Another nasty day in the energy futures trading pits.

At one point, the price of a barrel of crude oil traded over 115/barrel. But when all the shouting was over, light crude closed at 114.93/barrel, up 1.14 on the day.

This, after news this morning from the Energy Information Administration showed that crude oil inventories dropped down 2. 3 million barrels last week, to 313.7 million.

The consensus forecast of those who follow such things was that we should have seen an increase of 1.5 million barrels.

In addition, the euro hit a new all-time high against the dollar today. Here’s the two-year chart tracking the increase in value of the euro to the dollar.

In case you haven’t noticed — when the dollar drops against the euro, you can pretty much count on an increase in the price of oil.

And we all know why that is. With the price of oil pegged to the dollar — as the dollar drops in value against the euro — there is then reason for traders to bid the price up.

Yes, this is one of the ugly side effects of the Federal Reserve continuing to lower interest rates. The lower the rates, the more the dollar drops in value compared to other currencies. Meanwhile, commodity prices continue to go higher and higher.

A nice fine economic mess, now isn’t it Ollie?

Or as one Wall Street-employed airline analyst said to me off the record today, “Oil scares the living shit out of me.”

Yep. Me too.