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blues

Well, today has been so fuct. Surely. I am very nearly ready to present my huge DOOMSDAY thread. It's coming. Sorry for the inconvenience, folks.

Market Watcher

$200 a barrel oil is about $5.30 at the pump.

Driving habits haven't changed any that I can see in the last few years. The pundits are saying the decrease is about 3% but I don't think so.

One is reminded that Rasputin plead with Czar Nicholas II to, at any cost, bring trainloads of flour and butter into the cities. One is reminded, as Jagger put it, that Anastasia screamed in vain. One recollects Stalin's aphorism, "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic."

What needs to be done is so simple but so difficult. As political will hardens with time unfortunately the problem will grow yet more rapidly and become increasingly intractible.

Some political messiah will arise (I see many wannabes) promising to rescue the suffering from their oppressors and he will be greeted with relief and mystical hope. He will be wildly fashionable. He will, instead of bringing back the easy life, instead bring back those old Four Horsemen who long predate the Revelation of Saint John.

There is a great deal of room for hope. As individuals we must seek the truth and cleave to it only. Virtue and honor will see you through if they are not discarded as useless rubbish, as but empty words. There is no strength without them.

Rosco

an anonymous post from the comments at 'the automatic earth' today summed it up for moi:

Greyzone said...

"So... what are the banks doing with all the money that Helicopter Ben is loaning them? Are they lending to each other? To individuals for mortgages? To companies to expand?"....

The big investment banks are taking Butt Boy Ben's Phunny Money and gambling with it like crack whores doubling down at a Vegas crap table.

They're gambling on commodities, the only game left with a shot at high returns to build reserves.

This is insane if it were with their own money but they're gambling double or nothing with BORROWED Phunny Money, a truly suicidal move.

Jacking up commodities to cover up their crimes will kill a lot of people, they don't care, they're High Return Junkies and they Need a Fix Now.

What they're doing now in commodities speculation is a crime against humanity.

May 22, 2008 5:12 PM

Elaine Meinel Supkis

That is correct, Rosco. My charts show that the spread between profits from lending to home buyers had collapsed when the Fed raised the rates so the lending moved towards speculators.

rockpaperscizzors

Oil price mocks fuel realities
US margin rules of the government's Commodity Futures Trading Commission allow speculators to buy a crude oil futures contract on the Nymex by paying only 6% of the value of the contract. At the present price of around $130 per barrel, that means a futures trader only has to put up about $8 for every barrel. He borrows the other $120.
This extreme "leverage" of 16 to one helps drive prices to wildly unrealistic levels and offset bank losses in subprime and other disasters at the expense of the overall population.

...In the US, stockpiles of oil climbed by almost 12 million barrels in April according to the May 7 EIA monthly report on inventory, up by nearly 33 million barrels since January. At the same time, MasterCard's May 7 US gasoline report showed that gas demand has fallen by 5.8%.
...energy price climb to $128 and beyond is driven by billions of dollars' worth of oil and natural gas futures contracts being placed on the ICE. Through a convenient regulation exception granted by the George W Bush administration in January 2006, the ICE Futures trading of US energy futures is not regulated by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), even though the ICE Futures US oil contracts are traded in ICE affiliates in the US. And at Enron's request, the CFTC exempted the over-the-counter oil futures trades in 2000.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JE24Dj02.html

Peak Oil is nothing more than a fraud perpetrated onto the public by the usual suspects headed by Goldman Sachs & JPMorgan, banks, oil traders and the big oil majors underwritten by the Federal Reserve and members of our illustrious government.

"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the plague."
- Cicero

Ed-M

Elaine,

Check this out at Life After The Oil Crash, Breaking News for May 28th: a short distance down, there is a graph comparing the price of oil in US$ vs. annual production in billions-of-barrels per year. It looks like a map of Japan! Which reminds me of the Japan Carry Trade, which is one of the ROOT CAUSES of this!

http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/BreakingNews.html

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Rock, we are at a peak in production. It gets harder, more expensive and less in volume as time passes. We are at the MAXIMUM not the minimum. The price hikes right now are due to wars over oil, not oil itself. But the peak arrives according to CONSUMPTION, not 'how much oil is there.'

If we consume more and more, the peak arrives faster. This may be hard for people to understand. Do not mix up wishful thinking with geological reality. Only places left for oil searching are deep oceans and ice-locked land masses of Antarctica and Greenland.

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