hello.
welcome to my odd theory about part of what’s happening in north american economics right now.
i ought to say right at the outset that what makes this different from the mad ramblings of a paranoid schizophrenic is that i fully admit this is somewhat of a crackpot theory postulated by someone who has no formal education nor experience in that of which they speak.
there are a few people who control the oil supply in the world. a handful of relatively obscure, mind-bogglingly rich people. add into that milieu a few ridiculously large corporations. this handful of people get to decide the ‘price point’, more or less for oil as a commodity. they also, it is rumoured, more or less kaiboshed or delayed development (or at least promotion of development) of alternate energy sources, particularly in the automobile industry. the big auto corporations didn’t actually put any energy-efficient or alternate fuel source vehicles on their design block because ‘big oil’ didn’t want them to. ‘big oil’ wanted to continue to reap capitol gains hand over fist.
big oil kept raising the price of oil. artificially inflated it. why? because they could. and don’t fault capitalists/consumerists for wanting to exploit the system that reaps them the most benefit. it’s the nature of the model.
eventually, the artificially inflated price of oil began to actually hurt the big auto manufacturers. nobody was buying their big, expensive, inefficient vehicles because nobody could afford to run them. auto companies began laying off its employees. those employees began to not be able to pay their own bills. which added to the already distressing ‘credit crunch’ (or: “in which folks buy things they can’t afford, with money they don’t have, and rack up interest they don’t understand”). when the auto manufacturers realised that nobody wanted to buy their crappy cars, they went to the government for a ‘bailout’. which essentially is giving taxpayers’ money to auto companies to subsidise them for the crappy cars none of the taxpayers wanted in the first place.
have you ever read kafka?
as the realisation sunk in that the artificially inflated price of oil was actually harming folks who could more or less control a large part of the consumption of oil, big oil figured they’d give consumers a break for a while to build false confidence in the market.
the crux of what i’m saying is that this ‘crash’ in commodities and resource markets is entirely manufactured by a handful of extremely wealthy individuals who control massive corporations.
please eat this message as soon as you are finished reading it.
i make squee noises when you tell me stuff.