Russian Interest rates 17%

[RobDownSouth]

Awe, I hurt vettebirther's new BBF's wittle feelings. He's just a little guy.

Didn't take the Vettebigot very long to replace his beloved boo boo bear, did it?

 

[KingOrfeo]

Not in the least. Successes in production were despite the administration's best efforts to hamper production. Production happened because of record high oil prices making new techniques, methods and locations feasible.

And now . . .

The fundamental limiting factor for shale oil was that the wells were only good for about two years, and then they were pretty much shot. So, if you were in that business, and held a bunch of leases, you had to constantly drill and re-drill and then drill some more just to keep production up. The drilling cost between $6 and $12-million per well. What happened the past seven years is that the drillers and their playmates on Wall Street hyped the hoo-hah out of the business — it was a shale revolution! In a few short years they drilled to beat the band and the results seemed so impressive that investment money poured into the sector like honey, so they drilled some more. It was going to save the American way of life. We were going to be “energy independent,” the “new Saudi America.” We would be able to drive to Wal-Mart forever!

Be careful what you wish for, the old saw goes. The shale oil “miracle” was an epochal stunt. They goosed so much oil out of the ground in a short period of time that they killed the goose — demand for oil at a price that made it worth drilling for. Now, much of the junk financing will default, and the result of that is no more junk financing for a long, long time, meaning that a lot of planned wells will not be drilled and completed, meaning that the current crop of short-lived wells will crap out in the 24 months ahead, and production will not be replaced by new wells, which will not be there. When and if the riggers get busy again in the Bakken and the Eagle Ford, you can be sure it will be at a much lower level of activity than the glorious year 2014. Of course, it remains to be seen how much financial illness the spoiled junk bond paper will spread through the derivatives markets, not to mention the boring old stock and bond markets and the big banks that traffic there. You can only fool reality so long. Eventually risk-on returns for real and swipes the ground with its mighty tail.

 

[KingOrfeo]

I was referring to an attempt to shore up the Ruble in his own country, before he is overthrown. Revolution could be in the wind.

Nah . . . I think Russia now is in a situation like Mexico in the decades of PRI hegemony -- a quasi-democracy, with one party predominating but not monopolizing power, with elections sometimes rigged but not entirely meaningless. Any revolution will be an electoral one.

 

[KingOrfeo]

He was known as a Rockefeller Republican, same as an establishment Republican today, or Rino.

No, the Rockefeller Republicans were more liberal than today's establishment Republicans.

"I have just one purpose, and that is to build up a strong progressive Republican Party in this country. If the right-wing wants a fight, they are going to get it...before I end up, either this Republican Party will reflect progressivism or I won't be with them anymore."

—Ike

Rockefeller Republican (named after former New York Governor and Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller of the Rockefeller family) was a euphemism used to describe members of the moderate wing of the Republican Party. With some intervals, they were the dominant force in the party throughout the 1950s, '60s, and early '70s. They were usually fiscally moderate to center-right, socially moderate to center-left, and slightly hawkish on foreign policy, and were most heavily concentrated in northeastern states. Hence, they were sometimes referred to as [sane] "liberal Republicans."

List of historical Rockefeller Republicans
##Nelson Rockefeller
##Gerald Ford
##Richard Nixon (no, really)
##Bob Dole would like you to know Bob Dole is on here too. (Notably before 1996.)
##Margaret Chase Smith
##Dwight D. Eisenhower
##George Romney[1]
##Wendell Willkie
##Thomas Dewey
##Earl Warren
##John B. Anderson, who found Reagan too conservative for his tastes and ran in 1980 as an independent candidate for president[2]

Where are they now?

They are largely gone, having been driven out by the rise of neoconservatism and the Religious Right. Today's "moderate" Republicans (like Olympia Snowe, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Bloomberg, and Chris Christie) are often dismissed as "RINOs" by the activist "movement conservatives" that have taken over the GOP since Reagan. As a result, what had once been among the most solidly Republican areas of the country, like New Jersey and western New England, are now among the most solidly Democratic, as these areas were hotbeds of the Rockefeller wing of the party. The endangered species status has also been placed in states of the Upper Midwest, where Rockefellers used to be similarly prevalent.

