{"id":40668,"date":"2018-11-18T13:09:22","date_gmt":"2018-11-18T18:09:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=40668"},"modified":"2018-11-18T13:09:22","modified_gmt":"2018-11-18T18:09:22","slug":"trump-claims-victory-as-oil-prices-plummet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=40668","title":{"rendered":"Trump Claims Victory As Oil Prices Plummet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trump Claims Victory As Oil Prices Plummet<\/a><\/h3>\n
\"Trump\"<\/picture><\/div>\n
\n

Oil prices are now down over 20 percent from recent highs, and President Trump knows exactly where the credit for that belongs. \u201cIf you look at oil prices they\u2019ve come down very substantially over the last couple of months,\u201d President Trump said in a news conference last week. \u201cThat\u2019s because of me.\u201d<\/p>\n

The President is partially correct about that, but not for the reasons he thinks. He attributes it to his hard line on\u00a0OPEC. But what has actually happened is that crude oil inventories in the U.S. have\u00a0risen for seven straight weeks.<\/p>\n

As pointed out in the\u00a0previous article<\/a>, one reason for that is that China, in response to the ongoing trade spat, has stopped importing U.S. oil. Earlier this year China\u00a0imported<\/a>\u00a0more than half a million barrels of day of crude oil from the U.S. Loss of this export market has contributed to the inventory growth in the U.S. \u2014 and hence to the drop in crude oil prices. (Presumably, crude oil inventories are dropping elsewhere, but possibly in countries with less transparency about their inventories).<\/p>\n

Some feel that there is also an element of fear that global demand may be slowing. But this week Reuters\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0that China\u2019s crude oil imports reached an all-time high in October. So, despite the trade war, demand in China doesn\u2019t appear to be slowing.\u00a0But China isn\u2019t\u00a0getting\u00a0its oil from the U.S. now.<\/p>\n

Where is China getting its oil? Iran, for one. Another way that President Trump has helped oil prices go down is that he blinked as the deadline for sanctions on Iran\u2019s oil exports neared. Oil prices had risen about 50 percent over the past year because of the impending sanctions that were expected to take Iran\u2019s oil off the market. (I don\u2019t recall\u00a0him taking credit for oil prices that rose in response to sanctions).<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trump Claims Victory As Oil Prices Plummet Oil prices are now down over 20 percent from recent highs, and President Trump knows exactly where the credit for that belongs. \u201cIf you look at oil prices they\u2019ve come down very substantially over the last couple of months,\u201d President Trump said in a news conference last week. […]<\/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":[3],"tags":[130,7844,441,592,5332,600,683,9141,827],"class_list":["post-40668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-china","tag-donald-trump","tag-iran","tag-oil-price","tag-oilprice-com","tag-opec","tag-reuters","tag-robert-rapier","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40668","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=40668"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40669,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40668\/revisions\/40669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}