DELTA AIR LINES is getting into the oil-refining business. On April 30th, the company announced that a subsidiary, Monroe Energy LLC, would acquire the Trainer refinery complex near Philadelphia. The state of Pennsylvania is providing $30m in assistance (basically in exchange for saving the jobs at the refinery), and Monroe plans to pour some $100m into retooling the complex to "maximise jet fuel production", according to a Delta press release. Here's more from the airline:

"Acquiring the Trainer refinery is an innovative approach to managing our largest expense," said Richard Anderson, Delta's chief executive officer. "This modest investment, the equivalent of the list price of a new widebody aircraft, will allow Delta to reduce its fuel expense by $300 million annually and ensure jet fuel availability in the Northeast. This strategy is aligned with the moves we have made to build a stronger airline for our shareholders, employees and customers."

Most of the coverage of this move has accepted Mr Anderson's pitch that this is a smart way for Delta to manage its fuel expenses. But if that's true, it's a "damning indictment of an American financial sector that... is supposed to be in the business of creating more elegant solutions to these kind of problems," arguesSlate's Matthew Yglesias. When you see the presumably sophisticated CEO of a huge public company claiming on conference calls with reporters that certain risks (in this case, the "jet crack spread", the difference between the cost of an unrefined barrel of crude and a barrel of jet fuel) are essentially impossible to hedge on the financial markets, something is wrong. Has Mr Anderson been poorly advised, or are the financial markets really not doing their job? There's some good discussion of this in the comments on Mr Yglesias's blog, but Kevin Drum at Mother Joneswrites that he's still confused:

[W]hat on earth makes Delta think that it can run a refinery more efficiently than someone who's fighting tooth and nail for business in the free market? If they can really do that, it's not a failure of Wall Street, it's a failure of capitalism. This whole deal sounds crazy.

Virginia Postrel, a libertarian-ish columnist for Bloomberg, agrees. "Vertical integration fools a lot of people," she says:

You might think that owning a refinery would at least protect the airline from price fluctuations. But, [Craig Pirrong, a finance professor and energy expert at the University of Houston] notes, crude oil prices affect the profits of airlines and oil refineries exactly the same way. When oil prices go up, their profits go down. Owning a refinery would simply magnify the effect. "If anything," he says, "it increases the risk exposure that has bedevilled the airline industry for years."

There's lots more good stuff in Ms Postrel's column, so click through for the whole thing.