Given the alarming lack of prudent intelligence on Wall Street, as evidenced by the highly publicized back story on the spreading credit crisis, I am worried that financial investors are now using oil prices on Nymex as their new place to play. It's not about supply and dmand. It's the dollar, stupid. The stock market is tanking and the government is unable to get people to buy Treasuries or municipal bonds at auction. Liquidity for cities needing to finance infrastructure is drying up. No one wants the U.S. dollar. Investors have nowhere else to go, so they are flooding into oil futures. But what kind of oil-price debacle are they setting us up for down the road, once they all go elsewhere? Government data shows speculators and large investment funds, those who don't need physical barrels, are dominating bets on rising prices. Refiners and other actual users of oil are apparently shorting oil prices. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission says long positions from speculators outnumbered short positions by nearly 100,000 contracts the week of March 3. The CFTC says net long positions from financial players have more than tripled in one month. Meanwhile, there is no shortage of oil, as OPEC keeps insisting. The EIA reports that crude inventories at Cushing, Okla., the delivery point for crude traded on the Nymex, rose by 2.7 million barrels to a total of 18.9 million barrels.