They are all the work of speculators – these faceless people with billions of pounds to throw around the world on one whim after another.

It would be wrong to tar all speculators with the same brush. There are those who are working hard to maintain and hopefully (sometime) improve our pension pots and investments for Mr and Mrs Average.

Others are the now totally discredited, wet-behind-the-ears financial whiz-kids, just out of universities, allowed to do almost anything they liked without proper control by older and wiser heads, driven ever onward by the prospect of bigger and ever bigger City bonuses.

Others are a few immensely rich people in the world who each have enough money to literally buy a small country and for some of them it's a game to speculate on the next get-richer venture, whether it be the price of oil, or on the commodity markets.

You name it, they gamble on it.And their antics impact on all of us, big time.

Let's look at the price of oil. Up it went day after day, from around $80 a barrel this time last year, to a peak of $143 as all the speculators piled in, driving the futures market further and further upward.

They had the price of $200 in their sights at one time. What's it now? $74 as I write and, at long last, the price at the pumps is starting to return to last year's level.

Thank goodness for the cut-throat competition by supermarkets for driving the price down. Left to the suppliers, it would be a different story.

Because the price of electricity and gas are linked to the price of oil, power prices went through the ceiling – and we all know what happened to bills now dropping through our letter boxes.

I'm waiting to hear a power company now announcing price reductions (quiet, isn't it!)
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