Posted on 08/08/2008 10:48:46 AM PDT by kellynla
Bad news from the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline - an installation that may not normally draw much of your attention, but which is a throbbing artery of global energy supply, carrying vital oil supplies from Central Asia towards a tanker terminal on the Turkish coast. On some remote, sun-baked plain of Anatolia, an explosion sparked a fire earlier this week, temporarily cutting the flow through the pipeline.
But guess what? Here's the good news: the oil price did not zoom upwards in response, not a blip, barely a flicker. Actually the price of a barrel of crude has been falling: from a peak of $145 in early July, it came down to $117 and was trading yesterday at $120. That's almost a 20 per cent drop in little more than three weeks.
If the trend continues into September at anything like the same rate of descent, most of the inflationary spike of the past 12 months will miraculously have been sliced away. This is a dramatic reversal, and it is worth trying to work out why it is happening and what it means.
Just possibly, it means that what investors refer to in shorthand as the great "oil up" story has finally revealed itself not as the fundamental reflection of scarce supply that its adherents liked to claim, but as a simple, speculative bubble that was always going to burst.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
The RBOB (gasoline) futures are already around $2.92 per gallon. Those are actually more pertinent to what your gas will cost in a few weeks than what oil costs.
Yeah, I was just making some scratch calculations.
It’ll take another couple of weeks for lower prices to work through the distribution chain, but it’s definitely coming. The drop should last through the fall, and if oil winds up where it ought to be ($60-$75/bbl)., we could soon be back down in the $2.00-$2.50 range. Obama is deeply saddened; deflated, one might say.
Well, my wild-arsed hunch is that we’ll settle into a narrower trading band around $80 or so /bbl., but I’ll take your scenario anyday.
I just bought a V-8 SUV. ;O)
I coulda had a V-8, but bought an Accord instead (35 mpg was hard to argue with this summer).
Shhhh...why let the speculators know?
Shhhh...why let the speculators know?
Just maybe we can get a reprieve from the tinfoil hat wearing Peak Oilers.
Instead of just going away, they unfortunately will probably all go back to screeching about bird flu, global warming, overpopulation, 2012, ect....
Yup. Crude should have stayed at $150. until October when the ban expires.
A month apart.
Suppose that the Dems are scared to death that high oil prices will erode their position in the house and senate. What could they do about it? Why they could call up some wealthy supporters and ask them to short oil. Do we know any wealthy commies? Like, for example, George Soros?
Realistically, I doubt this is happening, but it pays to keep a suspicious mind.
You can’t go wrong with an Accord at all, except maybe that the new ones are beginning to get rather homely.
I bought my wife the new 4-door and it’s not at all bad-looking. Extremely quiet, built solidly (in the USA!), and even with a 4-banger putting out 190hp it’s got plenty of power. I still drive an SUV, so I’m the fuel hog in the family right now...
Well, there’s no accounting for taste, to each their own, and all that.
To my eye, they have strayed too far from those beautiful, classic Honda lines.
I respect them anyway. I’m a big fan of the basically bullet-proof car: my wife’s old Accord, my old Crown Vics, my old Cherokee and my new (to me) Grand Cherokee.
I can’t drive something (a) that I think is ugly (Aztec) or (b) that I fear is a ticking time-bomb (Taurus, GM).
I know a WWII vet who flew Hellcats for the Navy in the Pacific. He’s been driving Honda Accords, one after another, for twenty years.
One time I asked him how he distinguished his views of Japanese cars from the views of other vets who won’t touch them.
He said the anti-Japanese car sentiment was a bunch of nonsense. “Three things, Petronski,” he said, counting with his fingers as he went, “one, the Japanese people alive now never did anything to me; two, THAT car is made in Ohio; and three, I’m gonna do whatever I want, ‘cause I’M the victor.
He said the anti-Japanese car sentiment was a bunch of nonsense. Three things, Petronski, he said, counting with his fingers as he went, one, the Japanese people alive now never did anything to me; two, THAT car is made in Ohio; and three, Im gonna do whatever I want, cause IM the victor.
I actually cleaned it up a little bit. What he actually said was “three, I beat those bastards, I’m gonna do whatever I want.”
That’s a wise man.
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