Trumps Oil Industry....

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

42 minutes ago, Tom Kirkman said:

 

Not quite sure what to do here as a moderator, with people who come here to celebrate the great Covid Oil Crash of 2020.

You kick their *ss.  Good Nuff?

[Gerry Maddoux + 3,627]

        

 

Is America a roaring giant or crying baby?

Victor Davis Hanson

Marshal Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto commanded the Imperial Japanese Navy in World War II until he was killed in April 1943. Despite the dialogue from the 1970 WWII film “Tora! Tora! Tora!” Yamamoto probably did not say in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

But Yamamoto likely either wrote or said something similar: “I can run wild for six months. After that, I have no expectation of success.”

Yamamoto summed up a general feeling among the Japanese admirals that the huge industrial capacity of the U.S. — which had been asleep during the Great Depression — along with the righteous anger and frenzy of an aroused American democracy would ensure the destruction of the Japanese empire in short order.

They were right.

In 1940, there were fewer than 500,000 service members in the U.S. military. At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, that number had grown to nearly 2.2 million. By 1945, more than 12 million Americans were in the armed services. It was an astonishing mobilization for a nation of fewer than 140 million people.

The U.S. started the war with seven fleet aircraft carriers and one escort carrier. By war’s end, it was deploying 27 fleet and 72 escort carriers.

The U.S. Navy ended the war with a fleet eight times larger than it was at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The American armada would become larger in total tonnage that all the world’s fleets in 1945 combined.

More incredible, by the end of 1944, the American gross domestic product exceeded the economic output of all the major belligerents on both sides of World War II put together: the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, Italy and Germany.

As we struggle to defeat the coronavirus, an aroused America is talking grandly of restructuring the U.S. economy.

Politicians promise that major industries — pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, rare earths, military technologies — will return home to create millions of new jobs and better protect the population in times of crisis.

There are other vows to recalibrate our relationship with China to ensure that when the next successor to SARS and COVID-19 hits, American lives will not be jeopardized by the duplicity of the Chinese government. At the beginning of the outbreak, Beijing hid the origins, nature and transmissibility of the virus, then lied about its supposedly brilliant control of the epidemic.

The American public is already asking tough questions.

Does the U.S. really need almost 15,000 people flying in from China each day? At a time when American students owe $1.5 trillion in student loans, is it smart to have some 360,000 Chinese students enrolled in U.S. colleges? Is it safe to fund hundreds of labs on university campuses that conduct joint research with Chinese academics?

Does the United States really wish to curtail fracking, which has made it the largest producer of natural gas in the world and ensured that a quarantined America has plenty of fuel?

Is it prudent to release precious irrigation water out to the Pacific Ocean when California is the richest and most diverse producer of food in America?

Post-virus America can awake from this epidemic and economic shutdown in one of two different ways.

One, we can wake up as we did on Dec. 8, 1941, to ensure that Americans control their own fundamentals of life — food, fuel, medicine and strategic industries — without dependency on illiberal regimes. The military can refocus our defenses against nuclear missiles, cyberwarfare and biological weapons. On the home front, diversity is fine, but in a national crisis as serious as this one, the unity that arises from confidence in shared American citizenship saves lives.

Our other choice is to keep bickering and suffering amnesia, remaining as vulnerable as we were in the past.

We can scapegoat and play the blame game. We can talk not of an America in crisis, but of the virus’s effects on particular groups. We can decide that it is mean or even racist and xenophobic to hold the Chinese government accountable for its swath of viral destruction — and so we will not.

We can ridicule the idea of Americans again making their own things and call it protectionism or economic chauvinism. We can conduct endless congressional inquiries about who said what and when about the virus, and perhaps reopen impeachment.

Or we can have bipartisan commissions decide how best to return key industries to the U.S., prepare for the next epidemic and pay down the enormous debt we have incurred to defeat COVID-19.

In other words, the choice is ours whether America awakens as a roaring giant or a crying baby.

