Tuesday, April 21, 2020

OIL PRICES PLUNGE BUT IN GAVIN NEWSOM'S STATE OF CALIFORNIA IT'S $4.00 PER GALLON - NEWSOM IS TOO BUSY WORKING ON MEXICAN WELFARE EXPANSION TO NOTICE WHAT IS HAPPENING TO LEGALS

WATCH TRUMPER'S GOLDMAN SACHS INFESTED ADMINISTRATION RUSH TO BAILOUT OUT BANKSTERS AND BIG OIL!



And it could have ramifications that reach into financial markets. Much of shale oil production has been financed by high-yield junk bonds and risky leveraged loans, predicated on oil prices of at least $60 per barrel. If major defaults occur this could have large knock-on effects in financial markets and eventually reach the banks.

Oil price contracts take historic plunge into negative territory

In a day of chaos in the international oil market yesterday, futures contracts expiring today on US-produced West Texas Intermediate crude dropped to as low as -$40.32 per barrel, meaning that producers were paying buyers to take them off their hands.
The price at the close of trading was -$37.63 compared with $18.36 a barrel on Friday. It is the first time in history that oil prices have gone into negative territory.
The reason for the collapse is the lack of storage capacity in the US because of the collapse in demand due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated lockdown measures.
The main US storage facility is at Cushing, Oklahoma, a town of 10,000 people. The storage hub was at 70 percent capacity last week with traders saying it would be filled within two weeks. This prompted the futures selloff because the holder has to deliver 1000 barrels for every contract they hold to Cushing.
Traders in the futures market described the chaos.
Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at Price Futures Group, told the New York Times: “We saw a total collapse in the market. There was everybody selling it into the hole with no buyers. They’re going to have to drive down to a price where someone wants to buy it, and no one wants to buy it.”
The director of energy futures at Mizuho in New York told the Times: “I’m 55 years old, and I worked on the trading floor in college. I’ve been through the first Gulf War, second Gulf War, World Trade Center, dot-com crisis, and nothing came close to this. It could get worse. This situation we are in is that bad.”
In an interview with Bloomberg, Michael Lynch, the president of Strategic Energy and Research, said: “The background psychology right now is just massively bearish. People are concerned that we are going to see so much build-up of inventory that it’s going to be very difficult to fix in the near term and there is going to be a lot of distressed cargoes on the market. People are trying to get rid of the oil and there are no buyers.”
Some futures traders are still betting on a revival and so contracts for June remain positive. But an even bigger crash could be in the making when they become due.
Stephen Schork, the editor of an oil-market newsletter, told the Financial Times: “It just gets uglier from here.”
The rapid rise in US unemployment—22 million workers have applied for jobless benefits in the past month—means that fewer and fewer Americans will be driving in the coming months, pushing down summer demand for petrol, usually the peak period.
“This summer is dead on arrival,” he said. “The biggest demand months are not going to happen.”
Global oil demand, which was 100 million barrels a day in 2019, has now fallen by 30 million barrels due to the pandemic.
Prices for oil deliveries in June remain positive but the most actively traded futures contracts fell by 18 percent yesterday to close at just over $20 per barrel. Back in January they were trading at $65 per barrel.
The price of contracts for Brent crude remains positive because it is stored on tankers which still have a capacity to take additional supplies but it is only a matter of time before this runs out. At the end of March there were 109 million barrels of oil stored on tankers at sea. Last Friday it has risen to 141 million.
The oil price crash has shattered the agreement orchestrated by US president Donald Trump for Russia and Saudi Arabia to cut oil production by 9.7 million barrels a day. Trump claimed the deal would save “thousands of jobs” in the US oil industry. But like so many of the other assertions by the blowhard in the White House this pronouncement has been torn to shreds within a matter of days.
Speaking at a press briefing yesterday, Trump said the administration was looking at increasing the holdings of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. “This is a great time to buy oil,” he said.
The idea was first floated several weeks ago but Congress refused to supply the funds for purchases. Trump said the administration was looking to fill up national petroleum reserves by as much as 75 million barrels and “one way or the other it will be full.”
But such is the extent of the contraction it is doubtful this will halt the slide, any more than the agreement with Russia and Saudi Arabia did.
The crash in the futures market will accelerate the already rapid decline in the physical market where prices are already down by more than 60 percent from the start of the year.
Even before yesterday’s historic events, Bloomberg reported that some buyers in Texas were offering as little as $2 a barrel for some oil streams. “In Asia,” it noted, “bankers are increasingly reluctant to give commodity traders the credit to survive as lenders grow ever more fearful about the risk of a catastrophic default.”
The crash is ripping through the US oil industry. Last week producers shut down 13 percent of oil drilling operations but this has not been sufficient to counter the oversupply.
The shale industry, which produces around 10 million barrels a day, providing what Trump has hailed as “US energy dominance,” now faces a rapid decline, if not a collapse.
And it could have ramifications that reach into financial markets. Much of shale oil production has been financed by high-yield junk bonds and risky leveraged loans, predicated on oil prices of at least $60 per barrel. If major defaults occur this could have large knock-on effects in financial markets and eventually reach the banks.
In the middle of last month, the Financial 

