by AlCzervik » Wed 02 Aug 2006, 16:45:46
Mogambo Guru is a humorous libertarian gold bug. He cited some of Bakhtiari's work today.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')nd speaking of commodities and the impact of rising oil prices, generous reader Laura S. sent me a report by the Commonwealth of Australia, "Reference: Australia’s future oil supply and alternative transport fuels." In it, we read of a Dr Samsam Bakhtiari saying, "Crude oil is a commodity unlike any other. It is simultaneously a strategic raw material, a unique industrial feedstock and the most essential of fuels." Perhaps from this you get such curious results. "For example," he writes, "you have no free market in oil. Naturally, you can go to the NYMEX stock exchange and buy as many barrels as you want at the price of $74 now, but these are paper barrels." In short, fractional-reserve oil!
This suddenly reminded me of the glut of fractional-reserve paper silver, and fractional-reserve paper gold, and fractional-reserve paper commodities, and even fractional-reserve paper paper, which makes for a gigantic short position in all kinds of things. I was going to bring these eerie, spooky and ominous parallels up to Dr. Bakhtiari, but he just smoothly went on, saying, "If you try to buy 10,000 barrels a day of real oil, of genuine barrels, you will have enormous problems getting that much oil on a regular and sustainable basis. So that is one of the problems that we will encounter in the medium term."
He goes on to say that all of this "all things being equal" and linear extrapolations aside, "we cannot accept the projections of certain institutions like the International Energy Agency in Paris, which predicts that the world will be consuming 118 million barrels per day in the year 2030 as realistic, because I cannot see how the world can get over 81 or, say, 82 million barrels per day right now, let alone in the future."
Here is where video news footage showed that I jumped to my feet, startling everybody, and shouted, "Hahaha! Exactly right, good doctor! There haven't been any big new discoveries of oil in a decade or more, and yet total oil consumption is going to be able to grow and grow and grow until it is 50% higher in 24 years? Hahahaha! Good luck, world, and good point, doc!"
The audience erupted in anguished cries of, "Shut up, you stupid Mogambo idiot," and angry demands that Dr. Bakhtiari rip me a "new one." But, being the classy guy that he is, he controls his rage, and calmly summarizes as, "So you have an enormous discrepancy between what these institutions publish and what we believe in, whether it is in reserves or whether it is in production of crude oil per day."
And that all assumes at least some growth in oil production, and the good doctor does not agree with even THAT modest assumption. Almost as an afterthought, he ominously says, "I believe we are in decline."
http://worldnewstrust.org/modules/AMS/a ... oryid=3977