Victor Davis Hanson is a historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

[Gerry Maddoux + 3,627]

^

My suggestion? Let them post their idiocy. It'll empower a whole regiment!

[El Nikko + 2,145]

19 hours ago, notsonice said:

The Saudis have done exactly what they set out to do with flooding the world with oil. They are destroying the US shale industry along with the infrastructure that is needed to drill for oil and gas. You will not see a revival for at least 3 years and in the meantime 10,000's of oil/gas and related businesses will be wiped out with little hope that they will ever be able to reform as it will take them years to get past bankruptcy. Yes the Saudis have won in their game,  in several years they will reap the win with a market that is under supplied once again and they will run the show.

They've shot themselves in the foot, Saudi Arabia relies on the US to protect it in the Middle East. It has also funded extremists for decades which often causes terrorist attacks on Western soil especially in Europe and of course it's citizens were behind the 9/11 attack. People are sick of the Saudis and this time while the world economy was collapsing their actions are probably going to cause so much hostility it's hard to imagine this not becoming a major political issue once people get over the coronvirus and start paying attention to what has happened here.

Now there is such a huge oversupply it could take a year for oil prices to recover and Saudi will continue to hemorrhage money...they might be 'rich' now but that isn't going to last much longer if they're hated by just about everyone. They already have a very hostile and p*ssed off Iran who will be suffering beyond imagination and who no doubt will be ramping up shipments of arms to Yemen where the Saudi's are losing that war.

Shale might seem dead right now but you have to realise that rock and oil is still there and the cost to mobilise a rig when/if prices recover is tiny and they can do it faster than any other oil industry...so with that said shale is likely to pop back up if prices rise and will stop oil prices ever going up to where Saudi needs them to be which is $60-80.

Saudi lost they just didn't realise it yet

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

14 hours ago, Itzram said:

What was the main reason that today barrel price downfall.... Can any one explain in detail? 

The oil "price" collapsed because too many players were attempting to unload futures contracts into a narrow window, and the buyers stood back deliberately in order to hurt the sellers.  That typically does not happen, but did this time because there were no alternatives for the holders of the contracts to unload.  The various diatribes you have read here, incidentally, are all wrong  (as to their analyses).  They are more emotional reactions, but fundamentally, the price collapsed because of the behavior of a (quite) small number of traders there were out to screw each other over.  And you get that in the commodities markets.

Remember that traders in futures contracts provide liquidity to those markets.  Without the traders, there would be very limited liquidity and the sellers of hard product would be facing an oligopsonistic market  (one with a small number of buyers that control the market place). Your classic oligopsonistic market is that of wheat, where Cargill is the big player as buyer and there are thousands of individual farmers as sellers.  You would have that situation in the oil markets where there are these thousands of producers, including small wildcatters, and a few buyers that are refiners or exporters.  Under those circumstances the oligopsonists set the price and rape the producers.  What the traders do is provide liquidity by injecting cash into that marketplace and that allows the sellers much more leeway to sell the product. 

There then develops a secondary trading market which is a derivative of the primary buying market, where "contraccts" for the commodity are traded by speculators.  Those guys again inject liquidity into the market by injecting more cash, the difference being that the synthetic buyers and sellers are not interested in physical possession, they do not take delivery and do not sell physical product forward. All they do is gamble on price movements, and they develop these arcane ideas of "technical" analyses using charts  (basically the "quants" of the stock market, same idea) and also market analysis using production data and having conversations with buyers, called "fundamental" buyers.  Those contracts have expiry dates and if you have purchased a contract then on expiry you are entitled to physicial delivery, which in the case of oil in the USA  (WTI) is the oil is deposited to you in Cushing in some big tank and you get a warehouse receipt (plus a bill, of course).  Lots of contracts end that way, and then the holder of that settled contract can go sell the stored oil at his leisure to some physical buyer such as a refinery. 

