[KCFrog]

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1226/p01s01-usec.html

not sure I buy this...

[kmann]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'S')pare capacity will also come from non-OPEC sources, says Mueller. "There are a number of big projects coming onstream in the US Gulf of Mexico, Brazil, Russia, and Kazakhstan," he says.

[Bas]

you sure they didn't mean production May go Down in 2008?

the "MAY" says it all though; it reflects an expectation that they will go up.

[wisconsin_cur]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')hrough much of this year, OPEC production has been about 1 million barrels per day lower than expected, says John Felmy, chief economist at the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group in Washington.

[Revi]

I think this sums up the situation:

"Next year, we will probably be in a range of $80 to $85 a barrel," says Rick Mueller, an analyst with Energy Security Analysis of Wakefield, Mass. "And if the US goes into a recession, the price forecast will be lower."

If the price does stay in the $80 to $85 range, it will still be higher than the average price for 2007, which was closer to $71 a barrel."
From the article


The price of oil can stay around $85 a barrel and still wreck people. The chances of us going over 88 million barrels per day as they say later in the article are nil. I think that we may have a recession in the US that causes us to use less oil, but we'll still have oil around $85 a barrel, so that means it went up around $10 from the average in 2007. We are still going to have a lot of people using less oil in the US because they lost their job, their house or their car and are now taking the bus and burning scraps of wood in a barrel to stay warm. I don't see this as a wonderful scenario. It's just demand destruction.

The effect is the same anyway. More people on the bottom quit using so much oil, so the demand goes down slightly.

It's still a symptom of a much bigger problem. That problem is peak oil. They say when we hit peak anything one of the ways we know we're at the top of the plateau is that we see wild swings in the value of a commodity. We're there. I wouldn't be surprised to see oil go down, then swing back up again.

[Newfie]

The other question is, what is a dollar worth? What are we measuring against?

What I have not seen, although I have not looked hard, is how the price of oil has risen against the Euro. The price of oil has not risen as dramatically as we make it out. It has risen for us (or US) because of the dollars collapse.

The US can clearly do a great deal to economize without doing significant damage to our lifestyle, it may even help us.

I don't doubt PO, I'm suggesting that there is more elasticity in the system that can come out before we have drastic implications. They will come soon enough.

Come on stock market, just a couple of more years and I can cash out my 401 tax free! Come on baby! (dice roll)