Iraq produced over a billion barrels of oil in 2015. Saudi Arabia is pumping as fast as their devilish hearts permit. Russia is churning it like vodka in Siberia. Hell, the only people who don’t seem to be having a shit load of fun, digging for oil, is us.
The country’s crude and gas condensate production increased to 10.825 million barrels a day last month, beating the previous record set in November by 0.4 percent, Bloomberg calculations based on the data show. Output for the year increased 1.4 percent compared with 2014, exceeding 534 million metric tons, or almost 10.726 million barrels a day, according to the preliminary information e-mailed from Energy Ministry’s CDU-TEK unit.
Russian crude producers have been setting post-Soviet records even amid plunging prices and U.S. and European Union sanctions that cut access to foreign financing and technology. The companies have managed to squeeze more crude out of some aging fields in West Siberia and brought a few mid-sized new projects on line.
This is starting to get the stench of desperation, as the price of oil plunges, these lunatics produce more oil. They’ve built national spending budgets around the idea that crude would sustain $100 for years to come. Now comes the panic.
How is it possible for oil to bottom amidst this chicanery? Imagine the price of the iPhone dropping because no one wanted them. Stores had warehouses filled with them, running out of room to store the damn things and all the while Apple kept producing record amounts of iPhones. Well, that’s exactly what’s going on in the oil markets.
As an aside, look at the graphic below, that I swiped from the morons at Bloomberg. Apparently, the B team is writing for them this weekend, who don’t know the difference between “losing” and “loosing.”
An embarrassment to the internets, they are (extra Yoda).
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It’s really too bad that Saddam isn’t still around. Say what you will, but it’s quite obvious that Saddam represented the only modicum of stability and keeping the fucking nut jobs intact over there that we could have only hoped for. Yeah, he was a bad guy, but he was contained as a state…Leave it up to the retard Bush Jr. & his psychopathic henchmen Cheney & Co. to fuck over humanity for the next 100 years….
You could look at it that way or, alternatively, begin to wonder why the “Arab Spring” happened — with our Western-controlled dictators being deposed for a bunch of Muslims — happened on Obama’s watch.
I know nothing about the oil market. But when everyone capitulates and sells at low prices, isn’t that sometimes bottoming action? Unless some source of energy has been discovered and not made public yet, that actually does make oil obsolete.
Regarding Cheney, we might be better off if he were a psychopath. Because even psychopaths are not as dangerous as people who are both terrified and aggressive, who strike out in some nonsensical direction when they are scared. Although it’s possible that Cheney would have had a biologically defective heart anyway, it is also possible that he literally scared his own heart to death, and that that is why he’s living with someone else’s transplanted heart now.
He may be greedy too, which is not a great quality either. But a government official who is both terrified and aggressive, will strike out irrationally at the wrong target, creating new problems for one’s country that would otherwise never have existed.
The road to hell is often paved with the good intentions of people who don’t live on earth, but live in some delusion instead.
We really need to learn from this, and to have only really sane, really rational people in government– people who are very in touch with reality, rather than living in some strange delusion. In fact, most of the population of the U.S. could benefit from finding ways to become more calm and act more rationally.
“When the people lead, the leaders will follow.”
Gandhi
Didn’t this happen with grains during the Great Depression, where low price causes over-production for survival, which causes even lower prices? I suppose it ends when the most vulnerable producers go out of business.
They over produced copper and other commodities too.
The situation in Iraq / Syria is strikingly similar to Khmer Rouge – US goes in, takes out the party they don’t like, they retreat, create a power vacuum, and a force fills the vacuum, slaughtering millions in the process – a few differences, but Kissinger’s play book seems to be evident yet again…
Such embarrassment, many edits Bloomberg (extra Doge)
Good Lord I hope 2016 isn’t going to be the year of the frog on here…
It could be worse. 2016 could be the year of commenters who put down other people, but who have nothing interesting to say themselves. Oh, wait… that’s most of the Internet every year.
EIA I believe has our Oil Storage levels at all time highs, so we joined the party too. Oil under 30 (brent and WTI, copper under 2.00….Happy New Year Fly, maybe finally I will get my Year of the Bear.
Just checked, this week it’s just a levels they haven’t seen in 80 years…that is close enough for record highs I guess… https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/supply/weekly/pdf/highlights.pdf