Now what happened this time is that there is no storage available at Cushing, Oklahoma, the major terminal.  There is actual physical storage, sure, and if you look at those drone photos you will see some empty tanks, but what has happened is that other players have "booked" those tanks in anticipation of taking other deliveries, so there is no room for  "your" oil buys.  So, on settlement day  (which was today), where do you put your oil?  And there is no place for it, unless you can sell it to the guys that hold the empty-tank reservations - they now control the oil market!   So, those guys just tortured the traders by holding off from buying, letting the price go to ridiculous minus levels, where they could scalp and hurt the traders, and put coin into their own pockets.  

In effect, what you witnessed is the behavior of a very small group of "traders," the professionals in that market, stealing from each other.  Remember that the commodities pits are filled with vipers, totally amoral guys who steal all day long and rationalise that as "just business."  You can make moral pontifications about that, but in the end it is what happens when you invite speculators into the market in order to create liquidity.  And, the producers and the users of oil (and grain, and orange juice, and pork bellies, and the other commodities) need that liquidity to operate. Think of it as the price of a market that is not distorted by oligopsonistic buyers.   Trust this explains. 

[surrept33 + 609]

University of Houston finance professor (and former oil futures trader) put it best I think:

https://streetwiseprofessor.com/wti-wtf/

Quote

 

The proximate cause of these wild gyrations, and unprecedented negative prices is, of course, the collapse of demand and the looming exhaustion of storage space, including at the delivery point of Cushing, OK. But although this is a necessary condition for today’s events, it is not a full explanation.

The storage issue has been known for weeks, and discussed intensely. It had been priced in to a considerable degree: contango was already at a historically high level. What information about the availability of storage arrived between Friday and today? Unlikely to be anything that could cause such chaotic price movements.

The likely cause is the difficulty of liquidating about 100,000 open contracts (100 million barrels!) in such extreme technical conditions. It is plausible, and indeed likely, that strategic behavior–perhaps rising to the level of manipulation–is the major cause of how prices moved today against the background of conditions that were widely known on Friday.

 

Basically the opposite of a efficient market.

He had an interesting theory, that someone in the market could have taken a purposefully long losing position out to profit from a much bigger short position in the futures elsewhere.
 

Quote

 

In these conditions, a trader, or a group of traders with modest-sized short positions can exercise market power by delivering even a small amount of oil over and above the quantity that should flow to Cushing. This drives down the price and allows the trader or traders to cover his (their) position(s) at artificially low prices.

In this situation, the storage bottleneck is the gasoline, the exercise of the market power is the match. With 100,000,000 barrels of open long positions needing to liquidate, given the storage constraint, the resulting conflagration can be epic.

 

 

Edited April 21, 2020 by surrept33

[0R0 + 6,251]

10 hours ago, Rob Plant said:

Oh well done you!!

Why don't you try to make something or employ people who have families that depend on this industry and the sub tier supply industries.

Your comment is frankly abhorrent!!

Go and crawl back under that rock you came out of!

Why are so many on this forum gleefully mocking those that will suffer hardship for years?? There seems to be many on here that are saying well at least we are better off than this country (our enemy). Dont you all get it the world economy needs to get back on its feet and having countries or huge industries in financial ruin isnt going to help that happen.

 

That would be something he CAN look into doing with the cover of a WTI short to help the oil economy - say buy oil producer or service company debt or equity out of bankruptcy. The WTI short would be a hedge. 

[Rasmus Jorgensen + 1,169]

3 hours ago, Rob Plant said:

I just fail to understand their motives for this apparent gloating 

I get you on the gloating, but there's some pretty appaling commentary on the this forum about ME & African culture and work ethics... 

@Tom Kirkman - principles are principles. Stand by them or they don't mean anything

[RichieRich216 + 454]

Trump has surrounded himself with businessmen, If these were all political hacks this would be much worse.

[יאן דיגילוב + 3]

There is no Principles there just was stupidity  of the Prince ! he got too much people mad ! he boosted too much and made too much people angry ! 

Soon the day come of the Tarrifs and for the mobilization of US army forces, let him die in war he made over his stupid  EGO the FED AND P. Trump never will give to shale to die .. U.S will just be stronger and smarter !  