Today it can effectively be argued that the centrist wing of the Democratic Party (Bill Clinton, Barack Obama) is most similar to the Rockefeller Republicans in policy and ideology. Indeed, in the world that is not the United States, Obama has been compared to the "one nation Toryism" of Benjamin Disraeli,[3] and he's even been explicitly linked to old-styled Rockefeller Republicans.[4][5][6]

 

[KingOrfeo]

I thought you ignorant of actual science greenies were under the impression that Obama was hindering fossil fuels and that that was somehow a noble effort?

Well, it would be; we need to leave some of that stuff in the ground, never to be burned.

 

[Que]

Well, it would be; we need to leave some of that stuff in the ground, never to be burned.

Finally someone honest enough to admit that the administrations policy according to its own stated ideology should be to impede oil production. When he made noises that he thought that a good idea to spout nonsense about how we don't need it and that the "green economy' was going to happen soon, and took the actions available to him to put the brakes on production, it had no effect on prices?

When his "vision' failed spectacularly and production by private companies increased anyway, he should get credit for failing to implement his stated vision?

 

[Sean Renaud]

Finally someone honest enough to admit that the administrations policy according to its own stated ideology should be to impede oil production. When he made noises that he thought that a good idea to spout nonsense about how we don't need it and that the "green economy' was going to happen soon, and took the actions available to him to put the brakes on production, it had no effect on prices?

When his "vision' failed spectacularly and production by private companies increased anyway, he should get credit for failing to implement his stated vision?

It's not the adminstrations policy, We wish it were and we could call him ours but he's not. He's scum like you.

 

[Que]

It's not the adminstrations policy, We wish it were and we could call him ours but he's not. He's scum like you.

Why is it that scum like me are the ones that care about the cost of heating oil for the poor and the cost of energy as it impacts transportation of consumer goods and those prices?

Why is it that angels like you do not seem to consider the impact high energy costs have on the sort of manufacturing jobs that people of low skills and modest backgrounds need?

 

[phrodeau]

He cares about the poor and unskilled now?

It's a miracle!

 

[Que]

He cares about the poor and unskilled now?

It's a miracle!

Based on your preferences for abandoning cheap efficient fossil fuels you obviously do not.

Enriching Al Gore and some Plutocrats including third world dictators in a bogus carbon tax scheme would do absolutely nothing to lift the third world out of poverty. Energy would.

The easiest measurement of a given locations wealth is their energy consumption. The easiest way to identify the impoverished it the black areas you see at night. Energy fueled our affluence, why do you and your kind show so little compassion for poor, unskilled people?

 

[phrodeau]

Based on your preferences for abandoning cheap efficient fossil fuels you obviously do not.

Enriching Al Gore and some Plutocrats including third world dictators in a bogus carbon tax scheme would do absolutely nothing to lift the third world out of poverty. Energy would.

The easiest measurement of a given locations wealth is their energy consumption. The easiest way to identify the impoverished it the black areas you see at night. Energy fueled our affluence, why do you and your kind show so little compassion for poor, unskilled people?

How about keeping the planet livable for everybody? Why do you show so little regard for humankind?

 

[Que]

How about keeping the planet livable for everybody? Why do you show so little regard for humankind?

You sure are getting hot under the collar from that 1/2 of a degree increase in average ambient temperature.

Did you get athletes foot or something from the soggy planet's 1/2 an inch higher sea levels?

If we would return to pre-stone-age living we could really cut out carbon footprint. Of course deaths from dysentery would be a bitch.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Paul Krugman explains what happened.

But Russia’s difficulties are disproportionate to the size of the shock: While oil has indeed plunged, the ruble has plunged even more, and the damage to the Russian economy reaches far beyond the oil sector. Why?

Actually, it’s not a puzzle — and this is, in fact, a movie currency-crisis aficionados like yours truly have seen many times before: Argentina 2002, Indonesia 1998, Mexico 1995, Chile 1982, the list goes on. The kind of crisis Russia now faces is what you get when bad things happen to an economy made vulnerable by large-scale borrowing from abroad — specifically, large-scale borrowing by the private sector, with the debts denominated in foreign currency, not the currency of the debtor country.

In that situation, an adverse shock like a fall in exports can start a vicious downward spiral. When the nation’s currency falls, the balance sheets of local businesses — which have assets in rubles (or pesos or rupiah) but debts in dollars or euros — implode. This, in turn, inflicts severe damage on the domestic economy, undermining confidence and depressing the currency even more. And Russia fits the standard playbook.

