Of the hundreds of ETFs on the market, one of the most useful to track is the PowerShares Building & Construction Portfolio (PKB).

Yes, I’ll admit it: I’m bearish on the stock market. I’m still concerned about sending more funds out into the market for one fundamental reason: Rampant energy inflation.

It seems like the most intuitive of trading theorems: Shippers use fuel to move goods and people around the world, so when oil skyrockets, the cost of shipping shoots up, too.

Although it’s tempting to describe sky-high commodities prices as being the latest ‘bubble’ to hit the markets, for commodities such as crude oil and corn, basic supply and demand may be pushing up prices. This from The Wall Street Journal:

Prices, to be sure, are soaring — crude oil fetched $132.19 a barrel in New York on Friday, up 103% from $64.97 a year earlier. Yet crude has posted similarly massive increases a number of times in the past three decades. Most notably, in the spring of 1980, as gasoline lines lengthened, the price of crude oil was 150% above the year-before level.

You’ve likely heard of being “bushwhacked.” Well, yesterday the market got Fed-whacked. Notes from the Federal Reserve’s April 29-30 meeting were released and, boy, did they make for some unpleasant reading.

Liquid coal — synthetic fuel produced from coal — could make a big dent in the Defense Department’s energy bill, as it struggles to find alternatives to sky-high crude oil prices.

This from The Wall Street Journal:

With oil’s multi-year ascent showing no signs of stopping — crude futures set another record Tuesday, closing at $129.07 a barrel in New York trading — energy security has emerged as a major concern for the Pentagon.

Peak oil — once considered the domain of conspiracy theory buffs — has become hard economic fact, as fears of an oil production shortage within five years sent long-term oil futures to almost $140 a barrel today.

This from the Financial Times:

The spot price of Nymex West Texas Intermediate hit a record $130.30 a barrel on Wednesday. On Tuesday investors had rushed to buy oil futures contracts as far forward as December 2016,

The Iraqi minister for oil has slammed President Bush’s claim that the recent decision by Saudi Arabia to increase oil production will help lower the price of crude oil.

This from Bloomberg:

The oil market is “well supplied,” and prices are being driven by “speculative flows” and not supply and demand, [the Iraqi oil minister] said today in an interview in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, at the annual World Economic Forum.

In yesterday’s column, we heard the market’s wildly bullish opinion of the oil services sector. The all-time highs in those who drill, pump, and transport tell us that billions of dollars are flowing into oil service order books.

Gold held steady above $880 through Hong Kong and the early London market yesterday, then started up and continued steadily up for most of the day, moving past $900, and recovering from each bout of selling to finish at $901.60, up $21.20.