Dec 092014
 
 December 9, 2014  Posted by at 8:04 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,


DPC North approach, Pedro Miguel Lock, Panama Canal 1915

And on the Seventh Day, God sold his shares? What do you think, is He short the market? Short oil? Oil does look up a tad, but then the dollar lost about a percent vs the euro, so that definitely feels like a headfake from where I’m sitting. The dollar lost more vs the euro than oil gained against the dollar. Gold and silver have somewhat more solid looking gains, but that’s against the same feverish buck, so what does it really mean? We’ll have to wait and see.

Now, be honest, who’s getting nervous yet? WTI oil yesterday fell 4.5% and tumbled through $63. $63, brother, you remember when it was $80 and you were thinking wow, that’s a long way down? That’s when you took that suit to the cleaners, and that feels like just yesterday, don’t it, and here we are, it’s down another 20%+. Anyone worried about their Christmas bonuses yet? New Year’s?

The central-bank-propped-up stock exchanges didn’t even like what they saw anymore either yesterday, let alone today. Greece down -13%, Shanghai -5.4%, Argentina -7.1%, Europe on average -2.5%. And that’s on a weak dollar day… Think we’ll have a lot of those days? Think God is short the greenback?

Is oil going to break the whole facade? What do YOU think? You think that maybe we’ve had enough of this charade? Is this the one God, let alone the Yellens and Draghis on this planet can’t manipulate from their comfy seats? The Fed can buy Exxon and Conoco, and Draghi can try and support Shell and BP, or maybe the Bank of England should, but oil is a global thing, it’s not like Treasuries or Greek debt that you can just buy a $1 trillion handful of every week or so.

But maybe God found a way to keep some more of the stuff in the ground. Who was it again that said nature developed man only to get rid of a carbon imbalance on the planet, to get it out of the soil and back into the atmosphere?

God’s representatives on earth anno 2014, central bankers, can’t control oil anymore than they can consumer spending. Anything else, they’re fine. But that makes them weak, it’s their Achilles heel, the things they can’t control. It didn’t used to be that way, but today central bankers are like movie stars. Exactly because they did everything they could to keep asset prices up. These days, you never leave home without one. Or as the Rolling Stones put it 40 years ago (when central banking was something entirely different from what it is now):

When your spine is cracking and your hands, they shake
Heart is bursting and you butt’s gonna break
Your woman’s cussing, you can hear her scream
You feel like murder in the first degree

Ain’t nobody slowing down no way
Everybody’s stepping on their accelerator crude oil tanker
Don’t matter where you are
Everybody’s gonna need a ventilator central banker

US Thanksgiving weekend spending was down 11%, and movie theatre box office no less than 20%. Sure online sales and Netflix went up a notch, but come on, a 16 year low Thanksgiving box office and the second installment of the Hunger Games trailing 25% behind the first, how does that spell recovery to you? Think God liked part 1 that much better?

Americans, like everybody else, are down and out. Their spines are cracking and their hands are shaking, and they don’t have a central banker on their side. Their central banker has sold all she could to the ‘other side’, and now she has no choice but to let oil prices kill millions of jobs, unless somehow an actual supply and demand market rises from its zombie state, the same market she has been very complicit in killing off.

If you don’t have real markets, and nobody knows anymore what anything’s worth, the only thing left to drive the financial world is herd mentality. Lemmings have that too. The world is going to regret letting Yellen et al destroy the market principle, and price discovery. Capitalism as a system cannot possibly work without price discovery. It leads to the few making out – literally – like bandits in the night, to the many left with nothing but debt, and to imploding societies.

Oil is the one substance that can make them implode. Because our entire societies are built on it. And from it, too. The industry that drives it, drives everything. And bringing down its revenues by 40% and falling will break that industry, and the society it designed and built. When oil was briefly at $40 in 2008, that was less of a factor, because their was some resilience still left in the whole global economic make-up. Today, it’s whole different story.

The American miracle idea of energy independence is fully reliant on a shale patch that went over $100 billion deeper into debt every year for years running just to produce that not-so-miracle. Take away 40%+ of what revenue it did take in, and there is no independence left. All that’s left is fracking fluids in your drinking water, and a few trillion in debt that the Big Kahuna lenders will seek to unload upon the real economy.

Oil prices at some point will rise again, but by then, and when is anyone’s guess, the price fall we see today may have done so much damage to the very structure of our economies that far fewer people will be able to afford it.

