SC Soccer Forums SCSoccer.com Forums Club Soccer & ODP Completely Tangential - Oil

It is a player's game.

If the price of a barrel of oil falls in a desert and there is no American there to hear it, does it make a noise?

Not at the pump, no.

Scary that we've somehow gotten to the point where "There is no shortage, we've just decided to charge you more" is now apparently an acceptable answer.

Now what does that have to do with price of Tea in CHINA?

For at least 34 years we new this day was arriving. Remember the 1974 oil crisis. Yet we the government for the people did NOTHING. Our CAPITALITIC oil companies also have done NOTHING! Both packed with bureacracy, ahh the american way. (Have to love it, and yes still better than the rest of the world)

On the other hand though, the US now has better soccer playing. In high school I played FUTSAL soccer in Brazil. About the time PELE came to the US, I moved to Iowa. where I was forced to play basketball, no soccer available. Now 34 years later, most if not all High Schools have soccer. Something the oil companies should learn from. They have refused to develop refineries, refused to develop shale oil, and even refuse to drill for oil in our territories Of course we let CHINA drill in the Gulf of Mexico.

I am one gratefull for our Soccer visionaries that have created the club environment to teach all soccer.

What a great thread!!!! I have a handful of buddies from high school (30+ years ago) and we stay in touch via email and argue/debate everything from religion to politics to literature to springsteen vs the doors vs zeppelin. This reminds me a little of that.

Shortage? We ain't got no stinkin' shortage? Right....

The American consumer has benefitted for years by cheap consumer goods coming from places like China. Now the chickens are coming home to roost, as Shibumi's opening graph shows.

America's economy is essentially flat and in pure American style assume everyone's economy is flat therefore how can there be increased demand. Yet companies like Caterpillar, who export over 50% of their sales, are booming with record profits...and declining NAFTA sales. Hmm.....

The developing world is now competing with America for an essentially stable supply. Globally demand for food, energy, steel, basic minerals etc etc etc.....are going thru the roof with prices following. The price of steel scrap now exceeds the price of basic hot rolled steel form a couple of years ago. Steel.....has more than doubled in cost over the last 2-3 years. Oil.....has exploded in price. What was the Obama quote about fancy salad stuff?
Corn is being diverted from food to methanol...prices of chemicals are going thru the roof because of the demand for fertilizer.

Basic economic principle....what happens when demand exceeds supply?

Other basic economic principle....who invests in businesses where returns don't justify the investment?

Why bust "Big Oil" for not drilling down into things like shale oil or refinery capacity? We as consumers benefited with a gas pump price that was largely flat for years and years. But....oil companies hardly benefitted from that. If you went back and looked at Exxon's profit picture as compared to ......say Duke Power, Microsoft, Wachovia....for years 1996-2005 my guess is you'd find a profit picture that isn't that great. Are they making money hand over fist now? Heck ya!!! Go look at Nucor while your at it. But when they are making marginal profits is i reaosnable to expect them to be making huge investments in R&D or capacity? Great companies will...but how many great companies are there (or people, soccer clubs, etc).

And speaking of doing nothing.....raise your hands if you (like me) have bought an SUV in the last 5 years? Big butted, gas guzzling vehicle. We love it. But in a time of $4-5 per galon gas.....is that smart?

Guess its easier to blame George Bush or Exxon or Southern Baptists.

And of course, who contributed largely to the increased global demand?

We did, naturally. Pursuit of a manifest destiny of spreading American-style culture to all the "dark places in the world" (a quote from the days of British imperialism, if you'll excuse me) we've done all we can to make other, less "civilized" places more and more like us...which means they are now competing for the same resources that we have previously dominated.

Still, the increased demand hasn't necessarily created a "shortage" in the sense that supply can't keep up...it's just created more of a seller's market, which oil producers are taking full advantage of at the expense of the consumer. They can produce plenty of oil to meet the demand, but why go the extra stretch to do it when they can produce the same or less, charge more, and have more global consumers to compete for their business, driving their profit margins through the roof? So what if the American economy fails...there are now plenty of other customers to fill the demand.