If the recent plunge in gas prices is the result of a conspiracy by President George W. Bush to help the Republicans retain control of Congress, as 42 percent of Americans believe, according to one Gallup poll, a lot of Wall Streeters wish they’d been in on the plot, Fortune reports.
So what really drove prices down – if not an Oliver Stone-worthy scenario involving the Commander-in-Chief, the House of Saud and Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson cajoling his cronies at Goldman Sachs to sink the crude market?
By late summer, hedge funds and other investors had poured billions into long positions in oil, gasoline, natural gas and the rest of what traders call the “energy complex,” all betting on a replay of the severe 2005 hurricane season that sent prices soaring in the wake of Katrina and Rita. But one day after oil reached a monthly high of $76.98 a barrel on Aug. 7, government meteorologists downgraded their hurricane forecast and cautioned that a repeat of 2005 was “unlikely.”
