Thursday, February 15, 2024

The Enemy's Oil is Down

 Oil is down substantially since 2007. How does inflation explain this?
 https://nitter.unixfox.eu/RealKeithWeiner/status/1746310296657068116 

 It doesn't. 

Price of oil down *substantially* from 3/2007. Price of Breckenridge ski ticket up substantially. 
You can't explain this paradox with declining purchasing power of the US dollar.

 It's lack of demand. Peak America 2008. Economy's been tanking since then.
 Fewer folk can afford a ski ticket, so they had to raise prices, on top of inflation/taxes/regulation. Economies of scale when scale is declining. 

 Indirectly inflation explains part of the loss of the price in oil. Uneven inflation causes economic damage; less stuff made, less oil burnt. With enough damage the loss in demand overwhelms the inflationary increase in price.  

 There could also be some leveraging/oil futures issue. Perhaps oil became definancialized in favour of stocks or some other derivative. You can check this by looking at how sensitively oil prices respond to Communist interest rate fixes.

 Finally the Fed may be directly subsidizing oil production, which causes an illusory decrease in price. Yes everything is cheaper to transport, but you more than make it up in the prices of wages and everything else not being subsidized.
 Perhaps that's how Fed holds down the gold price: paying miners to sell it almost for free. 


 I suppose it's incredibly easy for the Fed to control BTC prices, isn't it? 1) Bribe hodlers to sell their BTC and not re-buy. 2) Resell the BTC at a loss. Repeat indefinitely; price arbitrary. What does a loss mean to an entity which an print its own money? Sure it's illegal, but who the fuck cares? What do you suppose would happen to the SEC's budget if it tried investigating the Fed for securities fraud?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Finally the Fed may be directly subsidizing oil production, which causes an illusory decrease in price.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-production-by-country?country=QAT~OMN~SAU~NOR~IRQ~USA~ARE~RUS

American oil production literally doubled since '08, making it the largest oil producer for the first time since the 70s. How much of the money surplus has been going to fracking companies since QE was launched alongside deficit spending, maybe most of it?