WTI Inventory Up

USEIA (January 22, 2021):

U.S. crude oil refinery inputs averaged 14.8 million barrels per day during the week ending January 15, 2021 which was 110,000 barrels per day more than the previous week’s average. Refineries operated at 82.5% of their operable capacity last week. Gasoline production increased last week, averaging 8.9 million barrels per day. Distillate fuel production decreased last week, averaging 4.5 million barrels per day.

U.S. crude oil imports averaged 6.0 million barrels per day last week, down by 194,000 barrels per day from the previous week. Over the past four weeks, crude oil imports averaged about 5.7 million barrels per day, 11.8% less than the same four-week period last year. Total motor gasoline imports (including both finished gasoline and gasoline blending components) last week averaged 504,000 barrels per day, and distillate fuel imports averaged 460,000 barrels per day.

U.S. commercial crude oil inventories (excluding those in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve) increased by 4.4 million barrels from the previous week. At 486.6 million barrels, U.S. crude oil inventories are about 9% above the five year average for this time of year. Total motor gasoline inventories decreased by 0.3 million barrels last week and are about 3% below the five year average for this time of year. Finished gasoline inventories increased while blending components inventories decreased last week. Distillate fuel inventories increased by 0.5 million barrels last week and are about 8% above the five year average for this time of year. Propane/propylene inventories decreased by 6.2 million barrels last week and are about 11% below the five year average for this time of year. Total commercial petroleum inventories decreased by 0.7 million barrels last week.

Click to access wpsrsummary.pdf

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.” George Orwell, “1984”

Franke Miele, Real Clear Politics:

In Nancy Pelosi’s “Twenty Twenty-One,” members of the Democratic Party engage in the Two Hours Hate against Donald Trump, who is supposed to be the enemy of the people, but may actually just be a fabricated symbol to distract the people from their real enemy — Big Tech.

Two hours of hate — er, debate — was held in the House of Representatives last Wednesday for the avowed purpose of removing a president of the United States. That’s all it took. Two hours. That should tell you everything you need to know about the state of democracy in our country.

More time is routinely spent on picking wallpaper. But let’s face it, most families wouldn’t trust Congress to pick out wallpaper for their living room, so why should we trust these self-appointed moral arbiters to pick our president?

Well, we don’t. Not all of us.

And for those with a taste for irony, consider this one: Jeff Bezos challenges mail-in ballots in a union election. You know, the high likely of election fraud from mail-in ballots.

OK for presidential elections.

But “unfair” for a union election.

Some things are just too funny.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/01/18/big_tech_big_brother_and_the_end_of_free_speech__145050.html

https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-seeks-to-postpone-alabama-unionization-vote-11611339250

CoVid Vaccination Status

A medical worker vaccinates a man against the coronavirus disease in Israel

Nature published a status report covering the in-flight vaccination programs (Mallapaty, 2021)), focusing on Israel and the United Arab Emirates programs.

Israel reports preliminary figures suggesting that people vaccinated there were about one-third less likely to test positive for SARS-CoV-2 two weeks after the first injection than people who had not received a shot. More than 75% of older people have been vaccinated and Israel expects to see hospitalization rates fall in this demographic in the weeks to come.

The United Kingdom and Norway targeted their vaccination programmes at high-risk groups. Britain vaccinated more than 4 million people, mostly health-care workers and older people, including those living in care homes; Norway has immunized all residents living in nursing homes, some 40,000 people.

Clinical trials of the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine show it to be around 90% effective at preventing COVID-19, and the preliminary data suggest it can also provide some protection from infection.

Reference:

Mallapaty, S. (2021). Are COVID vaccination programmes working? Scientists seek first clues. Nature. doi:10.1038/d41586-021-00140-w

4th Anniversary of Democrat Inauguration Riots

Witnesses describe destruction during Inauguration Day riots | WTOP

Four years ago, the violent Democrat assault on Washington was met by force.

The Democrat assaults were joined by an FBI assault on the then-newly elected president and the persecution of his staff.

Today, the violent and corrupt Democrat assault of 4 years ago is joined by tech oligarchs. This time, the target isn’t an elected president.

This time, the target American liberty.

Christopher Bedford in The Federalist:

The decision by the most powerful companies in history to conspire against social media competitor Parler — without even an attempt to provide evidence of wrongdoing — was a step beyond any previously taken. By denying the No. 1-downloaded app in the country access to Amazon Web Services, the host it had built its existence on, the rulers of Silicon Valley destroyed the upstart.

In addition, with companies like online credit-card processor Stripe joining in, the ability of other “unacceptable” businesses and causes to so much as accept payments and donations is now on notice.