U.S is not like saudia and russia - U.S. Economy not 100% depends on oil but i know they Do and both russia and saudia have  there problems.. Gerry Maddoux   right in what he wrote

[Geoff Guenther + 317]

Everyone on this site has been frustrated at the lack of oversight on flaring and venting and from that I think that the majority knew that the resulting overproduction could slam everyone.  I never thought it would be so spectacular.

In my early days at Enron, everyone thought that the company was so large and central to US gas that it was too big to fail. It obviously did fail, and what happened to gas supply in North America? A few hiccups with gas prices here and there, but gas kept flowing. Fortunes disappeared, and sadly many peoples' pensions disappeared along with them.

There will be some good investments to be found in the oil patch, just like when Kinder Morgan bought Enron's pipelines. And there are lots of people trying to figure out whether they can make a play. It'll take some time before oil (or its replacement energy) gets energy people to full employment again.

[nsdp + 449]

6 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

The oil "price" collapsed because too many players were attempting to unload futures contracts into a narrow window, and the buyers stood back deliberately in order to hurt the sellers.  That typically does not happen, but did this time because there were no alternatives for the holders of the contracts to unload.  The various diatribes you have read here, incidentally, are all wrong  (as to their analyses).  They are more emotional reactions, but fundamentally, the price collapsed because of the behavior of a (quite) small number of traders there were out to screw each other over.  And you get that in the commodities markets.

Remember that traders in futures contracts provide liquidity to those markets.  Without the traders, there would be very limited liquidity and the sellers of hard product would be facing an oligopsonistic market  (one with a small number of buyers that control the market place). Your classic oligopsonistic market is that of wheat, where Cargill is the big player as buyer and there are thousands of individual farmers as sellers.  You would have that situation in the oil markets where there are these thousands of producers, including small wildcatters, and a few buyers that are refiners or exporters.  Under those circumstances the oligopsonists set the price and rape the producers.  What the traders do is provide liquidity by injecting cash into that marketplace and that allows the sellers much more leeway to sell the product. 

There then develops a secondary trading market which is a derivative of the primary buying market, where "contraccts" for the commodity are traded by speculators.  Those guys again inject liquidity into the market by injecting more cash, the difference being that the synthetic buyers and sellers are not interested in physical possession, they do not take delivery and do not sell physical product forward. All they do is gamble on price movements, and they develop these arcane ideas of "technical" analyses using charts  (basically the "quants" of the stock market, same idea) and also market analysis using production data and having conversations with buyers, called "fundamental" buyers.  Those contracts have expiry dates and if you have purchased a contract then on expiry you are entitled to physicial delivery, which in the case of oil in the USA  (WTI) is the oil is deposited to you in Cushing in some big tank and you get a warehouse receipt (plus a bill, of course).  Lots of contracts end that way, and then the holder of that settled contract can go sell the stored oil at his leisure to some physical buyer such as a refinery. 

Now what happened this time is that there is no storage available at Cushing, Oklahoma, the major terminal.  There is actual physical storage, sure, and if you look at those drone photos you will see some empty tanks, but what has happened is that other players have "booked" those tanks in anticipation of taking other deliveries, so there is no room for  "your" oil buys.  So, on settlement day  (which was today), where do you put your oil?  And there is no place for it, unless you can sell it to the guys that hold the empty-tank reservations - they now control the oil market!   So, those guys just tortured the traders by holding off from buying, letting the price go to ridiculous minus levels, where they could scalp and hurt the traders, and put coin into their own pockets.  

In effect, what you witnessed is the behavior of a very small group of "traders," the professionals in that market, stealing from each other.  Remember that the commodities pits are filled with vipers, totally amoral guys who steal all day long and rationalise that as "just business."  You can make moral pontifications about that, but in the end it is what happens when you invite speculators into the market in order to create liquidity.  And, the producers and the users of oil (and grain, and orange juice, and pork bellies, and the other commodities) need that liquidity to operate. Think of it as the price of a market that is not distorted by oligopsonistic buyers.   Trust this explains. 

