Just a guess, for whatever it's worth:

Taking vacations and much of the normal summer driving people have done in years past is an elective use of fuel.

Heating a home is not. Neither is bringing in the harvest and keeping the supply of food and material we need to live, at the present time serviced by diesel powered vehicles.

Forecasts call for a cold winter.

The olympics is over; China is due to crank the machine up again.

If oil prices fall, it'll be due to deflation, meaning most of us won't have much money to buy the stuff with.

Whether the price of oil is higher or lower, we won't be using any more of it and probably will have to learn to get by on less.

I really doubt our economy is ready to take off. Still way too much unreconciled bad debt in the economy.

I did inhale.

What is both fascinating and terrifying is that it is just now dawning on many people without & within the financial industry and has not yet made adequate headlines is this: the S&P Bank Index (NYSE: BKX) is at the level it was in 1996 and the S&P500 itself is @ 1998 levels. Aside from the gargantuan issues of the housing and banking crises, which has foreclosures @ well over 7,000 a month nationally, credit card and automobile and personal and business loans are starting to show significant backing-up, late payments, and partial payments. The stretch is on....

This means that as the mainstream media awakens, they carry debate on whether the current climate is "as bad as the 1970's' with many alleged experts saying 'no way'. Well, the Dow peaked above 1,000 in 1973 and went into a major funk until late August 1982 (@ the 776 level), but that lasted roughly 9 years. The S&P500 is now in its TENTH year of going nowhere and anyone with any assets in the financial markets is roughly back to 2006 levels (including dividends/interest on their little piles). So, depending on what measure one uses to determine how "we're doing", two years of making money, saving (or investing), and an average investor has spun their wheels for over two years with nothing to show for it. Toss in the loss of appraised value in one's home and more to the point, real street-level inflation of at least 8-12% and even the investor class is 10-30% under water just since 2005. Trying to square this kind of monumental loss of net worth with the headline news (such as these little snippets) is mind-boggling. Mass denial? Official Lies? People struggling to keep from falling backwards any faster? The candidates are in a bubble of doing what nominees have always done. But, if they were firmly based in reality, they would be putting major FDR-like proposals on the table. How often do we hear that Iraq was, is, and will continue to be unaffordable in light of an economy that has in fact exceeded almost all aspects of the dreaded 1970's stagflation? The name of the game if this keeps, as it is likely to do (if not get worse) will be: how long will it be before the economy starts creating wealth again for average people? 2015? 2018?

I'd heard that there is a deadline for the US banks to get their books in order and that deadline is about August 29th - and could this trigger another meltdown?

I got this from Christopher Story and WorldReports.org - he seems to be a kind out there sort of theory. Sort of "vicious elites fighting behind the scenes" with the original twist of "the Soviet agenda is still unfolding, and also an evil German secret agency led by GHW Bush is manipulating world events. etc." But what do you guys make of it? The dude has a ton of really expensive periodicals, yet i havent much heard of him at all otherwise.

And he's convinced that Leo Wanta - an old Reagan financial operative - was sitting on billions from bankrupting the Soviet Union, but now the elite cliques won't pay out to Putin. Or something... What is all this about?
http://worldreports.org/news

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Hongpong.com