Saudis warn of shortfalls as oil hits $61

[donsu]

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/e0cdc282-ee47-11d9-98e5-00000e2511c8.html


Oil prices hit new record highs above $61 a barrel on Thursday, driven by short-term supply fears as the first hurricane of the season threatened crude production and refinery operations in the Gulf of Mexico.

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But senior Saudi energy officials have privately warned US and European counterparts that Opec would have an “extremely difficult time” meeting that demand. Saudi Arabia calculates there is a 4.5m b/d gap between what the world needs and what the kingdom can provide.

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But European officials hope that energy saving measures could curb oil demand. They believe Opec could produce the 44m b/d the world would need if consumers adopted efficiency measures under discussion by governments in the US and Europe.

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Fears that US refineries are ill-equipped to meet winter demand for heating oil and other distillates have driven crude prices more than 9 per cent higher in the last week.
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the cost of keeping warm this winter? the cost of driving to work and back?

[Deja Q]

1. The crash is coming. Enjoy life now for tomorrow you WILL be dead.

Or, worse, poor and starving in the cold.

[CaliTeacher]

2. Wait...

...explain to me again why we invaded Iraq and not Saudi Arabia? Or better yet, why GW holds hands with the prince of Saud while traipsing through the garden at the ranch. You're either with use, or against us...or I guess you can be both and make a mint off of inflated oil prices.

[Cobalt Violet]

3. I'm going to have to quit my job because getting there is getting...

too expensive. And if I'm at this point I'm sure there are plenty of others just like me.

Hell I can't work just to be able to get to work. I need some spending money.

[whistle]

4. Why is the price of crude oil not even higher per barrel......

.....Why not $71, $81 or even $100 per barrel? How are economic forces which only 24 months ago had crude oil at around the $30 per barrel mark able to set prices where they are at the moment?

I am suggesting that free market prices have nothing to do with the price of crude oil. This is pure Karl Marx free trade capital exploitation of workers in effect here.

<snip>
On the Question of Free Trade
- - Karl Marx, 1848

On January 9 1848, Marx spoke before the Democratic Association of Brussels about the topical question of free trade

<snip>

This law of commodity labor, of the minimum of wages, will be confirmed in proportion as the supposition of the economists, free-trade, becomes an actual fact. Thus, of two things one: either we must reject all political economy based on the assumption of free trade, or we must admit that under this free trade the whole severity of the economic laws will fall upon the workers.

To sum up, what is free trade, what is free trade under the present condition of society? It is freedom of capital. When you have overthrown the few national barriers which still restrict the progress of capital, you will merely have given it complete freedom of action. So long as you let the relation of wage labor to capital exist, it does not matter how favorable the conditions under which the exchange of commodities takes place, there will always be a class which will exploit and a class which will be exploited. It is really difficult to understand the claim of the free-traders who imagine that the more advantageous application of capital will abolish the antagonism between industrial capitalists and wage workers. On the contrary, the only result will be that the antagonism of these two classes will stand out still more clearly.

Let us assume for a moment that there are no more Corn Laws or national or local custom duties; in fact that all the accidental circumstances which today the worker may take to be the cause of his miserable condition have entirely vanished, and you will have removed so many curtains that hide from his eyes his true enemy.

He will see that capital become free will make him no less a slave than capital trammeled by customs duties.

<more>
<link> http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/marx_freetrade.html