Jan, most of what you say is correct.  The sole cause of yesterdays debacle is Ronald Reagan who introduced the futures market to oil and gas in 1983. I did legal compliance work the Amoco Oil Trading desk in Houston from 1982-1984.   Old days there were no paper barrels that you could trade oil on margin.  Every contract was for wet barrels and contracts were bought and paid for 100% in hard currency US Dollars.   No margin contracts with borrowed money and no MBA's in Brooks Brothers or custom tailored suits playing games.  Longest arbitrage  trade was transit time for a ULCC from Ras Tanura to LOOP.   No paper barrels to screw up supply and demand information was much clearer.  There were only X barrels of line fill in the liquids lines, only Y barrels in Terminals  and Z barrels in  refinery storage.  Cargos at sea were well known as all ships registered without today's funny business and you knew how many barrels left loading terminals by the Plimsoll lines on the ships.   Landsat photos told you how full storage tanks were by measuring the shadows from lip of the tank to the top of the roof.  The were 319 refineries in the US owned by some 180 operators and the top 10 controlled 22% of capacity.   Today there are 135 refiners and the top 10 owned 75% of nameplate. Too many players for one or two to corner the market and major  market info could not be concealed the way it can today.   There were too many players and too many leaks

The number of pipeline operators have consolidated, storage has consolidated  as well refining ownership.   So physical capacity is in fewer hands and KSA is number 10,   These few control the market and the paper barrel players(I will never shed a tear for them) and the public are at their mercy.

Due to the same physical constraints in physical plant, the grain markets orange juice etc are just as limited as oil is today.

Replay next month, if KSA wants it.

Edited April 21, 2020 by nsdp
typo

[nsdp + 449]

51 minutes ago, Geoff Guenther said:

Everyone on this site has been frustrated at the lack of oversight on flaring and venting and from that I think that the majority knew that the resulting overproduction could slam everyone.  I never thought it would be so spectacular.

In my early days at Enron, everyone thought that the company was so large and central to US gas that it was too big to fail. It obviously did fail, and what happened to gas supply in North America? A few hiccups with gas prices here and there, but gas kept flowing. Fortunes disappeared, and sadly many peoples' pensions disappeared along with them.

There will be some good investments to be found in the oil patch, just like when Kinder Morgan bought Enron's pipelines. And there are lots of people trying to figure out whether they can make a play. It'll take some time before oil (or its replacement energy) gets energy people to full employment again.

Rats, I missed one; how did I miss you?. I was part of the prosecution of the Enron Energy trading.Dynergy. and RRI.   41 went to federal prison should have been 42.  I first met Ken Lay when he replaced Bob Herring at HNG and I was at Amoco.

[nsdp + 449]

6 hours ago, Gerry Maddoux said:

        

 

Is America a roaring giant or crying baby?

Victor Davis Hanson

Marshal Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto commanded the Imperial Japanese Navy in World War II until he was killed in April 1943. Despite the dialogue from the 1970 WWII film “Tora! Tora! Tora!” Yamamoto probably did not say in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

But Yamamoto likely either wrote or said something similar: “I can run wild for six months. After that, I have no expectation of success.”

Yamamoto summed up a general feeling among the Japanese admirals that the huge industrial capacity of the U.S. — which had been asleep during the Great Depression — along with the righteous anger and frenzy of an aroused American democracy would ensure the destruction of the Japanese empire in short order.

They were right.

In 1940, there were fewer than 500,000 service members in the U.S. military. At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, that number had grown to nearly 2.2 million. By 1945, more than 12 million Americans were in the armed services. It was an astonishing mobilization for a nation of fewer than 140 million people.

The U.S. started the war with seven fleet aircraft carriers and one escort carrier. By war’s end, it was deploying 27 fleet and 72 escort carriers.

The U.S. Navy ended the war with a fleet eight times larger than it was at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The American armada would become larger in total tonnage that all the world’s fleets in 1945 combined.

More incredible, by the end of 1944, the American gross domestic product exceeded the economic output of all the major belligerents on both sides of World War II put together: the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, Italy and Germany.

