Oil prices have risen about 2% this week on Middle East tensions. If the rhetoric from Washington cools, oil prices could pull back at least $2 a barrel, Kilduff said.
President Trump’s fear of Joe Biden seems well-founded, especially since Biden is now favored to move into the White House in 2021, by some estimates. “With Trump facing an unlikely reelection, this means it is most likely at this point Joe Biden will win the general election in November,” Washington, DC research firm Sandhill Strategies predicted in a March 16 analysis. The coronavirus outbreak has triggered a bear market in stocks and a likely recession , which is a death sentence for presidential reelection hopes. “No U.S. President has won reelection in recent history after a period of economic downturn,” Sandhill points out. Biden hasn’t officially clinched the Democratic presidential nomination yet. But that seems inevitable, barring an unforeseen turn in the race. He handily leads Bernie Sanders in the delegate count , and Sanders himself seems to be tacitly acknowledging his inevitable dropout. Recessions are funny things, because economists only declare them months afte...
So, what has caused oil to fall this severely in the first place? The excessive supply of oil has likely been the main reason for the big drop in its price. The glut first started to build in the US because of the shale revolution there. Companies sold their oil cheaper, causing the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to lose market share. Traditionally, the OPEC had acted as a swing producer; it would cut its oil supply if prices fell sharply and increase production if prices rose meaningfully, as it attempted to keep oil relatively stable at a comfortable level. This strategy had served the oil cartel well in the past – especially its largest member, Saudi Arabia. However, with shale oil booming, the OPEC could no longer control the market like before. If the cartel cut its oil output, the US and other shale producers would simply fill the void and increase their market share by selling oil cheaper. Therefore, in November 2014, Saudi Arabia resisted calls from poor...
Ben Bernanke, former Federal Reserve chief, prompted the ‘taper tantrum’ when he hinted at reducing bond purchases // A paradox has emerged in the financial markets of the advanced economies since the 2008 global financial crisis. Unconventional monetary policies have created a massive overhang of liquidity. But a series of recent shocks suggests that macro liquidity has become linked with severe market illiquidity . Policy interest rates are near zero (and sometimes below it) in most advanced economies, and the monetary base (money created by central banks in the form of cash and liquid commercial-bank reserves) has soared – doubling, tripling, and, in the US, quadrupling relative to the pre-crisis period. This has kept short- and long-term interest rates low (and even negative in some cases, such as Europe and Japan), reduced the volatility of bond markets, and lifted many asset prices (including equities, real estate, and fixed-income private- and public-sector bonds). And...
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