Elaine Meinel Supkis
Hu can relax. Bernanke let everyone know he is handing out cheap loans like there is no tomorrow. The Fed has been assured by the Chinese that they want the present status quo to continue. World oil prices shoot through the roof but there is "no inflation" because any inflationary excess is cleaned out by shipping jobs to China and India. Whoopee. Not.
By ADAM GELLER, AP Business Writer 22 minutes ago
NEW YORK - Stocks soared Tuesday on news that Federal Reserve policymakers believed their run of interest rate hikes is likely nearing an end, propelling the Dow Jones industrials up nearly 200 points. The report helped offset the effects of oil prices that passed $71 a barrel.Wall Street was already climbing in mid-afternoon when the Fed released minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee's March 27-28 meeting that showed most of the panel's members "thought that the end of the tightening process was likely to be near, and some expressed concerns about the dangers of tightening too much, given the lags in the effects of policy."
Like a drunk finding a dime in the gutter, "we are rich!" we yell. Every penny debt we ring up inflating real estate or stocks is celebrated. Stocks: we buy stocks in companies that are bending themselves into pretzels to ship as many jobs as possible to cheap labor countries. This is why we have no inflation in "core products" if one excludes food and energy, taxes (MY REAL ESTATE TAXES SHOT UP!!!!) or health insurance. Stuff I buy once in a blue moon are up only a smallish amount which is what happens when energy goes up.
The mad rush for the exits is now a torrent. Hu, the clever ruler of China, has made a point of courting all the big money boys in America. He recently awarded Spielberg the contract to put on a nifty show along side a Chinese film director, of course, so Spielberg will be super-nice to him, he then paid a courtesy call on Bill Gates and is meeting with all sorts of powerful men who will, in return, ship him more industry and more jobs!
By Steve Hargreaves, CNNMoney.com staff writer
April 18, 2006: 12:17 PM EDTNEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - As gasoline prices spiral upward ahead of the high-demand summer season, some traders and consumer advocates are laying at least part of the blame squarely on the doorstep of the federal government.
While near-record crude prices account for nearly 60 percent of the cost of making gasoline, and unabated demand from U.S. drivers has done nothing to ease prices, part of the run-up has to do with problems with switching from one type of gasoline additive to another.
The switch is happening because lawmakers didn't include liability protections for makers of MTBE, a suspected cancer-causing additive easily soluble in groundwater that has been the subject of several lawsuits, when they enacted an energy bill last August.
This goofy article mentions in passing the fact that our sabre rattling has rattled oil futures so the price has shot up. And unrest in various dictatorships has cut the oil flow and of course, the raging war in Iraq isn't helping things, either.
No mention in the article that Bush and Cheney have worked in the oil industry much of their lives and made their money, well, Bush's gramps and dad, in oil. Isn't it innnnteresting that the minute Bush entered the White House, world oil prices shot up and up and up and every time they begin to glide down, he sabre rattles and it shoots up again! Gee whizzikers!
Sean Markey
for National Geographic News
April 18, 2006
With the price of oil topping a wallet-busting U.S. $70 a barrel yesterday, the search for alternative fuels keeps heating up.Last week, scientists announced what may be a new end-run around the oil problem: producing diesel fuel from coal, natural gas, and organic material.
Reporting in the current issue of the Journal Science, researchers say they have developed a way to shuffle the carbon atoms derived from cheap fuel sources like coal to form more desirable combinations, such as ethane gas and diesel fuel.
In their study, scientists scrambled the makeup of hydrocarbons—organic compounds found in fossil fuels—using two chemical processes, one of which earned last year's Nobel Prize in chemistry.
The reaction produced ethane gas and diesel fuel.
The synthetic diesel "is much cleaner burning than conventional diesel, even cleaner burning than gasoline," said Rutgers University chemist Alan Goldman.
According to the experts, we can take coal and process it into gas! Whoopee. If we do this while also burning coal to make electricity, we can live in our super bubble happily except if we do this, we run out of coal in around 50 years. Then what?
The long slide into the Dark Ages that will happen rather quickly since we will burn off all the compressed fuel in a mad rush to the Bitter End! This will also produce lots and lots and lots of greenhouse gasses.
Record heat prompted power outages Monday afternoon across North Texas.About 15 percent of Texas' power supply was already offline Monday for seasonal maintenance, NBC 5 News reported. The heat triggered unseasonable energy demands and by late afternoon, Texans were using more energy than utility companies were prepared to produce.
The Texas Electric Regulatory Board ordered electric utility providers across the state to reduce their loads, prompting rolling brownouts across the area.
"This is a prescribed action that we do to support the electric grid," TXU representative Carol Peters said. "Certain areas will be experiencing rolling blackouts every 15 minutes, but we we'll be taking power off of the system and returning it to different areas."
Over 100 degrees Farenheit in early April? What? This is madness. All winter long, Texas and parts of the Midwest burned. We had no winter down there and now summer is already raging and everyone is retreating into artificial bubbles that are inflated by burning coal which feeds back into the system and voila: deadly early spring heat waves.
Hurricane season is going to be a blast.
Comments