国际英语新闻：Oil Price Rise Fueled by Investment Funds

"Back in the year 2000 the investing community as a whole made up about 10 percent of long positions in the oil market and now they are up to 40 percent," said Zeihan. "So you add that many new players and that much new money, but you do not add any more than a 10 percent increase in oil supply and, of course, you are going to have higher prices."

While that investment money comes from all over the world, Zeihan says one of the most significant contributors has been China, which takes in dollars from the United States and other nations that import its products. He says China has put much of that money into oil futures.

But the Stratfor analyst says the fundamental laws of supply and demand always win out eventually and then, as happened in 1998, 2001, and, most recently and dramatically in 2008, the price drops.

"Sooner or later the fundamentals are going to overpower the investor fervor," he said. "It happens every few years. Eventually the fundamentals will overpower any exuberance on the market and you will have a sudden, rapid sustained price drop over the course of a few weeks."

Zeihan is not predicting when that will happen. In the meantime, he sees signs that higher prices are encouraging more conservation and driving sales of fuel-efficient cars, but he does not see the development of an alternative to oil any time soon.

"In the United States we have proven that high prices were certainly exactly what was necessary to make hybrids very popular, but in terms of any other energy source, there is really nothing on the horizon," he said.

Zeihan says there is no other transportation fuel as dense in energy, as flexible and as easy to transport and use as petroleum.  Natural gas from shale  may help alleviate some of the U.S. demand, he says, but that will require a big investment in infrastructure.  He says electric cars, recharged from power supplied by expanded nuclear plants, looked promising until the recent nuclear accident in Japan. For the foreseeable future, Zeihan says, the world depends on oil and consumers will have to put up with the frequent price fluctuations.