I’ve been reading Rob Bradley’s Oil, Gas, and Government: The U.S. Experience, which is a detailed history of state and federal intervention into the petroleum industry.  (As you can imagine, the two-volume work is some 2,000 pages long—who says our politicians don’t get anything done?)  Bradley explains that during the Korean War, the government instituted price controls on inputs used in the oil industry.  As always, the price ceilings led to massive shortages, so that the government then had to allocate the supply of resources to the various users, who had to fill out endless forms and paperwork.  I thought PRI’s readers might enjoy the following exasperated response that an independent oil man put on the form for requesting materials:

Lately I’ve noticed an annoying trend in financial commentary on oil prices.  These articles make it sound as if the movement of oil prices and the strength of the United States dollar (USD) have nothing to do with each other.  For example, the Tuesday Oct. 23 Wall Street Journal has a story on Asian countries that states:  “The recent decline in the value of the U.S. dollar—and parallel rise in the value of some Asian currencies—has also given Asian consumers more power to spend liberally on fuels, because oil is typically priced in dollars and therefore cheaper to buy” (A2, italics added).