Quote:
Originally Posted by Arragonis
This chart give a nice history of production.
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Note that this only shows spare capacity, not actual production which has increased nearly every year since the 70's
Quote:
Originally Posted by Arragonis
As for prices, I think we have seen the plataeu for this year at $150 barrell. It may bounce at that level before falling back. Next year demand will be higher as we all finally start to get some of our cash back from the !*&^ing banks we bailed out and start spending again.
That will drive up demand and that is when we will start to have the problems and pressures. The period 2013-2018 is going to be "very interesting" times.
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I dunno about your banks, but ours are basically just as bad as before they were bailed out. For example,
Bank of America just split it's mortgages into two: good and bad, and about half of them are bad. This is about a trillion dollars in assets that are delinquent or are likely to go delinquent. Not all of those loans are owned by BAC, about 3/4 are on the books of the GSEs or are in Mortgage Backed Securities and BAC just services them, but there is still enough that BAC could go bankrupt. And US taxpayers and pension funds get to foot the bill for the rest of the bad loans.
The other big banks are just as bad. Citibank went on record reporting that 60% of their loans made in 2006 were bad and 80% in 2007. Even though the banks can't get anywhere near full loan value from these loans, accounting laws here allow the banks to keep them on the books at 100% of the loan value. So there are tremendous losses here that have not been recognized in the US economy.
Very interesting indeed (In the Chinese sense of the word).