President Obama recently announced policy measures to enhance the surveillance of oil futures markets. The president stressed that the new measures would not bring down gasoline prices overnight, but implied that they would lower gas prices in the long run because more oversight would deter market manipulation. In a CNN commentary U-M economist and Energy Institute affiliate Lutz Kilian writes that there is no evidence that rising crude oil prices were caused by market manipulation, and there is no reason to expect increased oversight to lower gas prices.

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