As the US strategic petroleum reserve (SPR) approaches capacity (721.5 million barrels filled out of a total possible 727 million, and will be filled by January 2010), the federal government will fade out of the oil-buying business. Some bearish traders believe that this factor can weigh in on prices, since most petroleum stocks in the United States are government-held rather than private. Bullish traders have also used the filling of the Chinese SPR as a reason that oil should go much higher.

The team at Casey’s Energy Opportunities believe that planned government buying or selling of crude oil for SPRs actually have very little impact in the overall market. However, an overall drawdown of worldwide inventory could put downward pressure on the price of oil. The various countries also have their particular reasons and influences in decisions to tap their reserves.

So which countries are executing preparedness plans to fill their strategic

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In my father’s house are many mansions. Surely one of them has a room with no elephants in it….

Not to crunch too many metaphors right here at the top, but a consensus seems to be firming up in the animate jello of the Internet that we have entered the Season of the Witch. An odor of ripeness fills the virtual air — something between dead carp and apples baking.

Whatever else appears to be going on in the upper stories and verdigris-tinged turrets of capital finance — currency rackets, gold switcheroos, interest rate arbitrage games, concealment of losses under rugs and behind curtains, Chinese fire drills performed by Spanish prisoners, executive three-card-monte set-ups, boardroom work-arounds, accounting quicksteps, Peter-to-Paul-shuffles, check kitings, pigeon drops, Ponzi schemes, hugger-muggers, bezels, shucks, jives, and enough monkeyshines to make Lord Greystroke cry for mercy — apart, in other words, from business-as-usual, such as it is

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Chen Weidong, a Chinese oil services executive, has published a review of Michael Economides's book about Yukos and the Russian oil industry on Energy Tribune.  The excerpt below is not about Russia, but it was the most shocking part of Weidong's article.  Both Russia and China have avoided reforms to their state-owned energy sectors, posing some similar problems.

The revenue of ExxonMobil is more than the ones for CNPC, Sinopec and CNOOC, combined but the number of employees of those companies, combined, is 30 times more than ExxonMobil's. Oil price has become internationalized; the price of oil products in China is higher than in U.S., indicating low efficiency and perhaps lack of competition. We all hope to improve the efficiency, but we are still not clear how this can be done.

China's reliance on foreign oil is more than 50 percent and is increasing. However, our petroleum

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Here I provide some more background on the relation between oil price increases and economic recessions.

When I first began working on my Ph.D. dissertation in 1980, I was intrigued by the fact that the oil embargo of 1973-74 and the collapse in Iranian oil production after the revolution in 1978 were both followed by global recessions. But when I called attention to the fact there had been a sharp increase in the price of oil prior to 6 of the 7 postwar U.S. recessions up to that point, the general response was one of skepticism.

By the time I was presenting evidence of this relation at various seminars in 1981-82, the Iran-Iraq War had produced yet another shock to world oil markets and the NBER declared that the U.S. experienced a new recession immediately on the heels of the previous downturn, meaning that the evidence had now become that

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Really. It’s too much. Yesterday, George W. Bush told foreign leaders “Our aim should not be more government, It should be smarter government.” Didn’t Bush just spend the past eight years embodying the exact opposite? Where was the smart part creating an “ownership society” with phony money? Where was the smart part of running up record deficits? Or the war in Iraq?

- But W. didn’t stop there. Apart from wanting governments to be “smarter” (who doesn’t?), he called for called for leaders to recognize that “government intervention is not a cure-all” for economic problems. So what was Fannie and Freddie all about? Or Hank Paulson’s Troubled Assets Relief Program. Or the bailout of AIG? If government is not a cure-all, then why has Bush orchestrated the biggest government intervention in the free markets in history? Is he really that unaware of

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Really. It’s too much. Yesterday, George W. Bush told foreign leaders “Our aim should not be more government, It should be smarter government.” Didn’t Bush just spend the past eight years embodying the exact opposite? Where was the smart part creating an “ownership society” with phony money? Where was the smart part of running up record deficits? Or the war in Iraq?

- But W. didn’t stop there. Apart from wanting governments to be “smarter” (who doesn’t?), he called for called for leaders to recognize that “government intervention is not a cure-all” for economic problems. So what was Fannie and Freddie all about? Or Hank Paulson’s Troubled Assets Relief Program. Or the bailout of AIG? If government is not a cure-all, then why has Bush orchestrated the biggest government intervention in the free markets in history? Is he really that unaware of

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A couple of anecdotes.Yesterday at the studio for my segment just about everyone there was asking me about the market and what to do. One of the guys looked at his 401k balance while I was there and he became bummed out.A couple of different friends said they saw the segment but didn't really know what the segment was about.The first one tells me that people who don't usually follow the market closely are paying more attention than normal. Obviously this belies more fear or some other emotion as the market is lower and maybe the regular news covering it more than normal too. BTW my visit to the dentist on Monday was similar.The second anecdote might be important. The segment was about the (financial) news of the day but still it was difficult to follow for ...

Article Source Time to reassess the potential for recent oil price increases to contribute to an economic downturn. The sharp spikes in oil prices associated with the 1973-74 oil embargo, the 1978 Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War in 1980, and the first Persian Gulf War in 1990 were each followed by an economic recession. However, when oil prices started to rise again five years ago, many of us suggested that things would be different this time, in part because the price was rising much more gradually and so should be less disruptive of consumer spending patterns. Others emphasized that, despite the price increases, oil was still cheaper than it had been historically if you took into account inflation. However, once you include the most recent data, neither of those claims would still be true. Average monthly dollar price of West Texas Intermediate (from FRED divided by ratio ...

One way Nigerians spend a romantic evening is watching the after-glow of another terrorist attack on oil production facilities. Well, it’s a cheap date!

This leads me to my ongoing bitch complaint regarding the lack of “any” energy policy in the US since the first oil embargo in 1973. I mean, c’mon–34 years of no action! No drilling off any coast anymore [thank you Nancy, Jeb & Co.], don’t touch Anwar [thank you Dems], no nuke plants in our backyard [thank you Jane], no wind farms near Cape Cod [thank you Ted] and no more fossil fuels at all [thank you Al]. In the meantime strategic interests owing to our own shortsightedness have us at war for the stuff [thank you George I and II]. So given this litany you’d think we’d have done something in …