The BBC website is asking weird questions:

How can the future of oil prices be stabilised? What are the alternatives? Does the problem lie with consumers or providers?

What is the ‘problem’ here?

What is the point of ‘stabilising’ the price of anything?

A price is a piece of information about what lots of people think about a product.

The whole point is that a price should not be ‘stable’. It should change as ideas/innovations/priorities change.

If it were ‘stable’, it might well not be doing its job, and/or the activity required to stabilise it might well be doing damage elsewhere.

Volatile oil prices are no doubt a damn nuisance, on many counts.

But that is telling us something – that volatile oil prices are a damn nuisance.

So so let’s stop burning all that dirty old black sludge (thereby pouring money into all sorts of strange undeserving pockets), and find something else to power our world.

Anyway, scroll down through the comments from BBC readers to find the energetic but wise thoughts of Grant from New Zealand:

Oil prices don’t need to be "stabilised", they need to be left alone. We don’t need any "new partnership", we need to tear down some existing ones. And that "visionary internationalism" shown over the global banking crisis was NOT a good thing.

NO company, no matter how large or institutional, is too important to be allowed to fail. No market outcome is so important as to justify government action. Free markets are far too important to allow government to do anything! Ever!