wall street and the rest of your unholy alliance do not have a desire for high prices though.  the money is in the volatility.  So half the time we rammed the price down, not up.

I also only think dollars are priced in oil to the extent Saudi wishes them to be.  And even then not 100%.  Our economy is not that levered to oil any more.  And they hold far less of our junk paper than China/Japan/China/Korea.  Perhaps dollars are priced in toasters and TVs????

As for "acceptable" market manipulation.  It's an ugly grey area.  Always made me queasy to do business just to make Platts notice.  But in thin markets with no trade at times, what else can you do to prove a point?  If you think the market should be lower based on your view of fundamentals, and have both physical and derivative bets on backing that view, do you have an obligation to stay out of the market to remain pure?  Or do you force the market to trade to establish a "real" price level?  the posturing and game playing got pretty childish when the number of players got so few that everyone pretty much knew what the others were up to.  Not fun at all.

I found the idea that people let 22 year old journalism grads working for Platts/Argus set 90% of the oil price to be a crime as well.  I tried to get the industry to do more fixed price biz.  Then smart players did well compared to the crooks at certain trading houses of the Dutch/Swiss variety.  

the crap on the IPE was pretty ugly though.  However, if Statoil, Esso, Shell etc wished to stop it they had the power to do so.  Just stop selling the crude off the settles and instead use fixed prices or monthly averages.