Oil Price Disconnect Hurts Us All

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Why isn't anyone getting mad about the lunacy of the oil market? Why isn't anyone asking, "What is going on here?" anymore. It must be the highflying stock market and decent earnings reports, convincing us that at least the financial end isn't nigh. Everybody must be too busy trying to make back the money they lost last year to care about the catastrophe in oil that is replaying itself.

Last year, as oil ratcheted up to $150 a barrel, I felt alone in screaming about the obvious decoupling of the fundamentals from the price, fighting the opposite viewpoints of the likes of heavyweights such as then-Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman.

This year, every oil analyst who comes on CNBC now seems to sound like me: "A liquidity trade," they crow. "A play on the weak dollar," they advise. These are euphemisms for a market with no tethers to supply and demand fundamentals, and it's arguably worse now than it was last year, as we have the added fuel of rapidly expanding ETFs in energy to add kerosene to this already raging liquidity fire. But now that we're all "on the same page" on what's causing this, I am astounded by the blithe spirit of all of these analysts. I wonder where the outrage is. Where is the concern?

People continue to forget that commodities aren't stocks.

If the stock market runs ahead of itself and decouples from its fundamentals, as most experts believe it probably has now, no one needs to get outraged about it. If stock prices have now gotten ahead of reasonable forecasts for earnings and growth, everyone still understands the game: You make your bets and take your chances.