Lifting the U.S. ban on crude oil exports would alleviate a growing glut of oil at the Gulf Coast refineries and should eventually reduce retail gasoline and diesel prices, benefiting U.S. consumers.

Just as there are popular indexes that measure the value of groups of stocks, such as the Dow Jones industrial average, there are indexes that do the same for commodity futures.

Market expectations of future supply and demand are important in determining current prices for agricultural products such as corn, which are harvested annually and stored for later use. Prices can quickly move when beliefs change—due to new data, for example—even if events far in the future...

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 mandated that a minimum amount of biofuel be blended into transportation fuels. But nine years after the law was passed, the energy landscape has changed.