Lex Luz

Crude Prices Plunge - UltraShort ETF Positioned for Profits

This strikes me as a less-than-thoughtful analysis. Clearly the momentum at present favors continued declines in oil prices, but what happens when the impacts of the global inflation regime created by the trillions of dollars in newly-issued central bank scrip begin to be felt? What would be the impact of oil being priced in a currency other than the dollar (though what that would be now seems a challenging question to answer).

It seems imperative also to consider global instability and "wild-card" factors in making these decisions, too. What happens to the price of oil if Israel attacks Iran and Iran blocks the straits of Hormuz?

The article isn't investment advice, it's a gambling tip. You may have the best of it for the next hand or two and maybe the DUG is a good gamble if all current trends hold and if no wild-card scenarios arise.

Does Big Oil's Apathy Justify Proposals to Tax Windfall Profits?

It strikes me as absurd to continue tax and subsidy policies that encourage total dependence on oil - a commodity that is clearly finite in supply - and it strikes me as equally absurd to try to cover up that fundamental policy framework or mindset with talk of a "windfall profits tax" however prettily dressed up it may be. As a nation, we are not yet willing to confront the fundamental issue here: in the very real world of the future, oil production can't possibly keep up with demand. We can argue all we want about the timeframe, but the end-game is exactly the same every time: we're out of oil.

Given that our economy, our security, our lifestyle, and in fact our very survival is 100% dependent on oil, and given that we're out of oil as a condition of the future, it strikes me that we had better get damned busy, damned fast, figuring out what comes AFTER oil. Yet ALL of our policies, ALL of our tax structures, ALL of our government spending are expressly and purposefully designed to keep us 100% dependent on the very thing that we need to wean ourselves off of.

We can paint all the frosting we want on this pile of horsesh*t, but that's never going to turn it into a cake. Much as I would love to see some sort of perfect capitalist world where the markets take care of all of this, that ain't gonna happen in a world where every economy, including the United States', is centrally planned. So it seems to me that we had better start constructing an energy policy that promotes vigorous domestic exploration & production of oil and that funnels some significant portion of that money into nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, and other alternatives for power generation, aggressively subsidized development of alternative fuels for transportation, and a radical re-focusing of urban & regional infrastructure to promote effective, realistic mass-transit.

This is THE national security issue, today, tomorrow, and for the next two generations. If we don't tackle this, starting now, the next two generations are probably the last.