We've noticed that retail gasoline stations no longer feature what baseball calls "crooked numbers" in their posted prices. Regular is now below two dollars per gallon in New Jersey, where we live. Sounds great, doesn't it?
 |
| Image: dailyfreep.com |
Well, it does and it doesn't.
The negative side is occurring in the new oil-patch state of North Dakota, where, as a Fox News story notes, state revenues are coming up over five billion dollars short of projections. While that's Monopoly money in Silicon Valley and Manhattan, that's real money in the Great Plains.
Today's Bloomberg Business includes a story about the economic impact of falling oil prices in the larger economy. The tally? $390 billion. Some officials interviewed for the article believed local oil-patch banks, which happily loaned money to drilling firms, might "feel pain." The pinch might also be noticed among those pension funds, mutual funds, and other investment vehicles which put their clients' money where the oil firms' mouths were. That net includes just about everyone, period.
Meanwhile,
GOP Congressional backers of the Keystone XL pipeline, designed to ship Canadian oil to American Gulf Coast ports and facilities, are pushing toward legislative approval of this environmental disaster in the making. One would think that cheap oil would knock out the key argument in the pipeline's favor. However, that line of reasoning would be rational, an approach the GOP does not appear to embrace. Just to keep things fair and balanced,
President Obama recently said he would set in motion permission for oil drilling off the US Atlantic coast. His stance frankly made as little sense as the Republican Party's urgency to push Keystone through a legislative keyhole.
Whatever happened to
Sarah Palin's battle-cry "Drill, Baby, Drill"? Who would have ever imagined a Palin-inspired idea would become something both political parties' poo-bahs would advocate?
No comments:
Post a Comment