August 3, 2015 -- Part IV; Saudi Imports; Muscle Cars, Jeeps, SUVs Are Back

Winners. July's auto sales:
Chrysler, Nissan: sales rise more than expected; Chrysler sales increase 6% on strength of Jeep
Ford: best July in nine years;

• total Ford Motor Company U.S. sales up 5 percent last month – its best July since 2006; retail sales up 5 percent;
• Ford F-Series has best July retail sales results in nine years, while still delivering record average transaction pricing; 
• Ford commercial vans post best July sales in 15 years;
• Ford brand SUV sales up 11 percent last month for best July sales performance in 10 years. sales of new Ford Explorer increase 27 percent, all-new Ford Edge up 17 percent, Ford Escape up 10 percent – an all-time July sales record;
• Fusion achieves best July ever; 
• Mustang has best July performance since 2008; and,
• Lincoln brand delivers best July sales results in a decade, driven by strong demand for its newest SUVs, which post best July sales since 2001

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Crude Oil 

Losers. Being reported by Reuters/John Kemp:

The biggest losers from the current price war between OPEC and the shale producers seem set to be producers outside the Middle East and North America caught in the cross-fire.

Expensive production from the North Sea, Canada's oil sands, offshore megaprojects, weaker African and Latin American members of OPEC, and frontier exploration areas around the world are all being squeezed hard by the price slump.

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OPEC Imports

I'm not sure when EIA first posted this data, but it's the most recent data available, for the month of May, 2015 (it was probably posted sometime in July).  Saudi oil imports into the US actually increased slightly month-over-month:

Note:

• huge increase in oil imports from Persian Gulf and OPEC between December, 2014, and May, 2015
• huge increase in oil imports from Saudi Arabia and Venezuela during same period
• Nigeria takes a big hit; Iraq stable

The plunge in oil prices began in October, 2014, with the announcement of the "oil share war" by Saudi Arabia. A quick glance of the spreadsheet at this site suggests historical imports of crude oil from Saudi Arabia ran about 45 million bbls for the month of May (compared to 38 million bbls in May, 2015). In other words, the comparison between December and May is not a good comparison but it is of some interest I suppose. The better comparisons can be made at the linked spreadsheet. However, comparing the imports by country is very enlightening.

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Book Corner

From Adam Kirsch's book review of Major Works On Religion and Politics, by Reinhold Niebuhr, edited by Elisabeth Sifton, in The New York Review of Books. 

This selection of Reinhold Niebuhr’s work, edited by his daughter Elisabeth Sifton, is the 263rd volume in the Library of America; and it is possible that the single sentence that appears on page 705 is known to more people, and has affected them more deeply, than anything else the library has ever published:

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

This is the original version of what has come to be known in many slight variations as the Serenity Prayer, under which name it can be found in millions of American homes in every medium imaginable—posters, refrigerator magnets, placemats, even tattoos (the Internet offers dozens of examples). Much of this popularity is owed to Alcoholics Anonymous, which adopted Niebuhr’s prayer as an official meditation.

Surely most of the people who have turned to the Serenity Prayer in times of trouble know little about the man who wrote it.

Niebuhr’s achievements as an intellectual, his influential contributions to public debate from the post–World War I years through the cold war and the civil rights movement, his reputation as a liberal thinker and activist, even his status as President Obama’s favorite theologian—these do nothing to cement the authority of the prayer, which stands on its own as a piece of seemingly timeless wisdom. Yet it is possible to read the whole of Niebuhr’s thought through the lens of the Serenity Prayer, which is a more complicated and challenging text than it may first appear.