The big crash of '29 was caused by virtually unlimited margin buying of equity stocks and the Fed subsequently choking the money supply, calling for payment on those financed margins. Everyone knows that will never be repeated even if USD goes to nothing value as those markets are now regulated as to leverage.

Lay and others in the energy business recognized that the US was/is a debtor nation maintaining a standard of living based primarily on credit requiring continual monetary expansion with no sound economic basis, only a monster military force, and offered the argument that credit (and monetary expansion) could be expanded to a scope unhindered by any conventional reasoning if a high-demand commodity like oil was used as the basis for speculation. The catch was there could be no US regulation of trading that commodity by the US, the world's largest consumer, for that speculation to succeed. We now have every financial institution in the US including pension funds and homemakers supporting the financing of oil futures at a ratio of 16-1. We're again riding the tiger and guaranteed to be eaten if we get off and the margins are called through regulation. This one has the potential to make the housing bust bail-out look like chump change, a major reason why inventories are kept as close as possible to demand.