{"id":16130,"date":"2016-01-07T11:23:11","date_gmt":"2016-01-07T16:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=16130"},"modified":"2016-01-07T11:23:11","modified_gmt":"2016-01-07T16:23:11","slug":"oil-plunges-to-32-handle-chinese-stocks-crash-and-are-halted-whiff-of-mayhem-breaks-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=16130","title":{"rendered":"Oil Plunges to $32-Handle, Chinese Stocks Crash and are Halted, Whiff of Mayhem Breaks out"},"content":{"rendered":"<header>\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/wolfstreet.com\/2016\/01\/07\/oil-plunges-to-32-handle-chinese-stocks-crash-and-are-halted-whiff-of-mayhem-breaks-out\/\" target=\"_blank\">Oil Plunges to $32-Handle, Chinese Stocks Crash and are Halted, Whiff of Mayhem Breaks out<\/a><\/h3>\n<p class=\"entry-meta\"><strong>Why Oil Keeps Falling off the Chart<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>After having been through the greatest two-year loss on record, the price of oil plunged 9.6% on Wednesday and in evening trading. As I\u2019m writing this, WTI hit\u00a0$32.62 a barrel, a new low since the desperate depth of the Financial Crisis, when it very briefly kissed $30.28 a barrel on December 23, 2008, before bouncing off sharply.<\/p>\n<p>This time, it\u2019s serious. Brent, the global benchmark, has crashed to $32.75, an 11-year low. This isn\u2019t a quick scare that happens during a Financial Crisis. It\u2019s the result of a persistently growing glut.<\/p>\n<p>Since the oil price plunge began in July 2014, every rally, every \u201copportunity of a lifetime\u201d to buy oil \u201cfor cents on the dollar\u201d has turned out to be a falling knife.<\/p>\n<p>This is what the three trading-day, 15% crash of WTI looks like:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-20629 size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/wolfstreet.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/US-crude-WTI-price-2016-01-06.png\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 529px) 100vw, 529px\" srcset=\"http:\/\/wolfstreet.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/US-crude-WTI-price-2016-01-06-260x240.png 260x, http:\/\/wolfstreet.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/US-crude-WTI-price-2016-01-06.png 529x\" alt=\"US-crude-WTI-price-2016-01-06\" width=\"529\" height=\"488\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The contagion of the oil price plunge has been drifting into other sectors of the US economy, housing and office space in Houston, the state budget in Alaska, jobs, manufacturing\u2026. Investments have gone up in smoke. Loans have gone bad. Defaults, restructurings, and bankruptcies are now a routine occurrence. Banks are looking over their shoulder. PE firms are licking their wounds from their mega-bets on fracking made in prior years, and they\u2019re licking their new wounds from having tried to catch many falling knives.<\/p>\n<p>This isn\u2019t going to be an easy bust to get through. It\u2019s a US problem. And it\u2019s a global problem.<\/p>\n<p>In the US, crude oil production started declining on a monthly basis in mid-2015, according to EIA estimates. But despite those monthly declines, production averaged 9.3 million barrels per day in 2015, the highest rate since 1972, and a 7%\u00a0<em>increase<\/em>\u00a0over 2014.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Oil Plunges to $32-Handle, Chinese Stocks Crash and are Halted, Whiff of Mayhem Breaks out Why Oil Keeps Falling off the Chart After having been through the greatest two-year loss on record, the price of oil plunged 9.6% on Wednesday and in evening trading. As I\u2019m writing this, WTI hit\u00a0$32.62 a barrel, a new low [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6941,185,251,4254,4255],"class_list":["post-16130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-chinese-stock-market","tag-crude-oil-production","tag-eia","tag-wolf-richter","tag-wolfstreet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16130"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16131,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16130\/revisions\/16131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}