We're not seeing a decline in employment or spending. The really bad symptoms of a bad economy aren't there yet.
> Gas if still $4.2 national average per gallon. That's HUGE, and the direct actions of the administration are to blame for this.
Which direct actions? And frankly, gasoline prices do not amount to a signficant amount of spending by American families. Food and housing costs are also up and wages down (adjusted for inflation) which account for a lot more money that people actually spend than energy. However gasoline prices are also way down from a month ago, yet food/rent are still up.
Gas affects the prices of nearly everything in the economy so I have no idea how you would conclude it's not a large portion of spending. I work in commodities and we are seeing massive price increases simply due to fuel & freight costs.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE
That doesn’t appear to be the cae
I’ve been hearing from some people that the rise in gas prices is this administration’s fault.
However, when I look at prices here in the EU, gas prices have risen much more. Is that the current US admin’s fault as well?
What specific tools should the exec use in this situation? EO no more oil exports? EO limiting the record petro industry profits?
What is the complete argument for why this is Biden’s fault?
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/shell-reports-record...
"Shell (SHEL.L) posted record results on Thursday, with a $11.5 billion second-quarter profit smashing the mark it set only three months ago, lifted by strong gas trading and a tripling of refining profit. The company also announced a $6 billion share buyback programme for the current quarter but did not raise its dividend of 25 cents per share. It said shareholder returns would remain 'in excess of 30% of cash flow from operating activities'."
The subtext is: these companies are doing well, and that's a bad thing. How do you think that effects their desire to bring down costs for consumers?
And also: yeah, their profits are up, because due to the actions of the administration people are uncertain about their ability to buy this stuff in the future, and the futures cost goes up.
Watch the end of this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tOQ5AaFJdU
The question is: do you think this will accelerate us towards a a green energy future.
Her answer: yes, and that's a good thing for the following reasons.
BTW, a green energy future is one where these oil companies are out of business. The energy secretary is saying that she wants these companies to accelerate their own demise at a decreased profit, and how there eventual disappearance is a good thing.
Yeah, gas prices are up. No kidding.
it was a mistake to focus on attacking o&g when alternatives still aint ready yet.
Companies with heavy capital investment will see huge gains in % profit as their debt obligations are inflated away.
For better or worse, we don't live in anything resembling a command economy.
This is not a value judgment as to whether this is right or wrong.
Essentially correct. Presidents have very little control over this.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/24/biden-administration-pausing...
We could drill our away out of this problem, but we are not, because the the biden administration is being held hostage by the progressive left. And before you start calling me a republican, im not one, but this is just a really stupid idea because it's decisions like this that will cause republicans to be elected in 2022 and 2024 - the american public isnt going to take higher gas prices for the team to fight climate change at this point, they are going to vote people into office that will lower them. biden doesnt realize this because he is surrounded by people that think a like and are too rich to be unaffected by inflation, or he doesnt care -- either way, it s a bad position
> Now, you could be excused for asking yourself: “Wait a second, I thought the U.S. had a bunch of oil in the Permian Basin in Texas and the Bakken Shale in North Dakota. Why the heck are we importing oil?” Turns out the answer is part chemistry and part economics.
> ...
> That’s because they take longer to process and need specialized refining equipment. This cheap, lower-quality crude comes from Canada, Venezuela and Russia, among other spots. Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was the product U.S. refiners were buying.
> “A lot of refineries, especially in the Gulf Coast, made a very expensive bet to invest in this equipment that would allow them to save money on input costs by processing, you know, lower-quality crude,” said Richard Sweeney, an assistant professor of economics at Boston College.
---
We can't drill our way out of this because we can't refine the oil that we produce.
Here's another article from 2019 - https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/the-great-oil-p...
> Refiners who invested billions to turn a profit from processing cheap low-quality crude are paying unheard of premiums to find the heavy-sour grades they need. The mismatch is better news for such OPEC producers as Iraq and Saudi Arabia, who don’t produce much light-sweet, but pump plenty of the dirtier stuff.
Saying this doesn't make it true.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-452931879750
> The U.S. was producing 11.185 million barrels of crude oil per day in 2021, compared with an average of 11.283 million barrels per day in 2020, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The latest data shows that for the week of March 4, 2022, the U.S. is producing 11.6 million barrels per day.
> While there was a dip in oil production in February 2021 due to winter storms in Texas, said Mark Finley, a fellow in energy and global oil at Rice University in Houston, the U.S. remains the world’s biggest producer of crude oil.
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-science-enviro...
> Approvals for companies to drill for oil and gas on U.S. public lands are on pace this year to reach their highest level since George W. Bush was president, underscoring President Joe Biden’s reluctance to more forcefully curb petroleum production in the face of industry and Republican resistance.
As a deliberate political choice by the Saudis.
https://theintercept.com/2022/02/15/saudi-arabia-gas-price-o...
Also if the president has no effect on gas prices why was ours groveling at the feet of the Saudi Prince?
Because they're the people who can have an effect?
If Biden could tweak gas prices, he wouldn't have to do that.
