In a June 27, 2008 OpEd Paul Krugman wrote an article arguing that speculation in oil markets was not driving the huge price spike. He accused congress of only listening to "experts" that said what they wanted to hear and argued that supply and demand where the true drivers of the spike.
Tonight's 60 Minutes piece on oil speculation presents a pretty compelling case that Wall Street speculation was indeed the main driver of the ridiculous $150/barrel prices we saw last summer. It doesn't take a Nobel price winning economist to realize that there's no way the price roller coaster of the past year had anything to do with supply and demand. Is Krugman going to argue that there's 2/3 less oil demand than there was 6 months ago and that the precipitous drop in demand started happening exactly at the same time that the Wall Street banks collapsed?
It's pretty obvious that Krugman was wrong. Krugman's opinions are currently taken as gospel by many of us on the left. This is a note of caution.