Those box office and holiday sales numbers are only a first red flag for where we’re going. As are the snap elections in Greece (spinned by Brussels) and Japan: incumbents who feel they have an edge for now, and decide to grab the opportunity.

It’s panic and fear and most of all it’s volatility. That’s our foreland. A weaker dollar for a day, which lets oil prices breath a little, which in turn lets gold sit pretty while it lasts. Tomorrow could be very different all over again. But most of all, looking at the trend in a wider context, this means a whole lot more trouble for the 95% of people who live in the real economy. Much much more. There’s nobody left to protect them from anything at all that goes on. They’ve been sold out to the highest bidder and the lowest common denominator.

And they can pray to God, but I hear he might be shorting them too.

Home Forums And On The Seventh Day God Shorted His People

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  • #17344

    DPC North approach, Pedro Miguel Lock, Panama Canal 1915 And on the Seventh Day, God sold his shares? What do you think, is He short the market? Short
    [See the full post at: And On The Seventh Day God Shorted His People]

    #17347
    Variable81
    Participant

    I did not come to ask you to stay all night
    Or to find out if you’ve seen the light
    I did not come to make a fuss or pick a fight
    I just want you to tell me if you think you can
    Baby, can you dig your man?
    Dig him, baby
    Baby, can you dig your man?

    #17348
    Birdshak
    Participant

    We milked the cows twice today. Chances are, we’ll milk them twice tomorrow and the next day, right on through the seventh day, then just keep going. Whatever the deity and the central banker hold in store for us, best they keep their titties hid, or we’ll milk them, too.

    #17349
    Tulsatime
    Participant

    I don’t go for any of the attributions to god, but it does seem logical that this is all part of the ‘natural’ process. Perhaps it has been repeated millions of times across the galaxy, a jump in the abilites of the dominant species that leads to a laying waste of the very environment that brought them forth. In a smaller scale we have seen the pattern before, and the money part is just a marker for a more advanced civilization?

    #17350
    Golden Oxen
    Participant

    “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

    #17351
    jal
    Participant

    Price of oil fell $40.00 a barrel
    They are still producing and selling.
    They sure milked us for long time at $100.00+

    #17353
    TheTrivium4TW
    Participant

    Hi Ilargi,
    What makes you think the oligarchs aren’t controlling oil now?
    Also, you recently said that when this system goes under, it will take out the top of the pyramid, too. Actually, the system collapses right into their hands. As Nicole said in A Tribute To The Automatic Earth, “why should the bankers GET IT ALL?”
    Ultimately, though, they will destroy themselves, but I don’t think collapsing the system under their control will do it. Rather, collapsing the system under their control WON’T BE ENOUGH, and eventually, MOAR will catch up and destroy them.
    If one doesn’t recognize that the Federal Reserve, JP Morgan, Citibank, Walmart, Haliburton, CNN, Fox, PBS, allopathic medical school, public education, Krugman, Obama, Bush, yea everything establishment, are all pieces on one side of Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard with the Debt Money Monopoly as the Grand Chess Master, one has NO CHANCE at comprehending what is occurring around them on a daily basis…
    No one piece exerts overwhelming CONTROL, but taken as a group… meet Mr. Wizard behind the corporate curtain.

    #17367
    Mike Twain
    Participant

    In America it has always been our God given right to ride around in cars.
    When the snowstorm from Hades hit a few weeks ago, the Buffalo Bills offered $10 an hour and free tickets to all who would come and shovel snow….they cancelled the game after seeing the turnout.
    The reality of all this is that the only weapon the ‘little guy’ has is to stop spending. Maybe us ‘stoopid’ people are starting to figure this out. The solution to all the government and corporate con games is to stay home and watch the show.
    Any economy based on how much stuff people buy is headed for saturation. As Charles Payne said on Varney & Co. the other day, he owns nine televisions….wtf? Read Robert Prechter’s story about being paid in Jaguar sedans.
    This is a bad time to be in debt and motivated by spending. Us old-timers don’t care about zero interest or inflation and deflation. Our new motto is: ‘Keep your head down and your mouth shut’. The cops aren’t after black people, they are after assets. The king’s tax collectors are on the prowl. Don’t see Geraldo or O’Reilly talking about that do you?

    #17368
    Dr. Diablo
    Participant

    I have to strenuously disagree. Lower prices are a GOOD thing. They are an especially good thing for the common man. This is why we attempt to make things, like telephones, ever cheaper and better so ever-more can afford them. This is exactly the same for oil, only more so as it’s a basic input.

