Current Events

A new day is upon us and as I settle in for an eight hour shift at my place of employment I peruse the news headlines for the morning and nothing amazes me. It seems to be blurbs like, "Overseas market carnage!", "Record fuel price drop!", "U.S. prepares for more losses!", and so on, clog our news fronts in an awkward attempt to educate the people of this country as to what is going on.

We are experiencing one of the toughest economic times since the great depression. Pardon me if i embellish slightly but lets not kid each other, this is a trouncing of massive proportions. Our 401ks are cut in half, pension funds are depleting, stock accounts are making the panicked transition to cash and or money markets. The only safety net the elders have is the stocks that have managed to remain trading and paying a high dividend, and that, in this day in age is not safe. While we all wake up to down futures, crashing overseas exchanges, the only thing to do is to ignore what you don't have to touch in the next ten years. To end this rant on financial despair, I repeat, evade the current cataclysmic events and think of sunshine in Paris.

For several months, while this collapse of our global economic future approached, oil was on an upward accession. Prices rose from a normal level of around sixty dollars a barrel, to an astounding one hundred and fifty dollars a barrel. This sent fuel prices through the roof. With the looming oil and fuel prices surging past levels that we ever imagined to be possible, life as we knew it had changed. Road trips did not exist, travel plans in every form where decreased, gallivanting for general amusement had ceased. Then, as if to somewhat tickle our innards a little, as the market took a nose dive so did oil prices. So now that we have no money in the bank, we would have been able to afford gas, "Sweet Deal!!!". The cycle continued and the market drew lower, oil reached a reasonable level, and recession has set in. After OPEC had been on its high horse for several months and the Iranian leader and other Saudi Royals had licked their chops, they decided that something needed to be done to screw the American people some more.

Folks like Chavez and Ahmadinejad treat OPEC like a legal price fixing game. If the price drops due to over production and thus leading to declining demand, they simply lower production rates in an attempt to drive prices higher. What they don't understand is the higher the prices the less we use so in essence they cant squeeze any more out of us in this economic atmosphere.

Now that I have wound my self up like a top, I need to end this and decide who to blame for the current economic turmoil just like everyone on wall street and on capital hill is trying to do at this very moment.

Till next time