It’s official: Up is Down and Low is high and Red is Blue and Women are Men. The Slog uses hard data and common sense to confirm his view that two years of underused oil + the coming recession do not = energy hyperinflation in a natural market. The objective of artificially high energy prices is to blame Russia, pauperise homeowners facing impossible bills, crash the housing market, increase unemployment in shrinking economies and present the New World Order of Monopoly as the Seventh Cavalry.
Try this piece of classic double-think on for size (from four days ago) courtesy of those wonderful newsbenders at Reuters who gave us faked photoshop stories about coffined bodies piling up in London’s streets during the “deadly Covid Pandemic” in the early part of 2021:
‘U.S. crude fuel stockpiles rise as demand slackens’….[aah, so as I’ve been saying, less demand equals falling prices – but wait for it]….in the same article, ‘Oil prices rose modestly on Wednesday even after U.S. oil inventories rose and after U.S. inflation figures bolstered the case for another big Federal Reserve interest rate increase. Brent crude settled up 8 cents at $99.57 a barrel, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude gained 46 cents to $96.30 a barrel.’
The telling word boldly italicised there is “even”. Why do prices get more bullish in what is clearly a bear market? I mean, c’mon – a little street wisdom here: why are prices rising when demand is collapsing into a quicksand of rising rates, EU economic collapse and huge sovereign indebtedness across the world….immediately after a piss-willy virus slowed global growth down to near-zero without hidden QE?
As Ronald Reagan might have said, “There you go again, following that science thing”.
Well Ronnie, somebody has to. But as the man who got elected President by promising to reduce the National Debt (and then left America with the biggest one in its history) I can understand why you wouldn’t want to.
Come back in time with me a little more to a month ago, when the Business2Community site ran a piece that went like this (my interruptions in bold caps):
‘While the wider markets have looked weak and both the Nasdaq and S&P 500 are in a bear market, oil stocks have looked strong [WHY?]….oil prices are facing resistance at the $110 per barrel price level [WHY NOT?]…..high gasoline prices are also leading to demand destruction in some countries [PETROL PRICES ARE THE EGG HERE, NOT THE CHICKEN] ……over the medium term, Europe, which is the biggest buyer of Russian oil and natural gas, plans to wean away from Russian energy [WHICH HAS LANDED GERMANY FLAT ON ITS ASS]….Former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has also joined the bandwagon and said that he sees a recession as a likely possibility. Most brokerages that are bullish on oil might not be pricing a recession in their price forecasts.’
If you can sort logic from Fauciism in that analysis, fine….but I do find the ending of the piece like the product of a pen than just arrived on Earth from Planet Blunderkind. Is the site really suggesting that almost every brokerage outfit in the US is unutterably dumb?
But if you want to come home to the whores at S&P, how about this twist of double-dutch from them almost exactly a month ago versus now:
‘Latest Energy Information Administration [EIA] data showed as total US gasoline inventories climbed 5.83 million barrels on the week to 224.94 million barrels….demand plunged 14% to a six-month low at 8.06 million b/d. It was the largest one-week decline in implied gasoline demand since the week ended Dec. 31, and left demand nearly 13% below normal….Overnight also saw the release of the latest US consumer price index from the US Labor Department that showed inflation in June jumping 9.1% year on year, a rise not seen in 40 years, heightening concerns of a recession….but (HERE COMES THE BUTTHEAD BIT)….Crude investors bullish as markets price in US economic recovery [July 15th]…’
Whaaaaat?
(I went back there this morning, and S&P had Unhappened the piece….it has vapourised into the Cloud of history-changing non-existence. As people used to say, the Past is no guide to the Future; in the New Normal, the Past is no guide to the Past, and the Future is predicted as one in which we all eat the air and are eternally happy).
The energy sector has joined that less than exclusive club of inverted realities in which there is a NWO narrative acting as an explanation of something that has allegedly happened, but isn’t actually happening at all. Do try to keep up – you are now in the Land of Klaus von Schlaphead-mit-Blairista-WallStrasse-Raubritter-Rothschild GMBH and Unsere geliebten Partner CIA/MI6 Sedwill EUNATO & Mitarbeiter.
Because of course, Arbeit macht Frei.
But beware – because forewarned is forearmed – you’re buying into an Energy Belief System (EBS, also short for Energy Bollocks Surrealism).
Neoliberalism is supposed to be about natural decisions in open markets. Now read this factoid from the horse mouth, rather than arse:
Global oil production amounted to 89.9 million barrels per day in 2021 – and the usage for the year amounted to 89.88 million. Tell me: does that strike you as an uncontrolled varietal open free market of unpredictable gushers and Ukrainian biolabs….or perhaps as something controlled to the nth degree by a very tiny minority of self-interested owners way, way above the law?
Whatever: let’s now look at what the Stocks of global oil are by Sovereign. We start with the big picture courtesy of Investopedia, which has this to say:
‘Global crude (includes lease and plant condensate) oil production is expected to rise from 76.1 million b/d in 2020 to 99.3 million b/d in 2050. Total petroleum liquids production is seen rising from 94 million b/d to 125.9 million b/d over the same time frame’.
There is no sign in that outlook that we are anywhere near a crisis point, and here’s why: BP Plc recently estimated that the world has 1.73 trillion barrels of oil reserves – sufficient to meet 50 years of global production at 2018 levels. To suggest that Putin has the power to bring down the West with an 11% share of the market and even smaller share of reserves is simply fantastic nonsense:
As I’ve been saying for some time now, it’s not hard to understand America’s interest in Venezuela. But for the immediate future, the Gigaloser in the energy price BS propaganda is going to be China, which is now by far the biggest importer of oil and gas on the planet.
This is the geopolitical game we’re really looking at: if Russia is goaded by the West into helping China with its short-term supply problems, Putin can work with Beijing to pour billions into energy research that will take both countries into the new Beyond Oil energy era. They (and us) have 28 years in which to develop a practical solution. If human ingenuity can’t even do that, then it’s a sad outlook for all of us.
We’re watching the self-appointed Demigods….in front-line action, and on steroids. They pulled off the biggest hoax in the history of virology and vaccination: now they’re applying phlogiston to the most basic economic rule of all – that of supply and demand.
Plato said that democracy could only be successful with an informed electorate. Abe Lincoln agreed, saying you couldn’t fool all the People all the time. But the Nazi propaganda archetype Josef Goebbels said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
It really isn’t hard to detect who the heroes of the Davosites are, is it?
The Slog 