All Posts Tagged With: "oil prices"
Economy Said to Be at Risk from Oil Prices
“If the recent rise in oil prices sticks, it will most likely slow a growth rate that is already too sluggish to produce many jobs in this country.” (New York Times) The best energy policy is no energy policy. FEE Timely Classic “Energy Policy: Wisdom or Waste?” by Roger McKinney
25Feb2011 | Foundation for Economic Education | 0 comments | ContinuedOil Price Still Rising
“Stocks fell for a second straight day Wednesday after clashes in Libya sent oil prices to two-year highs….” (Washington Post) Freeing the market is the best way to create security. FEE Timely Classic “A Free-Market Energy Vision” by Robert L. Bradley Jr.
24Feb2011 | Foundation for Economic Education | 0 comments | ContinuedOil Prices Are Rigged? It Just Ain’t So!
In reality, all prices are determined by supply and demand, properly defined. Outside investors with lots of money can certainly influence prices, but there are always risks. Funds that had large “long” bets on commodities took a bath as oil fell from its July 2008 high of $145 down to well below $50 a few months later. Futures markets allow producers and consumers to hedge against needless risk by locking in prices, and they allow speculators with superior foresight to improve the allocation of resources over time. Our Time authors think they’ve shown that the oil market is rigged, but it just ain’t so!
21May2009 | Robert P. Murphy | 2 comments | ContinuedDeflation: The Bogeyman of Bankers and Confused Economists
Excellent article on this currently popular topic from the FEE vault: The Dreaded D Word by Christopher Mayer
15Dec2008 | Mason Drake | 0 comments | ContinuedBless the Speculators
“I believe there needs to be a thorough and complete investigation of speculators to find out whether speculation has been going on and, if so, how much it has affected the price of a barrel of oil. There’s a lot of things out there that need a lot more transparency and, consequently, oversight.” Those are [...]
1Nov2008 | John Stossel | 1 comment | ContinuedPoliticians Eye the Oil Market
With oil prices setting records every week and gas prices topping $4 per gallon, voters are getting increasingly angry. This naturally makes the politicians nervous, so they do what they can to divert blame from themselves at all costs. Two easy targets are “Big Oil” and speculators. In this article we’ll see that the politicians’ [...]
1Oct2008 | Robert P. Murphy | 1 comment | ContinuedSomething Besides Money Growth Causes Inflation?
Howard Baetjer, Jr., is a lecturer in economics at Towson University. Some economic phenomena can result from a variety of causes. A temporary increase in unemployment, for example, might be caused by a sudden, disruptive change in production technology, or in trade patterns, or in labor or tax laws; or it could be caused by [...]
1Jul2007 | Howard Baetjer Jr. | 7 comments | ContinuedEnergy Policy: Wisdom or Waste?
Roger McKinney (rdmckinney@cox.net) is senior analyst for a quasigovernmental health-care agency in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We can’t help ourselves. Americans crave the black gold that pulses through the concrete arteries of our nation’s transportation system. In the opinion of many, we have hocked our future for a cheap fix with a drug that abandons our nation [...]
1May2007 | Roger McKinney | 5 comments | ContinuedWe Need a Stiff Oil Tax?
In an article last fall in the Washington Post, one of my favorite economic journalists, Robert J. Samuelson, argued for “a stiff oil tax” and “stricter fuel economy standards” (September 14, 2005). His rationale for this increased government intervention is that “we are vulnerable to any major cutoff of oil.” We can reduce our vulnerability, [...]
1Mar2006 | David R. Henderson | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Great Horse-Manure Crisis of 1894
We commonly read or hear reports to the effect that “If trend X continues, the result will be disaster.” The subject can be almost anything, but the pattern of these stories is identical. These reports take a current trend and extrapolate it into the future as the basis for their gloomy prognostications. The conclusion is, [...]
1Sep2004 | Stephen Davies | 78 comments | ContinuedOPEC Sells Us Oil Because It Likes Us?
Jerry Taylor is Director of Natural Resource Studies at the Cato Institute. Slavish devotion to common but wrong-headed ideas about economics is never more in need of exposure than when the subject is oil and the Persian Gulf. Here wrong-headed ideas about economics can get someone killed. But there they were on full display last [...]
1May2003 | Jerry Taylor | 0 comments | ContinuedTerrorism: The Price of Bad Energy Economics?
Fear of losing access to Saudi oil prompted the U.S. government to intervene in the Persian Gulf a decade ago, to maintain troops in Saudi Arabia ever since, to ignore Riyadh’s role in underwriting terrorism even after September 11, and to confront Iraq again. In short, America has been paying a high price for its [...]
1Mar2003 | Doug Bandow | 0 comments | ContinuedPower to the People?
Michael Lynch is a research affiliate with the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In his piece “The Power to Change the World: A Hydrogen-Based System Replacing Our Reliance on Oil Would Revolutionize Society” (Los Angeles Times, September 2, 2002), political activist Jeremy Rifkin lays out an argument for switching to [...]
1Jan2003 | Michael C. Lynch | 0 comments | ContinuedRising Oil Prices Create Inflation?
With oil prices rising rapidly and the euro and the Australian dollar declining sharply (to name only two currencies to fall persistently), it appears that a rough road is ahead for the world’s economies. Perhaps the biggest concern for those countries which import oil is that a new wave of inflation will sweep over them. [...]
1Apr2001 | Christopher Lingle | 0 comments | ContinuedHigh Gasoline Prices Are Your Fault?
Who should be blamed for the high oil and gasoline prices? OPEC? The oil companies? The government? According to the New York Times’s Floyd Norris, if you chose any of those you would be wrong. Writing on June 23, Mr. Norris places all the blame for the current “energy crisis,” as he calls it, squarely [...]
1Nov2000 | Roy Cordato | 0 comments | ContinuedPaper Tiger
Christopher Mayer, a commercial loan officer, is studying for an MBA at the University of Maryland. Gadflies have long been predicting the exhaustion of critical natural resources—especially oil. Despite the doomsaying, a barrel of oil is cheaper today than a pair of movie tickets. As Daniel Yergin pointed out in a recent editorial in the [...]
1Apr1999 | Christopher Mayer | 1 comment | ContinuedShould There Be a Carbon Subsidy?
The Clinton administration has committed the United States to a massive reduction in the use of energy. That is the implication of its signing the United Nations Global Climate Treaty in Kyoto, Japan. If the Senate approves, we will have to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions drastically CO2 is emitted naturally, of course, by everything [...]
1Jul1998 | Roy Cordato | 0 comments | Continued-
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