I personally don't think mandating all actors to altruistically abstain from transacting at market price would be a sound policy, but that seems to be what liberals want.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/11/big-p...
> The biggest spender, Johnson & Johnson, shelled out $17.5 billion on sales and marketing in 2013, compared with $8.2 billion for R&D. In the top 10, only Roche spent more on R&D than on sales and marketing.
They are similar but different.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/10/europe/biontech-pfizer-vaccin...
[0] https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=49344#
I was able to find some incomplete data that suggests the US is pretty good on the metric of wait time, compared to many European countries and Canada:
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/242e3c8c-en/1/3/2/index....
My short-version argument would be—and I'm a little annoyed at having to explain this, because I've been explaining it to people on the Internet for 20 damn years, it's so not-hard to find this info that it's kinda difficult not to have been exposed to it, and it seems like it should be common knowledge at this point and like some folks are going way out of their way not to understand it—that the "good effect" is precisely that the US spends 50-100% more than any of these countries, per capita, and does not smoke the rest on practically every metric, instead doing a little better in some areas, a little worse in others, middle-of-the pack on others still. It sure as hell looks like we're paying a huge premium for similar outcomes, which also explains why there aren't a lot of people in other countries begging their governments to adopt a system like ours (a fact one has to explain when cherry-picking metrics to make the US look good—OK, so why aren't others rushing to copy us? At least some of them should be, if we actually do have an unambiguously better system).
The "good effect" is that other health care systems spend far less, and also don't bankrupt people over medical bills, while achieving roughly comparable results.
If I came to you and told you I had a process to produce a Tesla knock-off that produced a car a little better in some ways, a little worse in others, but pretty damn comparable, at 50-70% of what it costs Tesla to produce a car, and then showed you dozens of factories I'd already built that were demonstrably doing exactly that, you wouldn't ask me how I was defining "good effect" when I used that to describe the results of the One Weird Trick of my process. It's obvious.
Were you not aware of the vast differences in costs & accessibility between OECD healthcare systems? By which I mostly mean between the US and everyone else.
I'm a median to upper-middle American, and I get great value from my healthcare. It's not obvious to me that a system that raises the experience for mean, or even the bottom end, of the distribution would be a good thing for me in many respects: emergency wait time, access to top percentile specialists, out of pocket costs, just to name a few. It also seems to me that you neglect to factor in that people of means, the world over, come to the US to access care from world leading treatments in many conditions. So they might not want American care in their country, but plenty surely want it for their own bodies.
Put simply: your "good effect" often smuggles in assumptions about which part of the curve to treat, and implicitly undervalues degradation of the status quo for others. You, as is the habit of liberals, would like to have a debate wherein your moral values about who deserves what and who should be deprived, is taken for granted. I'm sorry, it's not immediately obvious to me that a system where 10,000 people wait 6-12 months for lifesaving operations is better than one where 1,000 people can get the operation in a month and the other 9,000 might have to go into debt to do the same.
Ah—I usually assume the Rawlsian "Veil of Ignorance" POV when it comes public policy issues, personally, as I think is fairly common. Sure, if that's your perspective, literally nothing matters except how a policy affects you, personally, right now, so my analysis may not hold—but that's not an especially useful perspective from which to consider public policy when discussing it with strangers, and I'm not really sure why you'd even engage on this in public if the only thing you care about is whether a policy is good for you, right this second (circumstances are subject to change, after all)
At least you're up-front about it, rather than hiding it. I don't mind that when it's made explicit—I just also, again, don't get why you'd engage, and wonder whether you might have guessed in advance the sort of more-typical POV I was taking, so really could have understood what I meant by "good effect" without my needing to explain it. What were you trying to accomplish here?
So why would I engage? Because you seem to be advocating policies that would directly (and potentially negatively) affect my health outcomes, and your justification is "but you're just a statistic".
> The net profit margin of S&P 500 companies, which include energy giants such as Chevron and Exxon Mobil, in the first quarter has been running at 12.3% based on estimates and earnings reported so far, according to FactSet. That’s down from a peak of 13.1% in the second quarter of last year, but above the pre-COVID-19 level of about 11%.
As with food, they've realized the public will pay higher margins than they previously thought they could get away with.
Ding Ding Ding!
The relevant question is why isn't there competition to drive the market price down.
If it appears that there is a monopoly or oligopoly extracting value from it's market position, the solution is diversification, not profit controls.
Profit controls just drive prices higher as companies strive to inflate their COGs
Mastercard is already experimenting with CO2 emissions based spending habits: https://www.mastercard.us/en-us/vision/corp-responsibility/p...
I am the last one to believe in these types of things but it is getting to a point where I feel like we're being boiled like a frog.
Climate/ESG initiatives have lost respect in my eyes, I'd like to support sensible things but this is how we'll get totalitarianism on our hands. Then there is the whole WEF agenda.
The only thing I want to see out of Biden on gas prices is a windfall tax on oil companies where the funds are dedicated to lithium exploration.
Imagine you're a company which builds refining and extraction infrastructure. The government wants you to build more capacity to bring down the cost fuel, but 18 months ago. you watched them just straight up cancel a project which was already half finished.
