I’m back in the swing of my usual day, after spending most of the weekend in western New York, attending a funeral service.

Weddings in the summer…funerals in the winter…that about sums up my years.

Now, for whatever reason, oil markets are cascading down, bowing to reason. I don’t know if this will be the lead up to the big plunge, or if it’s just another head fake before more pain. But what I do know is that oil prices right now are completely unrealistic. Oil should be in the $80’s, at most.

The Iran embargo is only better for oil prices. There’s more than enough oil for the major economies, but we fight over every barrel produced. The embargo is a de facto division of the planet’s oil; Iran and some others go to China; the rest of the Middle East is Europe’s; and China and Europe in turn butt out of American oil.

This simple restructuring could allow prices to plummet, as you can bet supply will not be affected by this act. However, demand will be controlled, artificially, by non-compete agreements. We’re making a buyer’s market here, but you are all too busy crying in a corner to see the big picture.

Finally, Europe remains a train wreck. The issue at hand is not a Greek default, although it’s proven very funny watching the talking heads go from dismissing a Greek default to declaring it imminent but dismissing any real consequences.

You lot are nuts; the big looming issue is that Europe, in net, needs to either default on a trillion euros this year, or print them, because private markets are not in the least interested in investing in countries with 100%+ GDP and swelling incompetent windbags for leadership.

If (When) Europe continues to break down, the repercussion is going to be U.S. exports that crumble. That will crush U.S. growth as U.S. multinational conglomerates, plus half of emerging markets, are going to see earnings get slaughtered from exchange rate dependent “one-time” line items…indefinitely.

Come on, now, the Alcoa news is just silly. They lost exactly as much money as everyone expected them to, yet people tore through the reports looking for a rosy story. They found one in higher revenues. How nice.

Never mind that the US Dollar will continue to eradicate all profits should it continue to run higher from here.

Alcoa’s announcement is not even unique. Oh wow! Alcoa had shitty performance and said it expects things to be better going forward. What a novel surprise…they’ve only been saying the same thing for five or six consecutive quarters now…

Tell me, what did you expect AA executives to say? “Hey all, if you think our performance was atrocious this quarter, wait until you see the next one!” Them throwing the “aluminum demand to double in a decade” spiel should be as irrelevant to their stock price as it is to outlook. A decade is a long time frame; none of these guys could tell you what is going to happen between now and Friday.

The shear level of utter bullishness makes putting money into this market a serious risk, and makes me very uneasy. At some point, expectations need to better match fundamentals. That doesn’t mean we get sucked into a vortex and see the world end. It does mean people shouldn’t be holding equity at prices that will take companies fifty years of labor and untold business cycles to see break even.

You would do well to be cautious about accepting highly suspicious demand reports of future aluminum consumption from companies that are losing money as an all clear to the economy. Will aluminum demand really double in the next decade? It very well could. But even if it does, a decade is a very long time during which a great deal of side roads could be taken. There is good indication pointing to us being on one of those detours at this very moment.