Three Ways to Profit From Rising Oil Prices

Crude oil is knocking on the door of $80 a barrel. That's not what experts have been expecting. At the start of the year, when oil prices were below $40, these experts predicted prices would stay there, or even decline a bit.

But the truth is, an explosion in the world money supply, particularly in China, has fueled oil-intensive growth and caused crude prices to reverse their decline of late 2008. This trend is likely to last for at least the next several months. So how should investors play it?

The underlying cause of the continuing explosion in oil prices is the loose U.S. monetary policy that central banks around the world put in to counter the banking crisis and have kept there. In the United States, interest rates remain at zero – even though inflation is already creeping up towards 3%