Once it had been Standard Oil that had set the price. Then it had been the Texas Railroad Commission system in the United States and the majors in the rest of the world. Then it was OPEC. Now price was being established, every day, instantaneously, on the open market, in the interaction of the floor traders on the Nymex with buyers and sellers glued to computer screens all over the world. It was like the late-nineteenth-century oil exchanges of western Pennsylvania, but reborn with modern technology. All players got the same information at the same moment, and all could act on it in the next.
