Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"Speculation would mean that traders are buying contracts for future delivery of oil and thus bidding up the price of oil. Now for this to work, it would actually require oil to be hoarded today, that is, taken off the market. Yet there is no evidence of this. In fact, inventories of oil are very low. Also, we have seen price increases for commodities where no futures contracts are available. I think a better answer is to link oil prices this year to our Federal Reserve and the Federal Reserve's policy this year of dramatically lowering interest rates. What that has done is, it has stoked the fires of future inflation and fears that inflation will be higher years down the road. Those inflation fears have gotten priced into the price of oil. Now the good news here is the Federal Reserve appears to be done lowering interest rates. So this will give us some hope that oil prices will stabilize and maybe - maybe - even head down."