Submitted by Matt Smith via OilPrice.com,
Seventy-eight years after Walt Disney released the first full-length animated feature, and seven factors in today’s crude complex are dwarfing crude prices.
Happy – Let’s start off with the good news: retail gasoline prices have dropped below $2/gallon on the national average. Prices have broken below the lows seen earlier in the year, and are now at their lowest levels since early 2009.
Earlier this year, we posited that the markets were reaching the point at which a significant percentage of investors no longer had faith in Central Banks’ abilities to put off the business cycle.
This now appears to be the case. In the last month, three Central Banks have announced policy changes. All three of these changes were alleged to be bullish in nature.
They were:
1) The European Central Bank (ECB) cutting rates further into NIRP and extending its QE program through March 2017.
Over the weekend, using the latest Commitment of Traders data, we showed something gold-traders had been aware in recent months (and years): "having closed lower for 8 of the last 9 weeks, gold has become the momentum-chasing hedge fund community's latest target.... Managed Money added to its already record short position in gold futures this week, pushing the leveraged bets to the most extremely bearish in history."
Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,
Good friend Michael Pollaro just sent a couple of charts that show the US economy heading for a brick wall. The first illustrates what happens when business sales (the green line) turn negative. In the previous two boom/bust cycles, when sales started falling the economy either tipped into recession shortly thereafter or (it was discovered in retrospect) was already well into a contraction.
The 'death cross' of these two energy market indicators is all one needs to know about the oil market...
As Bloomberg notes, total industry oil stocks reported by the International Energy Agency rose for a third month, increasing by 0.5 percent to the highest on record at 2.99 billion barrels.
China’s Beige Book, released last week, showed further economic deterioration in one of the world’s largest commodity-consuming nations in the fourth quarter.
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