Times reported that most oil companies, with 

the exception of Exxon [Mobil] and Chevron 

were on “life support” and that even with oil 

prices at $57 a barrel “the US shale industry 

was already struggling to generate cash and 

retain investor support in 2019” and 42 

companies, with $26 billion in debt, had filed 

for bankruptcy.
In the month since that report, the situation has become dramatically worse at a speed never seen before in history.



The immigrants are not all coming to get welfare and they don’t immediately sign up, but over time, an enormous fraction sign their children up. It’s likely the case that of the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants, more than half are signed up for Medicaid — which is our most expensive program. [Emphasis added]

As Breitbart News has reported, U.S. households headed by foreign-born residents use nearly twice the welfare of households headed by native-born Americans.

Kobach: California Shouldn’t Demand Money from the Rest of Us Only to Give it to Illegal Aliens

US President Donald Trump (C) looks on with Governor of California Jerry Brown (R) and Lieutenant Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, as they view damage from wildfires in Paradise, California on November 17, 2018. - President Donald Trump arrived in California to meet with officials, victims and the "unbelievably brave" …
SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
3:51
Once again, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) has gone to extraordinary lengths to reward illegal immigration and encourage illegal aliens to stay in the United States. On Wednesday, he announced that—due to the coronavirus pandemic—California will give $500 checks to 150,000 low-income illegal aliens. The cost to taxpayers will be $125 million.
This came a day after Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that illegal aliens will be eligible to receive $1,500 checks that the city will be handing out to its residents.
What Newsom and Garcetti are doing is illegal under federal law. In 1996 Congress passed a major welfare reform act. A crucial section of that law prohibits states and localities from giving public benefits to illegal aliens. And it remains in federal law today at 8 U.S.C. 1621: an illegal alien “is not eligible for any State or local public benefit.” Public benefit includes “any … benefit for which payments or assistance are provided to an individual, household, or family eligibility unit by an agency of a State or local government….”
We stopped hoping that California would follow federal law a long time ago; these latest actions continue a pattern. As I wrote last July, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) was the first governor to sign a bill making free health care available to illegal aliens. The cost of providing those benefits to illegal aliens was a massive $98 million. That giveaway, too, violates federal law.
But now Newsom is providing millions of dollars in checks to illegal aliens while at the same time expecting the rest of the country to subsidize this spending. California officials are hoping that the federal government will reimburse 75% of the state’s coronavirus expenditures.
And Democrats in Congress are demanding that we federal taxpayers cough up the money. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) want the federal government to provide $150 billion to state and local governments to help absorb their coronavirus spending.
The audacity of handing unlawful checks to illegal aliens while demanding that the rest of us pay for it is breathtaking. Especially when red states have kept their spending under control and have not been handing checks to illegal aliens.
No state that is handing checks to illegal aliens, subsidizing free health care for illegal aliens, and offering sanctuary to illegal aliens – all in violation of federal law – deserves a penny of assistance from the rest of us taxpayers. Not to mention the fact that an unprecedented number of low-income Americans are unemployed. Those U.S. citizens shouldn’t have to compete with illegal aliens for jobs when the economy reopens. But Newsom and other California Democrats are encouraging the illegal aliens to remain.
You would think that California officials would put U.S. citizens first just once, during this time of national crisis. But you’d be wrong.
Kris W. Kobach is a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2020 and is the former secretary of state of Kansas. He is currently General Counsel for We Build the Wall. An expert in immigration law and policy, he coauthored the Arizona SB-1070 immigration law and represented in federal court the 10 ICE agents who sued to stop President Obama’s 2012 DACA amnesty. During 2001-03, he was Attorney General John Ashcroft’s chief adviser on immigration law at the Department of Justice. His website is kriskobach.com.


