Whose losses?

22 years ago when the North Sea was raging, Cantarell was streaming on-line, and the US's North Slope was hammering out oil, the consequences of such an oil glut led to $10 a barrel oil. Bush the Elder attempted to goad the Saudis into producing less to stave off economic losses in Houston. Yesterday Bush the Junior tried to get them to produce more, for the exact same reason...to stave off economic losses. It's only a difference of whose losses we are talking about.

We can't ask the same of Venezuela, Iraq, Angola, Iran, Nigeria, or Russia; we're not in bed with them, yet. Either they don't have any capacity to produce more or we don't like them. But the effect would be the same -- flood the market, prices drop, and economies spring back from the crypt.

But we are currently bedding down with the Saudis. This request yesterday; you'd think that with a red phone call Bush could arrange for some other form of wealth transfer to Saudi Arabia in exchange for more production...so such a public call-for-more seems suspicious. But in any event, we also decided to forgo the 70,000 barrels a day push to our strategic petroleum reserves, which is now almost full at ~700 million barrels. This should drop prices a few cents, yes. Of course, realize that 700 million barrels represents 33 days of use at our current rate, or 58 days' worth of imports.

If there's such a big issue these days about living paycheck to paycheck, and that a slew of us Merikans will sink within a month of losing our jobs...aren't we doing the same thing with the SPR, reducing our capacity to weather any future, real, production shortfall?

The thing I take from this is that, like social security, medicare, the trade deficit, state budget deficits, and the total national debt, we are slowly discovering how much we have really borrowed from others. I suppose being in debt isn't such a bad thing provided our economy grows faster than we grow debt. But if we, for whatever reason, can't grow our economy (energy, maybe?)...