And someone's been listening.
Crude oil futures for August delivery tumbled $5.33 dollars yesterday, making a two-day fall of $9.
The wretched stuff is still trading at $136, so we're not out of the woods yet, but there are belated signs that some reality is returning to worldwide commodity markets.
This, in turn, takes some of the heat out of inflation pressures, currently bedeviling economies in booming Asia and the Far East even more than they are in Europe.
As usual with the worldwide economy these days, the reason is to be found in the US.
When the credit crunch hit earlier this year US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke slashed interest rates to rescue the banking sector (to make it easier for banks to lend to each other) and also to help US consumers who found they were making impossibly high mortgage payments.
This bold policy seems to have worked, with the US looking as though it might avoid recession, but it had the adverse effect of accelerating the long-term decline in the dollar, the currency in which oil is denominated.
There then developed what you might call a 'perfect storm' in the oil market. A combination of growing demand from the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India and China), a declining dollar and heaps of speculative money chasing what turned out to be a one-way bet, drove the price of oil to dizzy heights.
Some people, most notably Russia's mega-energy company Gazprom, have even been forecasting oil prices north of $200 a barrel.
Such levels are clearly unsustainable (a year ago oil was trading at $70 a barrel and we thought this was high).
The upshot has been that stock markets worldwide have tumbled, with both the US Dow Jones index of major industrial shares and the London FTSE 100 losing more than 20% of their value, the definition of a "bear" market.
The Shanghai index in China, which has been happily soaring away for years, has lost nearly half its value.
This morning stocks in the Far East, led by China, soared following a late rally on Wall Street (the Dow rose 150 points in late trading). London rose too in late trading yesterday even though it still ended in negative territory.
So is the worst over?
Noone's suggesting that the world economy has turned the corner, but there is a feeling that the doom and gloom may have been overdone and that there are bargains to be had in blown-out shares (banks and media stocks are trading at their lowest ratings in most people's memory).
If this is the case then we may well see a burst of long overdue takeover activity in the media sector, with ITV in particular looking a juicy prize at just over $2bn, less than half its value a year ago.
Were you so minded, you could snap up the Daily Mirror (and lots of local papers) for a few hundred million.
Someone, somewhere will be taking a look.
Stuart Rose takes centre stage
Until he decided to step up to executive chairman from CEO, Sir Stuart Rose was the country's most-lauded retailer.
He had turned around struggling Marks & Spencer, rescued it from the clutches of rival knight (and old mucker) Sir Philip Green and even brought the much-loved Twiggy back to our screens.
Of late though M&S shares have been in freefall (down by nearly a quarter after a profits warning) and today Sir Stuart faces his critics at M&S's AGM.
He won't be voted off the board and will no doubt succeed in mollifying his critics with soothing noises about his own eventual sucession and M&S's trading prospects.
Yesterday M&S shares were the biggest riser on the London stock market, up nearly 7% to 231p (at one time last year they touched 700p).
This was probably a combination of bargain-hunting (US investment company Brandes made a fortune in investing in M&S when it was friendless in London) and a belief in the market that M&S's trading woes had been exaggerated.
M&S still has some work to do though, bargain hunters should head for its food halls as Sir Stuart turns discount grocer for the next few weeks.
GfK prepares to take on WPP
WPP made its hostile bid for market researcher TNS this morning at 260p a share, just above TNS's closing price last night of 248p.
This is hardly a knockout bid therefore and so leaves the door open for German giant GfK, which wants to effect an all-share merger with TNS, to make a counter offer.
WPP's offer is a £1.1bn mix of cash and shares, a figure the German firm could probably match.
WPP shares fell by 14p or 3% in a rising market this morning, suggesting the City has doubts about the extra debt the company would be taking on to buy TNS.
The key shareholder in all this is Fidelity, the US investment company that owns 10% of TNS and which is also a shareholder in GfK.
As such Fidelity must have been kept onside by TNS and GfK as they hatched their merger plans.
Will it stick with them or find Sir Martin Sorrell's cash too tempting?
Stephen Foster is a former news editor of 北京赛车pk10, former editor of Marketing Week and Evening Standard ad columnist. He is a partner in Editorial Partnership and writes the blog and Politics of the Media for Brand Republic.