THE NEW PRIVILEGED CLASS: Illegals!

This is why you work From Jan - May paying taxes to the government ....with the rest of the calendar year is money for you and your family.

Take, for example, an illegal alien with a wife and five children. He takes a job for $5.00 or 6.00/hour. At that wage, with six dependents, he pays no income tax, yet at the end of the year, if he files an Income Tax Return, with his fake Social Security number, he gets an "earned income credit" of up to $3,200..... free.

He qualifies for Section 8 housing and subsidized rent.

He qualifies for food stamps.

He qualifies for free (no deductible, no co-pay) health care.

His children get free breakfasts and lunches at school.

He requires bilingual teachers and books.

He qualifies for relief from high energy bills.

If they are or become, aged, blind or disabled, they qualify for SSI.

Once qualified for SSI they can qualify for Medicare. All of this is at (our) taxpayer's expense.

He doesn't worry about car insurance, life insurance, or homeowners insurance.

Taxpayers provide Spanish language signs, bulletins and printed material.

He and his family receive the equivalent of $20.00 to $30.00/hour in benefits.

Working Americans are lucky to have $5.00 or $6.00/hour left after Paying their bills and his.

The American taxpayers also pay for increased crime, graffiti and trash clean-up.



Cheap labor? YEAH RIGHT! Wake up people! 

JOE LEGAL v LA RAZA JOSE ILLEGAL
Here’s how it breaks down; will make you want to be an illegal!
THE TAX-FREE MEXICAN UNDERGROUND ECONOMY IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY IS ESTIMATED TO BE IN EXCESS OF $2 BILLION YEARLY!
Staggering expensive "cheap" Mexican labor did not build this once great nation! Look what it has done to Mexico. It's all about keeping wages depressed and passing along the true cost of the invasion, their welfare, and crime tidal wave costs to the backs of the American people!
AMERICA: YOU’RE BETTER OFF BEING AN ILLEGAL!!!
This annual income for an impoverished American family is $10,000 less than the more than $34,500 in federal funds which are spent on each unaccompanied minor border crosser.
study by Tom Wong of the University of California at San Diego discovered that more than 25 percent of DACA-enrolled illegal aliens in the program have anchor babies. That totals about 200,000 anchor babies who are the children of DACA-enrolled illegal aliens. This does not include the anchor babies of DACA-qualified illegal aliens. JOHN BINDER

“The Democrats had abandoned their working-class base to chase what they pretended was a racial group when what they were actually chasing was the momentum of unlimited migration”.  DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE 

 

As Breitbart News has reported, U.S. households headed by foreign-born residents use nearly twice the welfare of households headed by native-born Americans.

Simultaneously, illegal immigration next year is on track to soar to the highest level in a decade, with a potential 600,000 border crossers expected.

“More than 750 million people want to migrate to another country permanently, according to Gallup research published Monday, as 150 world leaders sign up to the controversial UN global compact which critics say makes migration a human right.”  VIRGINIA HALE

For example, a DACA amnesty would cost American taxpayers about $26 billion, more than the border wall, and that does not include the money taxpayers would have to fork up to subsidize the legal immigrant relatives of DACA illegal aliens. 

