With over thirty years of experience writing about Saudi Arabia, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and former publisher of The Wall Street Journal Karen Elliott House has an unprecedented knowledge of life inside this shrouded kingdom. Through anecdotes, observation, analysis, and extensive interviews, she navigates the maze in which Saudi citizens find themselves trapped and reveals the sometimes contradictory nature of the nation that is simultaneously a final bulwark against revolution in the Middle East and a wellspring of Islamic terrorists.
Saudi Arabia finds itself threatened by fissures and forces on all sides, and On Saudi Arabia explores in depth what this portends for the country’s future—and our own.
wildbourgman wrote:In my view energy prices without inflation could have been much lower in the last five years, but then again drilling activity would have slowed in reaction to that. I guess what I'm saying is that nominal prices may not entirely predict or explain production rate capability. Many peak oil folks including myself forget about forget about how dynamics pricing can be.
wildbourgman wrote:I don't know if anyone can put a number on this but what would have oil prices been if QE 1,2,3 infinity would have never happened? How low would they have gone short term if the bank bailouts would have never happened? What's the number? I'm not smart enough to even guess!
Yeah, there will always be another boom. An infinite series of them.TheAntiDoomer wrote:^Yawn, another "shale boom is ending" article, only to be proven wrong over the next few years.
Could the price of oil fall to $50? Jan Stuart and Stefan Revielle of Credit Suisse think so. Just think about the implications here: it would touch just about every industry on the planet; many speculators would be ruined; hordes of drillers and prospectors would go out of business. Britain’s drivers, meanwhile, would be thrilled. And it would be a boon for companies struggling to keep their fuel costs down, such as hauliers.
But is it likely to happen? According to these two analysts, investors are becoming increasingly concerned about an oil price collapse. “How bad can things get?” is the question, and their answer is “very bad!” But only if the global economy implodes once again…
The argument runs like this: global imbalances have not been fixed; indeed, in some cases they have got worse “and much of the available political and real capital has merely been squandered in the interim”. The cost of fixing things has now escalated, and the inevitably painful process of cutting debt has merely been postponed. But the painful reckoning cannot be put off forever.
For its doomsday scenario, Credit Suisse assumes “a repeat of the collapse in trading and global activity that accompanied the Great Financial Recession of 2008”. “It could happen [very soon] and a recovery would be decidedly sluggish”. Oil demand would deflate sharply, there would be plentiful supply and a recovery would be “halting, fragile, and painfully slow”. The US dollar would strengthen and oil prices would fail to recover to much beyond $80 a barrel in the next few years.
Oil prices should be about half of today's $105 a barrel by the end of the year, Gulf Oil CEO Joe Petrowski predicted on CNBC on Monday.
He stressed on "Squawk Box" that this trend is mostly on the supply side because record amounts of oil and natural gas are being produced in the United States and in Canada and OPEC supplies are higher.
But "$50 [a barrel] oil does not translate into $2 gasoline," he said, because it still has to be refined and transported.
westexas wrote:In my opinion, QE is more of a response to high oil prices, than a cause of high oil prices
(From the decline of empire blog )High oil prices are a significant drag on the economy. If the oil price gets high enough, past experience demonstrates that recessions follow. The only controversial part is identifying just how high the price must be to trigger a recession.
I should note before proceeding that the record-setting oil price of 2008 was not the main cause of the "Great" recession. In fact, the recession began in the 4th quarter of 2007, before the price surge in mid-2008. Even here, sorting out cause and effect gets tricky because the oil price had been rising throughout 2007. On the other hand, house prices started declining in mid-2006.
Undoubtedly, the surge in oil prices accelerated the deterioration of economic conditions in 2008. However, the financial meltdown in the fall of 2008 and the tailspin that followed was certainly not caused by high oil prices. To understand that, we must look at the collapse of the Housing Bubble and various structural imbalances that existed in the economy for many years (or decades) before that.
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