Would you go for this? I wouldn't.
And you have a bunch of land lease contracts which allow you to extract oil. Without these contracts your business will collapse. The government has said that they won't give you any more until you use the ones you have. But again: they've spent the last 18 months cancelling projects, and talking about how we need to make a transition away from your business.
Do you trust that once you use up the remaining leases you have, that they're really going to give you more? I wouldn't trust that.
It's unlikely an unfinished pipeline for export purposes had a significant impact on current gasoline prices.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-895299166310
"Experts tell The Associated Press that the Keystone XL pipeline cancellation isn’t affecting what’s happening in the oil market today. It was never operational when it was shut down, and was not slated to go into service until 2023, according to a press release from TC Energy, the company constructing the project."
"Even if the Keystone XL pipeline had been completed, the amount of oil it was designed to transport would have been a drop in the bucket for U.S. demand, experts noted. The U.S. used nearly 20 million barrels of oil a day last year, while global consumption of oil was near 100 million barrels. The pipeline would have contributed less than 1% to the world supply of oil, according to AP reporting."
https://wtop.com/national/2021/10/covid-19-drives-gas-oil-pr...
The returning to normal(ish) phase - in late 2020, early 2021 - increased it.
We're still dealing with supply chain issues, and will for a while. The idea that you can turn the economy down 30% and back up 30% in less than a year with no lasting effects is silly.
> When this thread started the war in Ukraine was the issue.
Yes. Starting from an already-disrupted screwed-up economic baseline certainly doesn't help.
Simply put we were net oil exporters under Trump, all of the sudden we are back to begging the Saudis. Given the environmental retoric of this administration it isn't unreasonable to conclude that they had a hand in that.
Please peddle your disinformation elsewhere.
Begging the Saudis under Biden: https://www.npr.org/2022/06/25/1107628743/biden-will-visit-s...
We export light sweet crude.
We don't have the refineries set up to refine that type of oil.
We import sour crude that the refineries set up to process more efficiently in the 90s (before fracking).
Saudi oil is the sour type - and so we import that and the price of Saudi oil has the biggest impact on US gas prices.
To change this around, oil companies in the US need to retool their refineries to the light sweet type that is produced domestically.
Their actions do have effects and sometimes a corrupt group of lifetime government grifters make bad decisions that have bad effects. The Orwellian framing is that nothing these people do could ever be wrong.
Open your eyes. The sanctions have done nothing to stop Russia, have driven up the cost of fuel (which benefits them, an energy exporter), and have dramatically heightened geopolitical tensions all over the world. We went from a situation where Russia was going to end up with a land bridge to Crimea, to a situation where Russia is likely going to end up controlling all of Ukraine, is substantially richer, and has driven a wedge between the US and India.
> Open your eyes.
Use your eyes to see how the Russian offensive is going.
> Biden and other world government officials placed massive sanctions on Russia exports of oil.
China, India, Africa, etc. are happily buying it up. Oil's a fungible commodity.
(We already imported basically no oil directly from Russia pre-war, already, but uncertainty of any global scale is bad for prices. Find the tiny little Russia line on https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/US_oil_p...)
Urals crude is trading $20-$30 below Brent, and China and India have Russia over a barrel when negotiating prices. https://www.neste.com/investors/market-data/urals-brent-pric...
The war has not been going well for Russia at all, stagnant at best https://understandingwar.org/project/ukraine-project
> is substantially richer
Russia has been putting out very cherry-picked data on their economy, which Western journalists have been taking at face value. They've been unable to make more PGMs, and their civilian sector is getting savaged.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4167193
Perun's Youtube channel has been a great deep-dive source into the war economy in general. If you're at all interested in how governments acquire arms, he's an indispensable watch. TL;DW: The time for Russia to win the war was February, now it's a matter of how many people and how much wrecked steel and how much of Ukraine he wants to make into a wasteland before he says uncle.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC3ehuUksTyQ7bbjGntmx3Q
EDIT: Because I can't reply, Good Times Bad Times is good too. They're a bit more high-level and wider scope than Perun, and I'd recommend them as well.
You watch the Good Times Bad Times channel too by any chance?
Not gonna happen. They might keep what they grabbed, especially if the West is going to continue dragging their feet and giving Ukrainians aid at the current "attrition war" rates, but they are at the peak of what they could achieve, at least at this round. The question now is - would they be able to keep it, not whether they can grab more.
I do agree with you that it isn't unexpected during a period of sanctions on a country that produces ~10% of the worldwide oil supply, though. Profits naturally will rise for the remaining players.
These people do have huge levers that control our lives that they can pull. Their actions do have massive effects on the American economy, and by extension the economy of the rest of the world. The actions they're taking are legitimately horrifying.
I seriously don't think these people understand what the lives of normal people are actually like. The white house had the gall to put out a tweet bragging that gas prices had come down, and that this could be saving people $35/mo, and how much that is helping.
Gas if still $4.2 national average per gallon. That's HUGE, and the direct actions of the administration are to blame for this.