Tuesday 5 August 2008

Oil prices coming down

Today, a barrel of oil costs $118.

I managed to get some US retail oil price data that includes data for this week. Prices over there are down about 23 cents from their peak at the beginning of July. Overall, retail prices are down about 5.5 percent.

Despite the fall in prices, I don't believe that US inflation is going to come down as quickly as the Fed and others think.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

JP Morgan said: "We leave the last ten per cent for the opposition."

It looks to me as if there are such huge concentrations of capital behind highly leveraged speculation that it can create vast bubbles that slice huge amounts of money away from those who need to use the resources - oil, water, food, housing.

Without regulation, this kind of hyper-speculation threatens to impoverish even the middle classes of western-style economies.

This stuff is serious...

B. in C.

Anonymous said...

USD is the reserve currency so they got themselves into way more trouble than the UK because the Arabs and Chinese had to take their paper. So inflation (in CPI sense) can continue there long after it's deflation in the UK.

Nick