Off The Net For Awhile: I See Yahoo!Finance Finally Got Their Data Point Correct

WTI is up a whopping 1.6%, solidly above $101/bbl now. [Later, the market closed with oil over 2% -- and "the financial press" connects it with a falling dollar:

• Mar crude oil rose $2.23 to $102.52/barrel 
• Crude oil climbed above $102 as the dollar index traded in the red. Prices came off a session low of $101.16 set in early morning pit trade and touched a session high of $102.54 just before settling with a 2.2% gain. Comment: if oil had been trending lower and slipped below $90, I could understand buyers jumping in on a bargain and moving the price up 2%; but when oil has been high-priced for longest stretch ever, for it to go up another 2% certainly seems it has to be more than just related to the dollar. The five-day EURDOL graph has it going from $1.364 to $1.376 -- all of one cent. Hard to see how that accounts for a 2% rise in the price of oil; of course ,the EURDOL trend is the one market watchers are concerned about. This is the low for the dollar for 2014 -- a huge psychological reason for oil to move up, I suppose.]

My thoughts in an unedited e-mail reply to Don with regard to the rise in the price of oil:

The dollar is marginally weaker over two years, but certainly not weaker over the five-year-graph. I suppose a marginally weaker dollar accounts for some, but not all of the $1.00+ rise in price today.

The Mideast is quiet (at least with regard to headlines that CNBC reacts to).

WTI/NYMEX is priced at Cushing and Keystone XL south is draining Cushing, so there's an artificial drop in storage at Cushing -- but analysts should have that factored in by now.

The RBN story, repeated again today, about the mismatch of refineries and light oil, is the only thing that I can figure out that might explain the rise. The additional heavy oil that the refineries would need would come from Venezuela, and we both know that Venezuela is about to implode.

And then later, in another response to the suggestion that nuclear arms race in the Mideast might be a factor:

I honestly don't see a whole lot different in the Mideast today than I did several years ago, except the nuclear arms race. And that will play out for decades. I think the rise in the price of oil today has as much to do with a recovering global economy as anything else; RBN Energy says Europe is short diesel and buying all the diesel, other refined products it can ship from Texas, Louisiana refineries.

Off the net for awhile. It's a beautiful day in the DFW neighborhood; going biking. I see that the Drudge Report is all screwed up at the moment. I thought only bloggers like me made mistakes like that. LOL. [Update, five seconds later: The Drudge Report has "been fixed." Thank goodness.]