Thursday of this past week saw the release of OPEC's April Oil Market Report, which gives us a picture of the global oil supply & demand situation in March, after the breakdown of OPECs agreement to cut oil production in the first quarter, when Saudi and its allies were engaged in an oil price war against the Russians and US shale, but before last week's agreement to cut production by 9.7 million barrels a day.
The unemployment rate has skyrocketed to 14.7%. That is a 10.3 percentage point jump in a month and a record since the government has been keeping labor statistics, 1948. While the jump is directly attributable to the Coronavirus, the decline in jobs is across the board. Worse, the damage from Covad-19 is starting to be permanent. It's so bad the graphs cannot adequately display the unemployment horror due to the scale.
This week we're going to review OPEC's August Oil Market Report (covering July OPEC & global oil data). As you’ll see, it shows there was a large shortfall in the amount of oil produced in July, a story that doesn’t seem to be being told elsewhere, as even the analysts don’t read the entire report (100+ pages)
The Durable Goods advance report shows the impact Covad-19 is starting to have on the economy. New orders dropped by -14.4% as transportation orders plunged 41% in a month. Shipments also were negative with a -4.5% drop. The airline industry is obviously decimated as the nondefense new orders for aircraft and parts sank by a whopping -295.7%!
Since the media largely missed what the data from OPEC's February Oil Market Report (covering January OPEC & global oil data) actually showed, and since Saudi jawboning about oil supply and demand in advance of the Aramco IPO has been keyed to keeping oil prices higher, we'll take a quick look at that report, which is available as a free download.
The cold week that we saw at the beginning of this month set quite a stunning record for US natural gas supplies, and put an exclamation point on our concerns about the natural gas that we're exporting. In the first week of the new year, the demand for natural gas was so great that we had to use nearly eleven and a half percent of all the natural gas that was in storage in the US, in addition to everything that was produced by US wells during the week, to meet the needs of heating, industry, power generation, and exports.
We’re going to start by reviewing OPEC's December Oil Market Report (covering November OPEC & global oil data), which was released on Wednesday of last week, and which is now available as a free download. The first table from this report that we'll look at is from page 64 of that OPEC pdf, and it shows oil production in thousands of barrels per day for each of the current OPEC members over the recent years, quarters and months, as the column headings indicate.
The March unemployment report is the first major visual onlsaught of a global pandemic consequences. From here it's only going to get worse as these results are from last month. The unemployment rate jumped from 3.5% to 4.4% over one month. That hasn't happened since 1975. Labor participation rate also plunged. If gets even worse.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) claims to be watchdogs over “hate groups and racial extremists throughout the United States.” However, some believe the SPLC is a radical left-wing organization itself, with an extremist agenda of its own.
The Third Estimate of our 3rd Quarter GDP from the Bureau of Economic Analysis indicated that our real output of goods and services increased at a 3.4% annual rate in the quarter, revised from the 3.5% growth rate reported in the second estimate last month, as growth in personal consumption, fixed investment, and exports were revised lower, even as the change in our inventories was a greater addition to GDP than in the 2nd estimate.
As I reported here the other day, the White House has endorsed an immigration reform bill by Sens. Cotton and Perdue, known as the RAISE Act. The bill seems to be already drawing both support and fierce opposition. CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta was so upset about the Trump administration’s endorsement of the bill that he picked a fight with Trump’s senior policy adviser Stephen Miller during the latter’s press conference.
The Advance Estimate of 2nd Quarter GDP from the Bureau of Economic Analysis released on Friday included changes in definitions, in classifications, and in the presentation of the components of GDP, as well as an annual and a comprehensive (or benchmark) revision of the national income and product accounts going back to 1929, ie, from the beginning of that measure of our economic history.
For 66 years the Glass-Steagall act reduced the risks in the banking system. Eight years after the act was repealed, the banking system blew up threatening the international economy. US taxpayers were forced to come up with $750 billion dollars, a sum much larger than the Pentagon’s budget, in order to bail out the banks. This huge sum was insufficient to do the job. The Federal Reserve had to step in and expand its balance sheet by $4 trillion in order to protect the solvency of banks declared “too big to fail.”
Construction spending fell 1.7% in March, after construction spending for both January and February were revised much higher. The Census Bureau's report on construction spending for March (pdf) estimated that the month's seasonally adjusted construction spending would work out to $1,284.7 billion annually if extrapolated over an entire year, which was 1.7 percent (±0.8%) below the revised annualized February estimate of $1,306.4 billion
Recent comments