When It Comes to $100 Oil, It's Every Man for Himself

Feb. 24, 2011 — -- Oil topped $100 a barrel for the first time Wednesday since 2008, the same year that Wall Street and Washington brought the nation to the brink of financial Armageddon.

But that was then. Surely both camps are much more prepared to deal with the fallout now, right?

Not so fast.

All appearances to the contrary, both camps have wasted very little time getting back to business as usual. Only in this case, Americans know for certain one thing they did not know back in 2008: If anything goes wrong, they'll likely be the ones to foot the bill.

And that changes everything. Here is what you do not know about how the Powers That Be have been handling high energy prices and the ongoing credit crisis, more popularly known in Washington these days as "the recent unpleasantness."

If you think letting your teenager go on a $1,000 shopping spree with only $50 in his or her pocket is a good idea, then no problem. Otherwise, why would anyone even consider letting Wall Street do it, especially knowing what we know now about its tendency toward self-restraint?

When Congress was given an opportunity to rein in traders' ability to make big bets with almost no down payment, guess what it did? It backed off and decided to march Big Oil into Washington for a public berating instead.

Incredibly, that decision was made just before oil prices hit their last record high of nearly $150 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange and gas streaked past $4 a gallon. Since then, little has changed.

But rather than do its job, its chairmen have mostly used it as a way of cozying up to Wall Street executives in exchange for the high-paying jobs they really want. Indeed, as oil shot to its peak on the New York Mercantile Exchange in July 2008, the CEO presiding over that market was none other than James Newsome, the previous chairman of the CFTC. LEAH MCGRATH GOODMAN is the author of "The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked the World's Oil Market

This work is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

Leah McGrath Goodman's book, "The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked the World's Oil Market," is out this month from HarperCollins. She is a Ted Scripps Journalism Fellow at the University of Colorado at Boulder.