The Market, Energy, And Political Page, T+ 50 -- October 2, 2018

Updates

Later, 9:17 a.m. CDT:  see earlier note below regarding Tesla. From Yahoo!Finance:

Tesla Inc announced record quarterly car production numbers on Tuesday but warned it was facing major problems with selling cars in China due to new tariffs that will force it to accelerate investment in its factory in Shanghai.

The California-based electric carmaker, emerging from several months of turmoil around its Chief Executive Elon Musk, confirmed numbers leaked to an industry news site on Monday that showed it produced roughly 80,000 cars in the third quarter.

Deliveries reached a record 83,500, above Wall Street estimates of 80,000 and including almost 56,000 of the Model 3 sedan whose ramp-up is widely seen as crucial to the company's drive to become profitable.

TSLA is down 1.6% in early trading.

Original Post

 
Pre-market trading:

• Dow (irrelevant): down 55 points [in early trading turned positive but looks very, very mixed and unsettled today]
• WTI: flat to slightly positive
• NOG: up 7% yesterday; up another 3% in pre-market trading today
• OAS: up about half a percent yesterday; up about a percent today
• CVX: moving nicely
• COP: down almost a percent today -- interesting
• TSLA: slightly positive today after a huge day yesterday
• GE: really, really irrelevant; up 2% in pre-market trading

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False Precision

Earlier I posted:

Nothing to worry about -- Bloomberg -- Iranian sanctions will take, on a daily basis, 1.5 million barrels of the right kind of oil off the market, but OPEC is already pushing production -- 30,000 bbls  more than the month before ... 

Here's the lede to that Bloomberg story --

OPEC production rose last month as deepening losses in Iran due to looming U.S. sanctions were countered by other members.

The group’s 15 nations pumped 32.83 million barrels a day in September, 30,000 more than the month before, according to a Bloomberg survey of officials, analysts and ship-tracking data. Even though Iranian production fell by 140,000 barrels a day to 3.36 million -- the lowest since early 2016 -- Saudi Arabia, Angola and Libya offset the losses.

Iran’s decline is expected to accelerate once sanctions formally begin in November. Major buyers of the country’s crude have already started to diversify their supplies. India was said to plan no purchases of Iranian crude in November, according to officials at the largest state-run refiners. That followed similar moves by South Korea and Japan.

The Middle Eastern nation’s shipments of crude have fallen 1.1 million barrels a day, or 39 percent, since April, according to tanker tracking data compiled by Bloomberg. That outpaces the 11 percent drop in production over the same period. The tracked shipments exclude volumes held on tankers that remain close to Iran’s export terminals, after the nation resorted to storing some of its barrels at sea last month.

30,000 bopd. Give me a break. First of all, that's an estimate .. a Bloomberg survey of officials, analysts and ship-tracking data.

Oilprice, citing another source, said OPEC had increased production by 90,000 bbls month-over-month; feeble rise led to huge surge in WTI.

30,000 bbls: that's about one-half of a unit train. About 40 railroad tankers. DOT-111 tank cars.

VLCC can carry two million bbls of oil. 30,000 bbls is 1.5% of two million.

Total global supply / demand: 100 million bbls.
 

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Turkey: Taking A Page From The Venezuelan Playbook

Erdogan urges Turks to report price hikes; says government will raid stores. From Reuters.

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Miscellaneous

San Francisco: best gasoline prices in paradise -- $3.50 -- GasBuddy.

Car sales: will come out today. Apparently Tesla deliveries will blow the socks off doubters. Don't know where I read that. Maybe it was a dream. EV plug-in sales scorecard here.

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The History Page

So, here we are again, Richard III of England.

From David Horspool's 2015 biography of Richard III.

We begin here: Richard III is king. He has most likely killed his nephews imprisoned in the tower -- the two sons of Edward IV -- to preclude any possibility one or the other should escape, and try to take back the crown. It is dark comedy to read apologists of Richard III to suggest there is no proof he harmed the two teenagers.

So, half of England supports Richard III, and half the country detests him. Those that detest him find common cause in having supported Edward IV and his sons. But they need a figure to rally around.

That figure is another Henry: Henry, Earl of Richmond.

Henry, Early of Richmond had not even been in England for the past twelve years. He was self-exiled in Brittany (northern France) for twelve years. Wow, twelve years.

It was truly amazing how flimsy his ties were to the throne.

We have to go all the way back to Henry VI.

Henry VI had a half-brother who died before Henry was even born.

That half-brother was Edmund Tudor -- this would be the patriarch, as it were, of the famous Tudor line, which most famously included Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth I. Edmund Tudor was the first early of Richmond.

So, we have this half-brother of Henry VI, Henry Tudor, who married Margaret Beaufort.

Margaret Beaufort was one of the handful of very powerful women at this time.

By the time Richard III had become Kind of England, Margaret Beaufort was re-married, to Lord Stanley.

Margaret Beaufort was a descendant of John Gaunt, the fourth son of Edward III -- pretty low on the list --fourth son -- and not only that, but by Edward III's mistress Katherine Swynford, whom Gaunt married only after their four children had been born.

The four bastards were "legitimated" in 1396-97 by Henry IV but it was only on the condition they were not in line of succession.

But the anti-Richard III folks were so desperate for anyone, they had little choice.

It helped their cause a bit when Henry, the second earl of Richmond who had been self-exiled in across the channel for twelve years said he would marry Edward's oldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, who was still in sanctuary with her mother in Westminster.

This illegitimate man (on so many levels), Henry Tudor and his wife Elizabeth of York eventually produced:

• Arthur, prince of Wales
• Margaret, Queen of Scots
• Henry VIII, kind of England 
• Mary, Queen of France

Not bad for an adulteress and a bastard father.

Elizabeth of York, the first Tudor queen and wife of Henry VII, herself had quite a pedigree and quite a story:

she was the daughter of Edward IV and niece of Richard III, and she married Henry in 1485, following the latter's victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field, which started the last phase of the Wars of the Roses. Together, she and Henry had a total of four sons, three of whom died before their father, leaving their brother, Henry VIII, to succeed his father as king

She was the sister of the two princes who disappeared, no doubt killed by Richard III:

The period of Henry VI's Readeption from October 1470 until April 1471 and the period between her father's death in 1483, when she was 17, and the making of peace between her mother and her uncle Richard were violent and anxious interludes in what was mostly a peaceful life. Her two brothers, the so-called "Princes in the Tower", disappeared, their fate uncertain.

Although declared illegitimate (her mother was Elizabeth Woodville) she was welcomed back to court by her uncle Richard III, along with all of her sisters.

As a Yorkist princess, the final victory of the Lancastrian faction in the War of the Roses may have seemed a further disaster, but Henry Tudor knew the importance of Yorkist support for his invasion and promised to marry her before he arrived in England; this was an important move; one which may well have contributed to hemorrhaging of Yorkist adherence to Richard III.  

 Note: "final victory of the Lancastrian faction" -- this was the penultimate battle of the War of Roses; the final battle was won by the Yorkists.

Enough for now.