Except for one thing. Usually, the way a country ends up with a lot of foreign debt is by running trade deficits, using borrowed funds to pay for imports. But Russia hasn’t run trade deficits. On the contrary, it has consistently run large trade surpluses, thanks to high oil prices. So why did it borrow so much money, and where did the money go?

Well, you can answer the second question by walking around Mayfair in London, or (to a lesser extent) Manhattan’s Upper East Side, especially in the evening, and observing the long rows of luxury residences with no lights on — residences owned, as the line goes, by Chinese princelings, Middle Eastern sheikhs, and Russian oligarchs. Basically, Russia’s elite has been accumulating assets outside the country — luxury real estate is only the most visible example — and the flip side of that accumulation has been rising debt at home.

Where does the elite get that kind of money? The answer, of course, is that Putin’s Russia is an extreme version of crony capitalism, indeed, a kleptocracy in which loyalists get to skim off vast sums for their personal use. It all looked sustainable as long as oil prices stayed high. But now the bubble has burst, and the very corruption that sustained the Putin regime has left Russia in dire straits.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Finally someone honest enough to admit that the administrations policy according to its own stated ideology should be to impede oil production.

No, that's my position, not the Admin's.

 

[miles]

Russia Defends Ruble With Biggest Rate Rise Since 1998
By Olga Tanas and Anna Andrianova Dec 15, 2014 4:38 PM PT

In a surprise announcement just before 1 a.m. in Moscow, the Russian central bank said it would raise its key interest rate to 17 percent from 10.5 percent, effective today. The move was the largest single increase since 1998, when Russian rates soared past 100 percent and the government defaulted on debt.

The news prompted an immediate gain in the ruble, with one-month ruble forwards up 1.6 percent in Asian trading.

Yet the announcement, as well as its timing, underscored the financial straits in which Russia now finds itself. If sustained, the new higher rates would squeeze an economy that is already being hurt by sanctions led by the U.S. and European Union, and by a collapse in oil prices. Some analysts said they doubted the economy could withstand such high rates for long.

The rest here:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-...nterest-rate-to-17-to-stem-ruble-decline.html

Putin must be getting economic advice from Jimmy Carter.

 

[phrodeau]

You sure are getting hot under the collar from that 1/2 of a degree increase in average ambient temperature.

Did you get athletes foot or something from the soggy planet's 1/2 an inch higher sea levels?

If we would return to pre-stone-age living we could really cut out carbon footprint. Of course deaths from dysentery would be a bitch.

Gas stations don't prevent dysentery; quite the opposite.

 

[Que]

Gas stations don't prevent dysentery; quite the opposite.

Fossil fuels power water filtration plants and the boiling of water unless of course like the other day you want to explain again how deforestation is preferable to fossil fuels because it grows back quicker.

 

[phrodeau]

Fossil fuels power water filtration plants and the boiling of water unless of course like the other day you want to explain again how deforestation is preferable to fossil fuels because it grows back quicker.

If you need a basic education on the carbon cycle, there are plenty of resources out there.

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

Putin must be getting economic advice from Jimmy Carter.

You have no idea what the fuck you're talking about, as usual.

Carter's appointee, Paul Volcker, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board intentionally put the country into a recession to combat inflation that had been increasing steadily for the prior 15 years driven by instability in the Middle East and OPEC. Once the threat of inflation abated in late 1982, Volcker cut interest rates and flooded the economy with money, and fueled an expansion that lasted seven years. This is what conservatives call "the Seven Fat Years" or "the longest economic expansion in peacetime history."

They mistakenly attribute this recovery to Reagan, who had nothing to do with it. Reagan sat back as Volker (Yes, the Carter appointee) completed the plan started during the Carter administration. Reagan's tax cuts in 1981 very nearly fucked the entire thing up, as evidenced by the second recession that followed closely behind those cuts.

 

[Que]

If you need a basic education on the carbon cycle, there are plenty of resources out there.

If you need a basic education on water-borne diseases and water purification there are plenty of resources out there...

Explain again how it is that cutting down a tree that removes carbon from the air is less harmful to the earth than harvesting the exact same amount of therms from fossil fuel.

Taking a condescending tone is sort of like taking a condescending tone and having a point except the having a point part.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Explain again how it is that cutting down a tree that removes carbon from the air is less harmful to the earth than harvesting the exact same amount of therms from fossil fuel.

The tree will be replaced in a geological-time eyeblink. But burning the fossil fuel adds CO2 to the air that has been sequestered in the ground for hundreds of millions of years, and it's not so easy to get it out of the air again.