By Grand Rapids Anonymous
Tuesday, March 8, 2022 at 11:01:00 A.M. EST
(ZH) “President Joe Biden is expected to ban Russian oil imports in a Tuesday speech to 'hold Russia accountable' for the invasion of Ukraine, according to the associated press.
[GRA: And ap ought to know—they co-govern the country.]
“The glaring omission amid an avalanche of sanctions comes nearly a week after White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked by fox news’ Jacqui Heinrich if the US was ‘funding the war’ by continuing to buy Russian oil – after which the Biden admin scrambled to reach out to Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Iran to increase production, as opposed to immediately tapping into job-creating domestic sources.”
GRA: Oil up to $126 a barrel. Question: Does China make up the 800,000 barrels lost by Russia to the U.S. If they do, whom are we punishing? Is this all part of the plan to destroy our economy?
I’ve seen many a commentator say that Biden completely blew the chance for a diplomatic solution by negotiation of NATO/Ukraine.
Biden’s descendant’s name is Blewitt. Once again, he lived down to his name. He BLEW IT!
--GRA
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3 comments:
It's generally acknowledged that Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves (link), yet they rank rather far down the list of current producers (link) -- so I would expect this to result in strongly renewed interest in exploiting the reserves of Venezuela.
The US is still the largest producer -- I believe the US took over the top spot shortly after Trump became president -- but Trump had nothing to do with that, it was the continuation of a long-established trend of increasing US production from fracking, which began under Obama.
Oil crashed overnite to as low as less than $15/barrel in early 2020 due to fears about the economic fallout of COVID.
It's hard to take the price of oil seriously as a true reflection of supply/demand, even of future expectations of supply/demand -- the market in oil has long been heavily influenced by the kind of rampant financial speculation that's part of the FIRE economy.
"It's generally acknowledged that Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves (link), yet they rank rather far down the list of current producers"
Proven reserves consisting mostly of tar sands type oil hard to extract and refine. VZ oil as extracted now for a long time the only plants that could refine the stuff in the USA.
Proven reserves consisting mostly of tar sands type oil hard to extract and refine. VZ oil as extracted now for a long time the only plants that could refine the stuff in the USA.
There are always technical challenges to recovering oil -- experience not only with deep sea exploration, where productive wells are drilled in water thousands of feet deep, but now also shale/fracking, shows these technical challenges can be overcome, and the oil can be economically recovered -- it's far less difficult to build refineries -- for such huge reserves, it seems worth the effort.
It's not just oil -- in general, commodity markets are rife with speculators and distorted by speculation -- here's another example:
Nickel prices soared as much as 82% to $52,700 a metric ton, the highest in the 35-year history of the contract trading on the London Metal Exchange, as fears over Russian supplies triggered a historic short squeeze according to Bloomberg.
Often price movements have a lot more to do with taking or unwinding speculative positions than anything most people would associate with a healthy market, e.g. supply/demand.
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