What's Going On With Oil

I've been a follower of The Oil Drum for a while now, and love to check in for their articles, or, the ones I understand, at any rate, as they have an uncommonly high signal-to-noise ratio. Today they have the most succinct and cogent explanation of the oil situation that I've ever seen.

Well worth looking at.

You can't soak the rich

There's a great editorial over at the Wall Street Journal (click image for link) about this guy named Kurt Hauser from San Francisco, who's demonstrated empirically that government receipts as a proportion of GDP are literally unaffected by income tax rates. One could only hope that the California electorate would start to pay attention and work on pro-business legislation instead of driving more of our companies over to Texas instead.

Sadly, it's not likely with the 'but it sounds good so it must be true' knee-jerk socialists that run the state. Can you believe these idiots want to add a VAT? It's no accident that the places in Europe that are kicking butt are the places growing their GDP (Ireland, Germany), not the ones that are confiscating as much as they possibly can (Spain, France, England). What I don't have a graph to show, though, is GDP-growth rate, which is affected by taxation -- ask Ireland how to benefit from a low flat tax.

But no, the local idiots are going to try to soak the rich to cover the costs of CA's incessant borrowing. Oh, and they're also going to get out of debt by borrowing more!

Doom and Gloom! Whee!

I know everyone thinks that I'm the perennial financial doom-meister, and, although I think that recent history is actually backing me up, I'd still like to be thought of as kind of a sunny guy.

...but then it's so hard when you see graphs like this:


When you look at this from a bank solvency perspective, you just gotta wonder how they're going to pay all this back. Or are they? Now that the Fed is even taking credit card debt as collateral¹, maybe the plan is just to nationalize all the bad credit, which would be the bail-out of the millennium, and so far beyond the pale that the term "moral hazard" just doesn't work any more.

Students of American history might recognize a few of those "tiny" upward blips....

Yours,

Mr. Sunny Outlook Guy



¹ Just because Congress said you can't wipe out credit-card debt via Chapter 11 doesn't mean these'll actually be worth anything in a high-foreclosure environment that actually makes Chapter 7 look like a better long-term deal for the debtor.

Awwww!

I know that for a red-blooded American male I have an overgrown sense of cute, but this one tops it even for me. It seems that a fox cub was orphaned in Nizhni Novgorod. In order to save its life, they decided to ask one of the local mother cats to foster it, which it did....


... and as an aside, will someone please hurry up and domesticate foxen so I can have my kittendog?

Red Belt

I just heard on NPR a (too-short) interview of my favorite actor, Chiwetel Ejiofor, who's in some kind of drama by David Mamut called "Red Belt". I'm not a Mamut fan, but if you're a fan of Ejiofor, you may want to check it out.

In case you're not familiar with him, he was the Operator in Serenity, the doctor in Dirty Pretty Things and the drag queen in Kinky Boots. Fan-f*cking-tastic actor of the minimalist variety.

Not being a Mamut fan, this'll be a renter for me, but I'll definitely be seeing it.