Hah!
Hey guess what though...
The bogeyman for this additional blow to Joe6Pack has already been well-sculpted.
Big Government, Wall Street plutogogues, and their clueless toady Big Media (along with the vast interests of Big Military) all agree that it's 7th century cavemen in the Mid-East to blame for $3.50+ gasoline prices. See the current uprisings and stone-throwings in Libya and Egypt.
Meanwhile they are printing money (and handing it out their cronies) faster than we can grow trees! Yeah, that has nothing at all to do with skyrocketing commodity prices. Move along, nothing to see here...
Recall I, most uncharacteristically, and most presciently bought a car in November that gets 32 mpg. Outside of my disastrous advice to short into this bull market rally - 2 years ago, not far from the bottom, I have never in six years steered y'all wrong.
The financial markets will roll over again, perhaps soon. And the pols will unfortunately crank up the printing press another notch upon the mistaken presumption that it *worked* in 2008-9.
To those of you who think $5 gas won't happen here I'd like to throw out another question: Did you ever think college tuition would top $50,000 a year?
A few years ago I figured that my family burned 1,000 gallons of gasoline per year. We probably are over that level now - as are most households where both life-partners work out of the house - and am not counting heating oil either.
But even at that baseline number, a jump of 50 cents per gallon in the price at the pump minimally takes an additional $500 a year out of the family budget. Again, I'll bet that the real impact for the average family when considering miles driven and heating oil is probably closer to $700 or $800.
AND on top of that the higher oil prices will hit just about EVERY OTHER GOOD AND SERVICE in the economy.
Move along here....if anything blame Bin Laden and Co., be a good (mind) slave now otherwise they'll cut the school sports program at your local government school.
See also:
Going Small
Gasoline - A Forgotten Scapegoat
3 comments:
people have already started buying 150 calls on certain contract months in oil. It's only a matter of time before we see this thing blow up. I've been convinced that 120 oil will be the breaking point this time, that will be $4 gas that an already overleveraged economy can't afford. The problem with shorting right now, is they (FED/Treasury) can step in and really wreck your game.
At some point the rich bastards will be all cash (out of stocks and bonds) and will be in search of yield.
THEN they will tell the Feds to tighten up lending and credit so they can buy bonds cheaper.
How far away are we from that? Who knows...
Every one likes to talk about govy bond yields blowing out to the upside, the thing is people kept saying that about Japan since the 90's and blew themselves up shorting JGB's.
I agree that rates will move higher when everyone moves to cash, but I can't see them raising yields. The FED has a good thing going, blow the stock market up. Commodities follow shortly thereafter, then when oil hits 150 the whole economy falls on its face creating a deflationary effect. They essentially blow bubbles to make everybody feel good about themselves and then let it collapse so no worries on inflation. Total garbage.
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