Ukraine Always Get What You Want

Thursday was the first day that every number on the price board was above $5.00. The lowest number is always "CASH REGULAR." Bought last night at ARCO -- "CREDIT REGULAR" was $5.25.9.

 

This from a global finance correspondent at the FT. Corroboration is difficult since these reports don't appear to be made public and BCA Research is only nominally on social media, but this report has shown up on Bloomberg, too. I leave it to more finance-minded people to decide whether this is serious analysis or a thinly veiled attempt to go viral.

 

Buy the EMPs.

But yeah, if you are that panicked you need to go long on canned goods and shotgun shells.

 

Too slow. That's my first thought. By the time sanctions collapse the Russian economy, Ukraine might already be lost. Whether we admit it or not, we're in a race with Putin. He'll just escalate as necessary. Here's this morning's New York Times front page:





My second is that sanctions alone historically don't work. (Blockades do, but at a terrible cost to civilians. And probably impossible in this case.)

Third, for economic sanctions and their impact to work, the targeted leader has to be concerned about his citizens and his political standing with the public and the world. That doesn't sound like Putin. He's a mob boss, and he's long since gone to the mattresses.

Which leads me to this quote from that Atlantic piece:

Maybe the sanctions will work, by driving Putin to the negotiating table. Or maybe they will make him feel cornered and cause him to lash out in a catastrophic way—committing suicide for fear of death, as Otto von Bismarck put it.

So I'm not sure sanctions alone - sanctions without a corresponding increase in military readiness - work in this case.

 

We went from $3.49 to $3.59 earlier this week. Friday was $3.79 and yesterday was $.3.99. I suspect we'll be kissing $5 by next weekend.

American oil companies have not ramped up production post pandemic, if what I read is accurate, and are moving slightly fewer barrels of oil per day than they were in 2020 to boost profits. If true, and they're still not ramping up, someone needs to ask why.

 

That Americans are already expressing concern over rising gas prices, as this thread demonstrates, is also bad news for Ukraine.

 

As of Friday:

• Gas at a local independent was $3.799.
• At the BP down the street it was $4.099.
• At the Mobil down the street from that it was $4.399.

 

Do you drive a car daily? I don’t ask this as a gotcha, just to remind you it’s not moral horror that we’re talking about a product we use every day, one that is not an insignificant part of our budget. I’m willing to bear a high cost in this fight, but I’m interested in where the numbers are going and how fast.

Wish I’d gotten that plug-in earlier…

 

You can not ramp up oil production in a week. As for the longer term American oil companies have not returned made much money on the the investments they have made the last ten years in American oil production. Shareholders have been putting pressure on oil company managements to cut down on domestic drilling. It will take more than atwo weeks tog et aht turned around.

 

I don't.

Nor am I knocking people who do. We built a car culture in this country and people depend on them .

But people's resolve to defend Ukraine will flag pretty quickly in the face of fast-rising gas prices here. Whether those gas prices are connected to Russia or sanctions or not. If people think they are, they are.

Presumably it's one of the things Putin is counting on.

It's his way of sanctioning us.

 

Addendum to my earlier post about gas prices:
It was actually yesterday (Saturday) morning about 8 a.m. that I paid $3.49.
I drove past the same station this morning (Sunday) about 7 a.m., and it was $3.78.