Black gold, Texas tea, Saudi Succotash - whatever you want to call it, oil lubricates the global economy.
Gasoline, diesel, fertilizer, plastics, paint: all use petroleum. Nail polish, surf boards, crayons, artificial turf: yeah, it's in those too. To varying extents, the prices on all of these items should be coming down in the near future as crude oil has dropped 17% in the past three months.
Gasoline prices at the pump have reacted favorably, most notably in Norway where prices have dropped close to 10% after being over $10 per gallon. Here's our recently updated chart of global retail gasoline prices:
The group of people breathing the deepest sigh of relief would not be the workers who have to drive over one hour each way to and from wory or surfers with a chronic case of gear-acquisition-syndrome. No, the group of people who are most overjoyed at the recent price action in oil is a tiny and select few, central bankers. They have now been given the breathing room they need to open the sluices of liquidity yet again. QE3 and whatever new acronym-labeled program the ECB comes up with are now a foregone conclusion.
No comments:
Post a Comment