    Price–in general here, and in theory–is simplistically a numeric measure of energy input. Do more harder stuff and the price rises. More steps, more people involved who need to eat, more time eating while coming up with that genius invention, all that. But oil is a basic energy input, like sunlight on a wheat field, lower that (accounting for EIEIO), and prices everywhere drop. This is a GOOD thing.

    Even looking at it from GDP standpoint, (where less $ in oil = lower GDP measured in dollar terms, although the same wheels are turning) you would simply be TRANSFERRING the $ spent from the oil patch to retail sales (for example). That’s why they call low oil prices a de facto tax rebate. The same dollars are spent, because–let’s get real here–the whole POINT of money is to buy things with it. Excluding some sudden penchant for savings, ALL money is spent. They also spend it on tools to make widgets, or on the widgets themselves, but again, to be real, the point of updating your widget machine is to have more, cheaper widgets to use. In that way, we talk about how awful the U.S. is in having 70% consumer spending, not business investment, but ultimately ALL investment is created exclusively and only to make end-products. Point being, lower oil prices is only a SHIFT of focus, of attention, of energy, AWAY from oil and into everything else. In theory, the net GDP stays the same (or even increases, as above)

    That said, okay, I understand that the oil patch is ultra-leveraged and sudden re-contact with economic reality will damage the financial markets. Damaging financial markets can hurt the real (leveraged) economy. It will lower (or shift) tax revenues, and it will be disruptive to the physical economy, including the job market, as all those assets slosh from one side of the ship to the other like a loose cannon on the deck. Yes. That part bad.

    Nevertheless, isn’t returning to economic reality a GOOD thing? Doesn’t economic health come from accurately measuring and deploying limited resources? So isn’t the popping of any bubble the first essential step toward health? Of course it is. The only bad part of this is that the bubble mis-deployed resources in the first place. That is the part that causes the present–and temporary–disruption. Which is precisely why you don’t want bubbles, nor the easy money that encourages them.

    But leaving illusion and returning to economic reality leaves you more likely to efficiently deploy whatever remains. The short-term adjustment is disruptive, yes. And to real human lives and fortunes. Which is why it should be a firm lesson against easy money ever after. But long-term the end of bubbles is the return to health, and that’s as true in the oil sector as anywhere else.

    Oil prices crashing and low? Net GOOD thing, not bad.

    It cannot be bad for oil prices to both rise AND fall. …Unless you want to retract all your essays on why a high price was bad? I didn’t think so.

    #17371
    Ken Barrows
    Participant

    jal,
    Are you saying Bakken oil is positive cash flow (or even close) at current prices? If you are, I want to see some data.

    #17378
    Golden Oxen
    Participant

    Dr Diablo, agreed if this were indeed a drop in oil caused by market factors. Quite another, if it is as many think, a ploy by the Saudi’s to put our fracking industry out of business, and then subsequently harm us more at a later date. I don’t know which but assume it is most likely a mixture of both.

    As far as TAE goes, while I do not know her current stance, Nicole predicted this very crack in oil prices a while back, and also predicted there would be very bad consequences from it a bit further down the road.

    It may be much too early to consider this a good thing in my view, but I certainly understand your positive sentiment towards it, especially where I own a car, and my New England home is heated with oil.

    As for the financial sector, if this crack in oil is the black swan that bursts the bond bubble, your assertion that it is a bad is much too gentle a description; one can only shudder when they think of the leverage and shenanigans going on out there with the Wall St and Bankster clan that a steep rise in interest rates would put an abrupt end to, a calamitous ending for sure.

    #17387
    Goner Pyle
    Participant

    Ilargi asked, “Who was it again that said nature invented man only to get rid of a carbon imbalance on the planet…?” One man who said it was David Price of Cornell back in 1999 in an article which can be found here: https://peakoilbarrel.com/energy-human-evolution-2/
    This ties in perfectly with Tulsatime’s astute statement above: “Perhaps it has been repeated millions of times across the galaxy…”
    This viewpoint was explored in ancient Hindu mythology with great acuity. For those interested I refer you to “The Parade of Ants” found in Heinrich Zimmer’s book Myths and Symbols In Indian Art And Civilization, Chapter One, Eternity And Time
    For those with ears to hear, let them hear. As for the rest…well, they’re our fellow hominids, so I won’t be too derisive. However, since adolescence I have found our species quite loathsome. A hominid with consciousness? Laughable!

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