Not bad all things considered. CCJ, HCLP, OMAB and TIS all went higher, with HCLP up more than 4%, OMAB up more than 3%, and TIS up more than 2%. BAS was down 1%, but this is a process.
BAS just recently announced their rig count numbers. Utilizations are way down, from 67% at the beginning of 2014 to 56% today. 4% has occurred just since the start of the new year.
Well? We’ve seen that these methods are more expensive. Now let’s see how cheap they can be. And who’s going to be around next year. My guess; BAS are champs.
If oil prices run back to $100 now that Russia has decided to play nice, I will die from laughing. The days of global competition are done; the USA is the victor. I know you defeatists want to apologize for our might – it’s nothing but luck of course, and that is somewhat true – and rekindle the “peaceful” yester-years of blood thirsty despots butchering the peasants for land and spoils, never ending. Save your breath.
Someone was going to win this game sooner or later, and it looks like that someone is us. Rather than wishing upon us another 1,000 years of savagery, suck it up and move on. You could hardly ask for a more genteel ruler than America, no? What other nation has ever spent this much time self-reflecting and prostrating over the vanquished?
Our President’s order is about to smote tens of thousands to ruin. And when he is finished, he will give a long, sophomoric lecture on the importance of civility and equal opportunity in the global marketplace. Could you imagine the look on the faces of Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great, if they could see such a spectacle? I imagine they would have both cast down their arms and retired to spend their final days as hermits.
What comes next is very important. The crowd is skittish, but today surely helped. We need Brent to breach $60 soon, and it would be very constructive if bond yields of the safe havens could, you know…yield something again.
The people are very scared of the Eurozone breaking up…for why, I could not possibly tell you. The euro has brought nothing but suffering on the nations of Europe. It was as if a spattering of intellectuals across the continent tried to trick Germans, French, Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, Finnish, Austrians, Belgians, Irish, Dutch, and Portuguese people into thinking they were all from the same place, like they wouldn’t figure it out.
It seems that way because that was exactly what happened. Such a brainless ploy. And almost set up to fail, from the beginning. The number of American economists, almost uniformly and unanimously across all walks of life, that laughed at this idea; it is incredible.
I will spoil the ending. Greece is going to walk away from the Eurozone, and nobody will care.
Did creating the Eurozone destroy the global economy in the first place? There were many currencies that were trading one day that didn’t the next. The euro came out and life went on. Reversing the process is no different, except at the end of the rainbow, Greece defaults and ruins their credit rating for a decade, and a bunch of banks get whacked (what else is new?). Then voila! we have a brand new example of what not to do when managing a country, as Greece becomes the butt of jokes for a half century (see France as to fighting wars or Venezuela as to not being filthy animals, for reference).
I remain cash heavy for now, but am looking for that moment when people start getting excited again.