If something’s more expensive, less people will buy it. That’s NOT the case with oil. Take China. Yesterday, it did the unthinkable…It cut oil subsidies.

Apparently, there’s just no stopping stocks. They just keep on trucking higher as investors forget about the recent troubles in the financial sector and focus on Merrill Lynch’s note that ‘credit markets may be “past their worst”’.

Billionaire investor George Soros has told Congress that the oil market is “a bubble in the making.”

“You hear it everywhere in the press… ‘Oil is in a bubble and it’s all down to speculators driving up the price,’” says Garry White in his Garry Writes newsletter.

“But I’m telling you now, they are all wrong. The real driver of the price of oil is supply and demand. Long-oil speculation is not rising – it’s actually falling.

Garry White’s in a fightin’ mood today. Just check out this quote from today’s Smart Commodities: “Blair didn’t have the balls to make essential decisions that would have secured our energy future”.

This from Bloomberg:

Royal Dutch Shell Plc said a militant attack on a pipeline has cut as much as 169,000 barrels a day of Nigeria’s Bonny Light crude production as rebels claimed responsibility for two more strikes today.

Crude futures contracts in New York have hit fresh highs of $117+ a barrel on the news of the attacks. Crude oil prices climbed to a new record after Shell said exports would be cut — the highest since futures started in 1983.

Crude oil prices have fallen following Bernanke’s utterance of the ‘R’ word at yesterday’s congressional hearing.

Concern that crude and fuel stockpiles are higher than average also weighed on crude prices. US gasoline stockpiles are above their five-year seasonal average.

Crude oil for May delivery fell by as much as $1.28 to $103.55 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange in electronic trade. Yesterday crude oil jumped nearly $4 a barrel.