Good Morning, North Dakota! January 20, 2022

Okay: today's offer. A free lifelong subscription to the blog to whomever sends me a photograph of the Green Giant Hamburgers restaurant in Williston, ND, back in the day. Or any verifiable information regarding same even if no photograph.  Later: wow, wow, wow -- less than an hour later a reader sent me this photo -- it was not the "Green Giant" but the "Jolly Giant." Fantastic, and the reader earns a lifelong subscription to the blog. Thank you so much. I can now die happy knowing another riddle has been solved. LOL.  

From the reader: It was the Jolly Giant and was the hangout for school kids. About a block away from the High School. We now own the building and I'd give almost anything to find the sign!

Legacy Fund: data should be released today. Link here. 

Monthly EIA petroleum report: pending. Will be released at 10:00 a.m. CT.

UNP  results coming up: whoo-hoo. UNP is up $5.61 in early morning trading. Up 2.4%. Trading at $245.

• 4% rise in quarterly profits;
• most profitable year ever;
• record year at all levels
• fifth consecutive year of margin improvement
• pricing environment should continue against really, really truck capacity:
• west coast ports: more trucks and more warehousing labor still needed
• port volumes at record level but international intermodal volume was down year/year; bottlenecks at ports
• domestic intermodal system: doing very, very well; recent partnership with Schneider (have to look this up; didn't know)
  
• but:
• carload volumes under pressure; supply change challenges
• inflation very much in focus
• strong pricing environment for UNP will likely continue through 2022
• rail theft in Los Angeles County 
• stopped vaccine mandates; will improve labor issues for UNP
  

F: handily outperforms all other auto makers in past twelve months, but will have worst week -- this week -- since 2020. This tells me more about the other auto makers than about Ford. If Ford is having a tough week, imagine all the others. "Since 2020." Wow. I remember when we used to say "worst week since 1929; now things are moving so quickly, we only go back one year. Millennials. The quicker picker uppers.

Good morning: wow, I'm in a great mood! Out school district is shut down -- completely -- except for soccer. The soccer tournament will go on as planned despite the district shut down completely -- 100% -- shut down -- it's like a snow day -- for a four-day weekend, but there's no snow. None. Nada. De nada. Covid hit a tipping point. Nothing else to do but shut down operations. Primary vaccinations didn't stop it. Boosters didn't stop it. Masks didn't stop it. Social distancing didn't stop it. Boris Johnson has it right.

Herd immunity: "we" were all wrong on this one. I completely missed it as did "everyone" else. The exception of course: my readers will all tell me they did not miss this. Smartest readers in the universe. Eighty percent immunity in this country does not reach "herd immunity" unless the entire world is at 80% herd immunity. The world isn't even close. The current variant, thankfully, may change all that.

Texas sports: I've always said Texans were serious about their sports and they are. The entire school district is shut down but the soccer tournament will go on as scheduled.

Biden: did incredibly well yesterday, by any standard. Seriously.

Investors: I have a page tabbed for investors. Just saying. This page is not meant for readers. This page is for my use only. I have a terrible memory and I'm hoping this page will help. But everything there is for my benefit. I'm asking readers not to bookmark that page or even visit it on a random basis. 

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site.  Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here.

Housing inventories: in the US at an all-time low? I think that's what I heard. Sales going forward will drop as interest rates rise. 

Corky is a Suidae, a "swede, not a norske": a reader asked if any javelinas were invited to Corky's wine tasting event last night. Corky wants to remind folks that javelinas are not in her family. Corky was quite upset that someone thought javelinas were part of her family. She got up at midnight last night to remind me:

Javelina (pronounced have-a-LEEN-a) is the common name for the collared peccary. ... While peccaries resemble pigs, they are not pigs. Instead, they are part of the Tayassuidae family, while pigs belong to the family Suidae. Many physical characteristics distinguish the two families of animals.

"Tayas" is short for "looks like a..."

5G airlines = Y2K for millenials. There is a two-mile 5G buffer zone around all airports. This goes back to the Trump administration. Has nothing to do with Biden. Just the facts, ma'am. FTC / FAA / airlines / telecom weren't talking. Just in their own stovepipes. Remember "stovepipes?" Haven't used that word in decades. 

Oil: there are three things you need to know about oil -- link here --

• what we have in storage is running out fast;
• we aren't pumping enough to replace it;
• demand is going ballistic;
  

Takeaway? "Any dips will be temporary. Oil is going to all-time highs." I seriously doubt that. But I like the narrative. LOL. 

Saudi perspective: but having said that, look at this. Despite very high crude oil prices, Saudi doesn't have the crude oil available to take advantage of this windfall. They could sell a whole lot more if they had a whole lot more to sell -- releasing a lot more of their oil in storage on the market would drop the price of oil a bit but not much -- but yet Saudi doesn't have the oil to sell. 

Saudi crude oil in storage dropped again month/month. Currently, Saudi crude oil storage is less than half what it was in 2016. I don't know if folks remember, but Saudi flooded the market with oil, 2014 - 2016 -- their trillion-dollar mistake -- and has never recovered. What were they thinking? Whatever. 

By the way, all things being equal, Saudi's oil in storage will continue to drop. Saudi is now refining more and more oil:

• first, of all: Saudi is now building heating oil inventories in anticipation of a very, very hot summer (this is true every year):
• second, Saudi now has a huge refinery in Poland; this was a big, big story; under-reported here in the states. As usual.