United States

Authored by Robert Fantina via AHTribune.com,

The United States presents itself to the world as a beacon of liberty and a proponent of human rights around the world, ready and willing to stand up for and defend the downtrodden. Florida Senator Marco Rubio recently said that the world looks to the U.S. as an example of democracy. This myth is not believed outside of the United States’ borders, and decreasingly within. There is simply too much evidence to the contrary.

Exactly six months ago, when oil bulls still held on to some fleeting hope that OPEC may somehow stabilize the crash in oil prices despite the shift in marginal oil production from low-cost OPEC producers to US shale (a hope which is now gone as the just disclosed letter from Andy Hall demonstrates), Goldman noticed something troubling: an unprecedented collapse in gasoline demand.

After years of being oil's biggest cheerleader, "oil god" Andy Hall, who starting with the OPEC Thanksgiving massacre in 2014 has had several abysmal years, in the process losing the bulk of his AUM, finally threw in the towel last week when in a July 3 letter to investors, he admitted that "the facts have changed" and that "fundamentals have deteriorated significantly" adding that "demand growth seems to be somewhat less than anticipated while supply keeps surprising to the upside...

While it may come as a surprise to the current crop of 17-year-old hedge fund managers, the current period of persistently low long-term interest rates and plunging, near reocrd volatility in the face of a  hawkish Fed and rising short-term rates, is hardly new: exactly the same happened from 2004 through 2006, despite the Fed's continued rate hikes and jawboning. Alan Greenspan, the Fed's Chair at the time, called this phenomenon a "conundrum" and blamed it on many things, including the global savings glut.