Monday, March 5, 2012

Oil back to $65?

It is difficult to post on a blog post, so I will just make a brief summary and than let you go onto the original posting if you want more information.

Chris Cook, who held a directors position at the International Petroleum Exchange has gone on record as predicting a crash in the financial oil bubble from the $100+ per barrel it is at now, to $65.

Of course the first item people are going to accuse him of is being a peak-oil denier.  His response:

Chris Cook: The Oil End Game
Naked Capitalism 27 February 2012

from the comments (and there are a lot of very good ones)( February 27, 2012 at 7:13 pm ):
I’m a Peak Oil denier am I?
Well, actually, if you’ve ever read my posts on the Oil Drum site, you’ll know that I subscribe to the common sense idea that oil is a finite resource; that there is indeed a peak level of production of crude oil; and that as you say – we are either there or thereabouts.
But there is a big difference between financial demand for physical oil and demand by consumers for oil, and there is a constituency of people out there who make fortunes from ramping the price up and crashing it again.
So he is not a peak oil denier.  What is the very short form of his argument?  The abandonment of oil by the large passive investors.

Much of this passive money underpinning the market and enabling producers to monetize inventory pulled out of the market in September 2011, and another wave pulled out in December 2011.

What is now happening is the end game: an orchestrated wave of noise that is drawing in speculative money. This is enabling the producers who are actually in the know to hedge by selling production forward during what they confidently expect will be a temporary – and pre-planned – managed fall in the oil price.

This is what is known as the "pump and dump".  And it is one of the oldest and easiest scams for insiders to pull off.

3 comments:

PioneerPreppy said...

It could happen but as I said the hit to the economy for the demand to fall enough to lower the price that much would be as bad or worse than 2008.

Odysseus said...

I personally maintain some skepticism about various peak theories, acording the Malthus we were all supposed to be starving to death long ago.

The X factor of human ingenuity keeps getting left out of these equations.

Now does this mean $18 per barrel oil comes back, no(though partially due to inflation).

russell1200 said...

PP: if I understand his theory, at least some of the drop in demand is coming from financial deleveraging. Of course someone is going to get killed when that happens. Who is getting the haircut will of course determine if we have another bailout or not.

O: I think that is true up to a point, but some almost chant the wonders of human ingenuity as if it were a religious chant, and not an observation of human nature. An observation that has only been true for about 200 years (1870 to 1970s) with the use of the steam engine.

Since the 1970s much of our growth has been associated with expanding debt. I would be more impressed with our recent ingeniuty if less of it involved borrowing money.