By LIAM DENNING

If Isaac Newton were alive today, oil prices might just make him doubt the whole gravity thing.

This should have been a hellish week for crude-oil prices, yet they remain higher than last Friday's close. The latest updates from the Department of Energy were nothing short of diabolical.

Monday's monthly report revised overall demand in September down by more than half a million barrels a day. At 18.4 million barrels, it was up on a year before, but comparisons with the month when Lehman Brothers collapsed tend to flatter. Demand in September 2007 was 20.4 million barrels a day.

Wednesday's weekly report showed inventories are, in contrast, overflowing. Domestic production of oil has actually risen by about 450,000 barrels a day in the past year. Stocks at Cushing, Okla., the reference point for the Nymex West Texas Intermediate oil benchmark, are more than a third higher than last year. Stocks of distillate, including diesel, fell, but remain 30% above the five-year average. Refiners are chugging along at a low utilization rate of about 80%.

In the face of continuing weak demand in the industrialized world and gathering efforts to curb consumption structurally, the "peak oil" argument rings hollow.

Oil's buoyancy in the face of all this points to the effect of cheap money. Low rates are pushing investor dollars into riskier assets, in part to hedge against a weaker dollar. Oil's correlation with the greenback has leapt from between 20% and 30% in May to almost 70% today. As with many other asset classes in this period of extraordinarily lax monetary policy, prices appear less subject to fundamentals, and more to cosmic forces.

Write to Liam Denning at liam.denning@wsj.com

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