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Oil's the Crux

By Jim Cramer

 About this article:
 Oil's at such a crucial level. If we can drive back from the $70 level down to something that's less extreme, we'll still have oil companies that make a lot of money and we won't lose the group. Actually, more important is that oil go to $60 and natural gas go to $5, because the companies that we all follow (with the exception of Exxon , Chevron , Occidental and Transocean are more dependent on earnings and nat gas swings than on oil. The issue here is the issue that bedeviled crude when it got to $140 -- the inability to meet the speculative demand for oil, the demand that comes from hedge funds. We simply can't bring it to market fast enough, and the majors have had such a poor hand at playing the hedge fund game and hedging the spikes that we...

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