Fears Of #Iran Conflict Send #Oil Prices Higher

There is no doubt that a severe disruption to the transit of oil through this vulnerable route would be extremely serious,” said consultancy FGE Energy in a note.

U.S. oil soars 10% in week on fears of U.S.-Iran conflict

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil futures rose 1% on Friday, with U.S. crude up 10% in the week and global benchmark Brent gaining 5%, on fears the United States could attack Iran and disrupt flows from the Middle East, which provides more than a fifth of the world’s oil output.

U.S. gasoline futures, meanwhile, jumped around 4% following a massive fire at Philadelphia Energy Solutions’ refinery in Philadelphia, the largest on the U.S. East Coast.

“The heightening of tensions between the United States and Iran has evolved as primary price motivator in spiking oil values,” Jim Ritterbusch of Ritterbusch and Associates said in a note.

While the rise in U.S.-Iranian tensions has largely driven the crude price gains, analysts said an early July meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its allies to reassess production targets, a potential softening of trade tensions between the United States and China and the refinery fire were also supporting prices.

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POSSIBLE IMPACTS

#Oil Demand Slows, #Global Trade War Tensions Mount

"Surging U.S. supply as well as gains from Brazil, Canada and Norway would contribute to an increase in non-OPEC supply of 1.9 million bpd this year and 2.3 million bpd in 2020" 

 

IEA cuts 2019 estimate for oil demand growth on global trade worries

 Noah Browning

 LONDON (Reuters) - The outlook for oil demand growth in 2019 has dimmed due to worsening prospects for world trade, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Friday, although stimulus packages and developing countries should boost growth going into 2020. 

The Paris-based IEA, which coordinates the energy policies of industrial nations, revised down its 2019 demand growth estimate by 100,000 barrels to 1.2 million barrels per day (bpd), but said it would climb to 1.4 million bpd for 2020. 

“The main focus is on oil demand as economic sentiment weakens ... The consequences for oil demand are becoming apparent,” the IEA said in its monthly oil report. 

“The worsening trade outlook (is) a common theme across all regions”, it added. 

 

The oil demand growth forecast assumes the maintenance of U.S. and Chinese tariffs imposed on goods in 2018, but the IEA said it had not factored in further U.S. tariffs announced in May.

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TRADE WAR ESCALATES!

 

Ultimately REAL PHYSICAL #Economic #Growth Stops, And Then...

"What economists around the world get wrong about the future."

THE FALLACY OF ENDLESS ECONOMIC GROWTH

By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

The idea that economic growth can continue forever on a finite planet is the unifying faith of industrial civilization. That it is nonsensical in the extreme, a deluded fantasy, doesn't appear to bother us. We hear the holy truth in the decrees of elected officials, in the laments of economists about flagging GDP, in the authoritative pages of opinion, in the whirligig of advertising, at the World Bank and on Wall Street, in the prospectuses of globe-spanning corporations and in the halls of the smallest small-town chambers of commerce. Growth is sacrosanct. Growth will bring jobs and income, which allow us entry into the state of grace known as affluence, which permits us to consume more, providing more jobs for more people producing more goods and services so that the all-mighty economy can continue to grow. "Growth is our idol, our golden calf," Herman Daly, an economist known for his anti-growth heresies, told me recently.

INVISIBLE GENOCIDE: FALLACY OF ECONOMIC GROWTH 

In the United States, the religion is expressed most avidly in the cult of the American Dream. The gatekeepers of the faith happen to not only be American: The Dream is now, and has long been, a pandemic disorder. Growth is a moral imperative in the developing world, we are told, because it will free the global poor from deprivation and disease. It will enrich and educate the women of the world, reducing birth rates. It will provide us the means to pay for environmental remediation—to clean up what so-called economic progress has despoiled. It will lift all boats, making us all rich, healthy, happy. East and West, Asia and Europe, communist and capitalist, big business and big labor, Nazi and neoliberal, the governments of just about every modern nation on Earth: All have espoused the mad growthist creed.

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WHY DON'T WE APPLY EXPONENTIALS TO OUR EXISTENTIAL LIMITS?