As we struggle to defeat the coronavirus, an aroused America is talking grandly of restructuring the U.S. economy.

Politicians promise that major industries — pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, rare earths, military technologies — will return home to create millions of new jobs and better protect the population in times of crisis.

There are other vows to recalibrate our relationship with China to ensure that when the next successor to SARS and COVID-19 hits, American lives will not be jeopardized by the duplicity of the Chinese government. At the beginning of the outbreak, Beijing hid the origins, nature and transmissibility of the virus, then lied about its supposedly brilliant control of the epidemic.

The American public is already asking tough questions.

Does the U.S. really need almost 15,000 people flying in from China each day? At a time when American students owe $1.5 trillion in student loans, is it smart to have some 360,000 Chinese students enrolled in U.S. colleges? Is it safe to fund hundreds of labs on university campuses that conduct joint research with Chinese academics?

Does the United States really wish to curtail fracking, which has made it the largest producer of natural gas in the world and ensured that a quarantined America has plenty of fuel?

Is it prudent to release precious irrigation water out to the Pacific Ocean when California is the richest and most diverse producer of food in America?

Post-virus America can awake from this epidemic and economic shutdown in one of two different ways.

One, we can wake up as we did on Dec. 8, 1941, to ensure that Americans control their own fundamentals of life — food, fuel, medicine and strategic industries — without dependency on illiberal regimes. The military can refocus our defenses against nuclear missiles, cyberwarfare and biological weapons. On the home front, diversity is fine, but in a national crisis as serious as this one, the unity that arises from confidence in shared American citizenship saves lives.

Our other choice is to keep bickering and suffering amnesia, remaining as vulnerable as we were in the past.

We can scapegoat and play the blame game. We can talk not of an America in crisis, but of the virus’s effects on particular groups. We can decide that it is mean or even racist and xenophobic to hold the Chinese government accountable for its swath of viral destruction — and so we will not.

We can ridicule the idea of Americans again making their own things and call it protectionism or economic chauvinism. We can conduct endless congressional inquiries about who said what and when about the virus, and perhaps reopen impeachment.

Or we can have bipartisan commissions decide how best to return key industries to the U.S., prepare for the next epidemic and pay down the enormous debt we have incurred to defeat COVID-19.

In other words, the choice is ours whether America awakens as a roaring giant or a crying baby.

Victor Davis Hanson is a historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

The Hoover Institution is home to and published  Richard Epstein's ( Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution) article that Covid would kill 500 people..https://ricochet.com/734865/coronavirus-overreaction/  Great scholarship at the Hoover Institution. For them it is always and forever Ocotber 16, 1929.  Their America first proaganda in the first week of December 1941 has to be seen to be believed.  Sen. Gerald Nye any one?

Edited April 21, 2020 by nsdp
bad sysntax

[Geoff Guenther + 317]

24 minutes ago, nsdp said:

Rats, I missed one; how did I miss you?. I was part of the prosecution of the Enron Energy trading.Dynergy. and RRI.   41 went to federal prison should have been 42.  I first met Ken Lay when he replaced Bob Herring at HNG and I was at Amoco.

The sneakiest of us flew under the radar to wreak havok elsewhere.

I still wonder whether Ken really died or disappeared himself to some island.

[nsdp + 449]

30 minutes ago, Geoff Guenther said:

The sneakiest of us flew under the radar to wreak havok elsewhere.

I still wonder whether Ken really died or disappeared himself to some island.

Ken was slippery alright but the Marshals Service took the ankle monitor off his cold dead toe.

[Gerry Maddoux + 3,627]

The fourth of July in Aspen is about as good as it gets. Ken Lay was there, in 2006, looked healthy, seemed to have a good time at the parade.

And died the next day in his home. 

You just never do know when it's your time.

🤔

[Gerry Maddoux + 3,627]

43 minutes ago, nsdp said:

Great scholarship at the Hoover Institution.

Actually, it is good scholarship.

