The collapse in oil is a strong hint that the world is NOT being run by manic Keynesians. Monetary base soared in the wake of the crash, but that was panic demand for money. M2 growth today is the same as before the crash (mid single digits) despite the US monetary base being several times higher. That’s why CPI is still sub-2%.

The irony for neoreaction is that it’s precisely the FEAR of manic Keynesianism that has been driving the Germanic Bilderbergers at the ECB to be too tight with monetary policy — thereby inciting precisely the sort of social chaos they sought to avoid. And, in fact, it’s growing grass roots backlash (Dresden being the latest example) that is helping push the ECB away from manic austerity toward a more rational policy. Look for QE at the January 22 ECB board meeting.

http://moslereconomics.com/2014/12/04/comments-on-crude-pricing-the-economy-and-the-banking-system/

“The Saudis are the ‘supplier of last resort’/swing producer. Every day the world buys all the crude the other producers sell to the highest bidder and then go to the Saudis for the last 9-10 million barrels that are getting consumed. They either pay the Saudis price or shut the lights off, rendering the Saudis price setter/swing producer.

Specifically, the Saudis don’t sell at spot price in the market place, but instead simply post prices for their customers/refiners and let them buy all they want at those prices.

And most recently the prices they have posted have been fixed spreads from various benchmarks, like Brent.

Saudi spread pricing works like this:
Assume, for purposes of illustration, Saudi crude would sell at a discount of $1 vs Brent (due to higher refining costs etc.) if they let ‘the market’ decide the spread by selling a specific quantity at ‘market prices’/to the highest bidder. Instead, however, they announce they will sell at a $2 discount to Brent and let the refiners buy all they want.

So what happens?
The answer first- this sets a downward price spiral in motion. Refiners see the lower price available from the Saudis and lower the price they are willing to pay everyone else. And everyone else is a ‘price taker’ selling to the highest bidder, which is now $1 lower than ‘indifference levels’. When the other suppliers sell $1 lower than before the Saudi price cut/larger discount of $1, the Brent price drops by $1. Saudi crude is then available for $1 less than before, as the $2 discount remains in place. Etc. etc. with no end until either:
1) The Saudis change the discount/raise their price
2) Physical demand goes up beyond the Saudis capacity to increase production

And setting the spread north of ‘neutral’ causes prices to rise, etc.

Bottom line is the Saudis set price, and have engineered the latest decline. There was no shift in net global supply/demand as evidenced by Saudi output remaining relatively stable throughout.”

– The Saudis do not have the production capacity to be swing producers. They had much more idled capacity in the 1980s. So the Saudis as causal agents of the global oil price drop seems unlikely.

– The Saudis are consuming more of their own oil due to population growth and more cars. They’ve probably already peaked as oil exporters..

– North Dakota oil producers will turn up exploration when prices go up again.

– Offshore probably has higher marginal cost than tight oil. So

– The oil price drop in 2009 was bigger than the one happening now. Yet oil prices recovered and exploration rebounded soon after. It should be different this time why?

http://www.businessinsider.in/China-Is-Using-The-UN-As-Cover-For-Sending-Troops-To-Protect-Its-Oil-Investment-In-South-Sudan/articleshow/42390392.cms

Topological isomorphisms of human brain and financial market networks

Always seem to get one or two wrong, ffs.

@admin

The gist of it is that there are scale-free properties and growth dynamics which can be used as leverage to understand a particular class of superficially distinct phenomena, including many of social relevance. Evolution, Learning, Trade, Ecology, Neurology and others all might fundamentally be seen as information processing networks under constrained evolutionary regimes. It’s not so much being the same process as much as sharing a leitmotif. Mainly one of non-euclidean geometry, least action principles and mathematical optimization (plus a whole bunch of other things but these are more primary IMO).

The argument in Network Cosmology is that the structure of spacetime has an impact on networks of causal events which is asymptotically mirrored by the growth dynamics of several kinds of complex networks and this seems to me corroborated by some peculiar correspondences, like the Curry-Howard-Lambek correspondence and now this mapping between the renormalization group, a very important idea in modern physics and deep learning in AI/ML and this other connection between bayesian inference and natural selection, information geometry and evolutionary game theory, makes cutting edge stuff like neural turing machines seem even more interesting. Lots and lots of interfaces. So instead of thinking biology reduces to physics, for example, it might be more profitable to think physics and biology as disciplines have common conceptual ancestors and are themselves consequences of a kind of speciation. How Deleuzian is this? Been thinking of reading some of his works but don’t know if I would get anything out of that.

Furthermore, assuming the characterization of many kinds of complex networks as possessing an underlying hyperbolic geometry is true, there are certain properties of navigability and flow optimization (resource allocation, in general) that cement things like hierarchy as not only natural but nearly optimal (and certainly winning) developments (this obviously not being a sanctification of everything the status quo does, but an aid to more concrete and rigorous establishment and definition of proper role and function) and possibly help understand some other developments such as how more “open” societies tend toward the top of the heap (also financial institutions, it has to do with configuring a network such that resource routing is efficient and robust without knowledge of the global topology and that’s where hierarchy comes in) and how this is related not only to the development but possibly also the very structure of intelligence (part of why I usually like making a distinction between intelligence and intellect), how linguistics, logic and social structure interact and so on. Overall I think some of these developments more or less slice the throats of many sacred cows out there but I’m not sure which ones exactly. They won’t provide a panacea but might dispel some conceptual miasma and provide a more structured, sane and rigorous common framework.

Networks are obviously at the core of cladistic analysis, for example (indeed hyperbolic geometry has a precisely tree-like, i.e., taxonomic, structure), so hope that makes it a little clearer how some of these instruments can be of aid in other tasks. Also applications to institutional analysis and the propagation/diffusion of information and evolution of cultural narratives/ideologies/identities, I’d guess. It also makes me interpret ancient religions in very different ways but I don’t know how anachronistic that would be. Keep in mind most of this is above my qualifications and is more an investigation of the work of others than independent verification. Still building the mathematical skills to speak of this with any real confidence but thought would be an interesting perspective for some of you since lots of it can be understood conceptually without requiring that much mathematical maturity. There are other conceptual correspondences I’d like to talk about (which might help make this more orderly and comprehensible, it’s one of those things that’s natural after you figure out where the wires go but before it seems like a total mess and me being an awful communicator doesn’t help) but perhaps that’s best left to another thread.

It’s some kind of weird shamanistic axis mundi katabasis shit though. As above, so below and whatnot. I’ll leave the teleology and other philosophical consequences of it to you.

I personally imagine a future where we have modified algae which produces oil, which we use for all the delicious things that oil gives us – plastics, lubricants and an nice quality store of energy.

Efficiency of photosynthesis is pretty low, IIRC.