Showing posts with label Oil Prices. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oil Prices. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Typical Politics with old policy

We are in an election year where the Democrat is claiming that he will change everything yet what is the solution the Democrats have for the oil issue: Windfall Profits Tax.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,364846,00.html

This is a policy that the infamous President Peanut Jimmy Carter already tried with disasterous results. At that time, gas prices were rising and the geniuses in Washington decided on Windfall Profits Tax and price caps. Guess what happened? No surprise to anyone who understands economics, companies started producing less fuel. Then what happened, fuel shortages. Carter's ingenius response? Fuel rationing. So you could only get a certain amount of fuel each week. Does this sound the future you want?

Also, how does the government getting money from oil company solve the problem that I am paying too much for gas?? This seems like faulty logic unless you are politician with a great idea as to how to spend it. They are currently saying for alternative fuels (lookup what happened to the tobacco settlement money that was supposed to be spent on education and smoking programs). Typical politicians with the same old tricks.

Now that said, the Republicans have absolutely NO idea how to work on the problem. They are just spinning in circles with really no decent ideas.

Facts are facts politicians don't understand the market. If they would stay out of it and stop trying to regulate and tax everything the solution would very quickly arise. This is how the free market works, where there is demand (read money) there will be someone to sell a solution.

Typical politicians- same tricks. The problem is that many are still falling for it.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Reverse Logic for Profit

It appears that the oil markets have no sense of common logic. I was just reading an article about the OPEC decision to not raise production quotas and the following statement was made:

"Badri said there was no reason for oil to reach $100, as it almost did last week, and continued to blame refinery bottlenecks, geopolitical issues and the weak U.S. dollar for oil's ascent from below $70 a barrel in mid-August."
-- http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071114/bs_nm/opec_badri_dc_1

This statement makes absolutely no sense to me. A bottleneck at the refining step is causing the price of crude oil, the product that supplies refineries, to go up. That is like saying that because the temperatures outside have been higher is the reason that natural gas prices have gone up.

From an economic perspective, it is reversed logic. It seems to me that bottlenecks in the refineries would cause there to be a larger crude oil supply because they are not processing it as quickly. This would cause supply surplus. Laws of economics say surpluses cause prices to fall not rise.

Is it possible that the all the players in the oil game have learned from politicians that if you just find something to blame people will buy it?