This isn’t surface level: This is the guts of capitalism, and it’s just begun. Credit card companies, banks — they’re moving into the innards of our freedoms and it will impact your business, newspaper, and yes, eventually even your church group if you believe the wrong Christian tenet.

In a free society, if you see an opportunity or don’t like what’s already out there, you can try to make your own. You can accept payments for services, turn a profit, hire, expand. These are both fundamental aspects of the American dream. In the span of one week they were shattered, not by government, but by private and unelected businessmen.

It’s a moment in Big Business’s campaign unlike any before: It’s the sacking of the American Dream. 

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/22/the-fracturing-of-america-a-weak-government-complicit-media-and-radical-silicon-valley-might-have-finally-set-it-all-off/

Cooler Canada

The anthropogenic hypothesis holds the rising concentration of greenhouse gases is due to human activities alone with no contribution from natural sources. Natural sources can be the result of temperature change from non-greenhouse gas drivers and from natural sources (e.g., ocean, landmass).

Atmospheric GHG has been growing steadily with no material change in slope for more than 60 years. Over that period, climate temperature has varied – cooling in the late 1970s, rising in the 1990s, and then slowly as the solar Modern Minimum approached its end.

Satellite radiometers are the most consistent and most reliable temperature record and data only goes back some 40 years. Here is the satellite record as reported by the University of Alabama.

Simulations generated by IPCC’s CMIP5 is the basis for the UN agency’s claims of a climate crisis. CMIP5 tends to run hotter than actual data.

In the top image of this post, Dr. Roy Spencer (University of Alabama, Hunstville) compares 108 CMIP5 simulations against surface temperatures in Canada recorded over 30 years over latitudes encompassing 51N to 70N.

For observations, Spencer used the same lat/lon bounds and the CRUTem5 dataset, which is heavily relied upon by the UN IPCC and world governments. All data were downloaded from the KNMI Climate Explorer.

Spencer:

We see that Canada has been warming at only 50% the rate of the average of the CMIP5 models; the linear trends are +0.23 C/decade and +0.49 C/decade, respectively. Note that in 7 of the last 8 years, the observations have been below the average of the models.

This finding is consistent with other backtests reported in the peer-reviewed literature.

Simply put, IPCC forecast models “run hot”.

I suspect one of the reasons is that IPCC models assume a much higher ECS than consistent with the current literature. This is not a recent problem:

In the 25 years of IPCC’s First to Fifth Assessment Reports [1–5], the atmosphere has warmed at half the rate predicted in FAR. (Moncton, 2015)

Several researchers observe natural variation (i.e., not caused by GHG) to explain the CMIP model problem, resulting in the poor model performance evident in this 2017 analysis and presentation to Congress:

Modsvsobs

Christy explains the problem as due to unduly sensitive estimates of climate sensitivity to GHG.

References

Canada is warming at only 1/2 the rate of climate model simulations « Roy Spencer, PhD. (n.d.). Retrieved January 22, 2021, from Drroyspencer.com website: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2021/01/canada-is-warming-at-only-1-2-the-rate-of-climate-model-simulations/

Christy (2017) https://science.house.gov/imo/media/doc/Christy%20Testimony_1.pdf?1

Monckton, C., Soon, W. W.-H., Legates, D. R., & Briggs, W. M. (2015). Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model. Science Bulletin, 60(1), 122–135.

“The final outcome of the credit expansion is general impoverishment.”

Ludwig von Mises - Wikipedia

Ludwin von Mises, “Human Action”

The Ruling Junta installed by The Party has been quite busy:

  • Rejoined the Paris Climate Accord which promises to raise US energy prices with no impact on climate
  • Rejoined WHO after they allowed China to export a virus that killed over 2 million people and crashed the US economy
  • Terminated the Keystone Pipeline resulting in thousans of workers and raising heating and power prices – while enriching Democrat donor Warren Buffet whose railroads will carry the oil.
  • Extended eviction moratoriums pushing more small businesses into bankruptcy
  • Increased the national debt by $1.2 trillion through “American Rescue Plan.”

Count on Gordon in EconomicPrism to nail it all:

Adventures in social reconstruction, however, are much more appealing to the archetypical insider President like Biden – one beholden to special interests.  What’s more, the people demand it.

They want free paychecks, free drugs, free food, free rent, free school, free energy, debt free loans…  You name it.  They want it all.  And they want much, Much, MORE.  Thus, Biden intends to give it to them.

…

How creating money from thin air and distributing it to a growing class of dependents is supposed to help people is unclear.  But what is clear is that free money debases the rewards of hard work, saving money, and paying one’s way in life.  It also propels the economy and financial system to an ever more precarious place…a place where only total catastrophe is possible.

