We are fully under the influence of petroleum demand destruction. The global oil market can’t function without real oil production price discovery, which doesn’t exist in the currently deflationary global economy, which forces indebted producers to sell far below cost.
Both supply and demand seem to cyclic in nature and we are not finished with the supply destruction phase, which can only be revived through a globally realistic oil trading price, which nobody knows. This is an unknown until demand destruction also runs its course. The global demand in the oil supply-demand balance that sets the global oil price cannot be known until we can understand where the global economy is headed. The global material economy seems to be contracting as the Baltic dry index, trucking, and railroad profitability seem to affirm, even ignoring oil prices and Chinese economy.
The reality is probably that a falling EROEI and the end to cheap oil after ~2005 made our finance capital investment growth less profitable. But this fundamental shift has been hidden through easy central bank credit and fiat currency generated on demand to pay interest on a growing mountain of unpayable debt, with a shift of debt from private hands to public, such as away from Wall Street toward Fed and US Treasury obligations. Now we see the world’s major central banks each independently creating their own fiat currencies to preserve a trading advantage, led by the dollar as the world’s standard reserve currency.
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