Sixteen Reasons -- June 27, 2018

On June 13, 2018, I posted sixteen reasons why I thought the "tea leaves" were suggesting the price of oil would continue to rise.

Since then, a few more reasons could be added, including the "technical difficulties" in western Canada (posted earlier today) and the "technical difficulties in the Neutral Zone (posted yesterday).

Be that as it may, "crude oil" is at its highest in four years and it doesn't appear to be a fluke, or short-lived.

• WTI: $72.90; up almost 3.4%; up over $237/bbl
• LLS: $76.23; up about 0.75%; up about 60 cents/bbl -- this correlates closely with DAPL-Bakken
• Brent: $77.72; up about 2%; up about $1.60/bbl
• OPEC Basket: $72.69; up about 0.75%; up about 50 cents/bbl
• West Canadian Select: $47.53; up over 5.4%; up about $2.45/bbl

Gasoline demand: data has been released. Unremarkable. Almost identical demand one year ago. A reader suggested that "gasoline demand" data is based on the amount of gasoline delivered to service stations. That would make sense. Obviously no one is actually measuring individual purchases during the past week. If so, the data would lag a week or so what is actually occurring.

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A Most Impossible Job

From Max Boot's The Road Not Taken, page 363:

Being secretary of defense was, from the start, an almost impossible job. Although the National Security Act of 1947 had created this post to preside over the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps, it gave the officeholder scant power.

The first secretary of defense, the Wall Street banker and former Navy secretary James Forrestal, spent his tenure locked in internecine battles with the military services over their funding and missions. He left office in 1949 a broken man, suffering fro what psychiatrists diagnosed as the equivalent of combat fatigue. Just two months later, he jumped to his death from the window of the naval hospital where he was receiving psychiatric treatment.