Naturally, fraud is inherent to this central planner directed process.  And as credit expansion pumps money through the economy, wild and unpredictable things happen.  Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, in his work, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, explained:

“Credit expansion can bring about a temporary boom.  But such a fictitious prosperity must end in a general depression of trade, a slump.”

When central planners shut down the economy last year to bend the coronavirus transmission curve they succeeded in collapsing the debt structure.  Putting moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures and placing a hold on student loan payments doesn’t solve this.  Nor does printing up trillions after trillions of dollars and pumping it into the economy as ‘stimulus’ to counteract the collapse.

The rapid vaporization of wealth the central planners have set us up for will be of scope and scale the world has never before seen.  We don’t know if the bottom will fall out next year or five years from now.  But we’re certain the boom has turned into the crack-up boom.

Trump’s Gone and Suddenly CoVid Data Improves – Hilarious!!!

The case against high-cycle PCR tests as a pandemic metric has long been known in the scientific community – except among those on the Leftscreaming “The Science!” while implementing crushing election year economic lockdowns.

And so on the very day The Party installs their selected president, we have WHO taking belated action to address the long-standing false positive issue in PCR testing.

Even The New York Times was aware of the PCR/”asymptomatic” problem as far back as August 2020 when they published an article stating that as many as 90% of COVID-19 tests in three states were not indicative of active illness. The high-cycle PCR tests were picking up viral debris incapable of causing infection or being transmitted.

Here’s Tyler Durden of ZeroHedge on the incipient “miraculous” end to the China econo-bio war strike of 2020:

If the percentage found by the Times in August holds, there have been approximately 2.43 million actual cases to date, not 24.3 million.

There is also no way to calculate the deaths from COVID-19 rather than deaths with some dead viral debris in the nostrils.

As for the flu:

As an aside, this also clearly explains the disappearance of the “flu” during this season as the plethora of high Ct PCR Tests supposedly pointing to a surge in COVID are nothing of the sort.

As they say, “timing is everything.”

References:

Cohen, A. N., Kessel, B., & Milgroom, M. G. (2020). Diagnosing COVID-19 infection: the danger of over-reliance on positive test results (p. 2020.04.26.20080911). doi:10.1101/2020.04.26.20080911

Surkova, E., Nikolayevskyy, V., & Drobniewski, F. (2020). False-positive COVID-19 results: hidden problems and costs. The Lancet. Respiratory Medicine, 8(12), 1167–1168.

https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/right-cue-biden-who-admits-high-cycle-pcr-tests-produce-massive-covid-false-positives

Gonna Party Like It’s 1999

Here’s The Contrarian on the current asset bubble we’re in:

  • The U.S. stock market and U.S. bond market are historically overpriced, and real estate is at the high end of the valuation scale too.
  • Starting valuations are so poor that seven-year real return forecasts are direr than they were even in 2000 and 2008.
  • In contrast to past periods of market weakness, bonds are unlikely to offer the same safe haven.
  • Thus, where can an investor turn in order to enhance their investment allocations and prospective future real returns?
  • How about the third major asset class, specifically commodities, and commodity equities, which are historically non-correlated and still historically out of favor?

Want another point of view?

OK, let’s recall Permabull Jim Cramer a year ago when the infamous and notorious Dr. “Death” Fauci was still recommending people take cruises:

We are buying some of every one of these this morning as I give this speech. We buy them every day, particularly if they are down, which, no surprise given what they do, is very rare. And we will keep doing so until this period is over – and it is very far from ending. Heck, people are just learning these stories on Wall Street, and the more they come to learn, the more they love and own! Most of these companies don’t even have earnings per share, so we won’t have to be constrained by that methodology for quarters to come.

– Jim Cramer, February 29, 2020.

Recall how Cramer did back in 2000 when we saw the last bubble implode

In contrast, GMO says don’t get Cramered – there’s a desert ahead. And this is what they think it looks like:

Bears get rich, bulls, get rich, pigs get slaughtered.

What to do?

Well, The Contrarian says commodities.

Then, there’s always Max who focuses on the explosion in Federal spending from The Party making us all “Venezuelans”. Which makes sense since The Party aligns with Venezuela.

That means more hard assets immediately and hope your real estate appreciation outpaces food inflation.

So let’s party like it’s 1999:

Reference:

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4399955-time-to-go-to-cash-for-next-7-years

https://www.gmo.com/americas/research-library/gmo-7-year-asset-class-forecast-4q-2020/?source=content_type%3Areact%7Cfirst_level_url%3Aarticle%7Csection%3Amain_content%7Cbutton%3Abody_link