Great think tank too. 

This guy Victor Hanson Davis is a good thinker and speaker.

[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

14 hours ago, Shakil said:

Bullshit. Companies like amazon can't even keep up with demand because there is shortage of workers. Delivery companies are booming right now. I guess people don't want to move. Hey, you know what? That's their problem. 

 

Hate to tell you but heaven does not exist.

Obviously not for you.

[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

9 hours ago, Tom Kirkman said:

 

 

 

Yesterday I quietly suspended for 3 days a new troll who was ecstatic that oil had crashed.  While I have no issue with people who hate oil, I find it mostly out of bounds for noobs to join this oil forum and post about how happy that oil had crashed and that oil workers are out of work.

I'm not a fan of censorship, but I view it in poor decorum to have newcomers come here and gloat that it is "great for the environment" that oil has crashed.

Any thoughts?  This is not "my" forum, this is a forum for everyone in the oil industry.

Not quite sure what to do here as a moderator, with people who come here to celebrate the great Covid Oil Crash of 2020.

Tom,

As we all defend freedom of speech on the forum, unless it is really ‘beyond the pale’, or just becomes annoyingly pedantic and is simply ‘clogging up the works’, just let them post. 
Forum member have the option to ignore them or block them (this option is not available on the app...😖)

[Eyes Wide Open + 3,555]

Trumps oil industry...Maybe America's Oil industry, that might change a few perceptions. One just sits and watches the all chaos that is occuring in every market segment across the industrialized world trying to see where it ends. Meanwhile China has grasped the circumstances and is moving forward. And that is where this all ends...moving forward each taking care of its own. Change is inevitable, i have always cringed at that statement..it is here.

https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/China-Refines-More-Oil-Than-The-US-For-The-First-Time-Ever.html

[Ron Ron + 18]

8 hours ago, RichieRich216 said:

Trump has surrounded himself with businessmen, If these were all political hacks this would be much worse.

If he had listened to the epidemiologist and infectious disease experts. The problem would have been far less serious. One reason was so pissed at washington states Gov. Inslee, is because the governor was pushing hard for Trump to listen to the expert. Unfortunately, Trump was convinced that the experts were wrong. So if you are correct then it is also true that the current crisis we are facing is the result of Trump surrounding himself with bussinessmen.

[Rob Plant + 2,756]

I think the difficulty in listening to the "experts" is that there are 33 known different mutations of C-19 and some are very mild and some are pretty deadly. How anyone is supposed to react in the best way when they don't know what they are dealing with is challenging to say the least.

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-has-mutated-into-more-than-30-strains-say-scientists-in-china-11976380

It appears that Europe has the more severe strains of the virus and that is why we are being hit the hardest.

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

7 hours ago, Douglas Buckland said:

Tom,

As we all defend freedom of speech on the forum, unless it is really ‘beyond the pale’, or just becomes annoyingly pedantic and is simply ‘clogging up the works’, just let them post. 
Forum member have the option to ignore them or block them (this option is not available on the app...😖)

Thanks Douglas.

[Marcin2 + 726]

@Gerry Maddoux about The article by historian Hanson.

To reinvent the nation No big words are needed just good policies and hard work.

I am writing about American exceptionalism at this forum cause I think that this ideology is just harmful for US people.

Americans are using big words, about heroism and bravery, Pearl Harbour, Chinese threat etc.

If you feel better After that  that is fine, but it does not change the real situation.

US as roaring giant ? Crying baby ? Are we still at the level of Lion King narrative ?

Please show to yourself that you can do anything constructive on top of whining or day dreaming about war heroism.

Bring back manufacturing to US, reinvent US manufacturing !!!!!!!!

I hear this every day for 5 years at least.

Please provide link with 1 example of coherent policy ( this means 10 pages with detailed business plan with operationalization how US government wants to do it in reality, I mean just MAGA slogan is  just not enough )

When you will have any coherent plan in place next show to yourself a few cases where it was applied.

And After that you would know that something was done so that America is going in the direction that you all just speak about.