Exclusive–Steve Camarota: Every Illegal Alien Costs Americans $70K Over Their Lifetime



JOHN BINDER
 Every illegal alien, over the course of their lifetime, costs American taxpayers about $70,000, Center for Immigration Studies Director of Research Steve Camarota says.
During an interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Daily, Camarota said his research has revealed the enormous financial burden that illegal immigration has on America’s working and middle class taxpayers in terms of public services, depressed wages, and welfare.
“In a person’s lifetime, I’ve estimated that an illegal border crosser might cost taxpayers … maybe over $70,000 a year as a net cost,” Camarota said. “And that excludes the cost of their U.S.-born children, which gets pretty big when you add that in.”
LISTEN: 
“Once [an illegal alien] has a child, they can receive cash welfare on behalf of their U.S.-born children,” Camarota explained. “Once they have a child, they can live in public housing. Once they have a child, they can receive food stamps on behalf of that child. That’s how that works.”
Camarota said the education levels of illegal aliens, border crossers, and legal immigrants are largely to blame for the high level of welfare usage by the f0reign-born population in the U.S., noting that new arrivals tend to compete for jobs against America’s poor and working class communities.
In past waves of mass immigration, Camarota said, the U.S. did not have an expansive welfare system. Today’s ever-growing welfare system, coupled with mass illegal and legal immigration levels, is “extremely problematic,” according to Camarota, for American taxpayers.
The RAISE Act — reintroduced in the Senate by Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR), David Perdue (R-GA), and Josh Hawley (R-MO) — would cut legal immigration levels in half and convert the immigration system to favor well-educated foreign nationals, thus relieving American workers and taxpayers of the nearly five-decade-long wave of booming immigration. Currently, mass legal immigration redistributes the wealth of working and middle class Americans to the country’s top earners.
“Virtually none of that existed in 1900 during the last great wave of immigration, when we also took in a number of poor people. We didn’t have a well-developed welfare state,” Camarota continued:
We’re not going to stop [the welfare state] tomorrow. So in that context, bringing in less educated people who are poor is extremely problematic for public coffers, for taxpayers in a way that it wasn’t in 1900 because the roads weren’t even paved between the cities in 1900. It’s just a totally different world. And that’s the point of the RAISE Act is to sort of bring in line immigration policy with the reality say of a large government … and a welfare state. [Emphasis added]
The immigrants are not all coming to get welfare and they don’t immediately sign up, but over time, an enormous fraction sign their children up. It’s likely the case that of the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants, more than half are signed up for Medicaid — which is our most expensive program. [Emphasis added]
As Breitbart News has reported, U.S. households headed by foreign-born residents use nearly twice the welfare of households headed by native-born Americans.

Every year the U.S. admits more than 1.5 million foreign nationals, with the vast majority deriving from chain migration. In 2017, the foreign-born population reached a record high of 44.5 million. By 2023, the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that the legal and illegal immigrant population of the U.S. will make up nearly 15 percent of the entire U.S. population.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder


Oil prices have (temporarily) taken a catastrophic fall into negative territory


The big news on Monday was that oil prices, for the first time, plunged into negative territory.  That means that oil-producers, rather than getting money for their product, are theoretically paying other people to unload the product.  There are significant ramifications to this collapse (although overnight trading may make the long-term picture less grim).  While the execrable Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez celebrated the crash, President Trump immediately took steps both to strengthen America and to shore up the industry.

BLOG: WE DO NOT HAVE A 'FREE 
MARKET'. WE HAVE A MARKET RIGGED 
BY POLITICIANS FOR THEIR PAYMASTERS 
ON WALL STREET. IT'S CALLED A 
BAILOUT!

The beauty of the free market is that nothing has a fixed value.  A commodity's value always reflects the amount a willing seller and a willing buyer can negotiate in an arm's-length transaction.  If an entrepreneur sees that buyers will pay well for a rare product, he will move into that market.
As more entrepreneurs move into a market, the balance of power between buyers and sellers shifts, allowing buyers to negotiate lower prices for a more commonly available good.  That's why we can buy Fuji apples and flash drives, both of which were prohibitively expensive when they first appeared.
Problems begin, though, when there are no buyers for a commodity that powers the world's engines.  That's what's happening with oil.  Thanks to virus lockdowns, factories are stilled, cars are parked in garages, airplanes are on the ground, and farm equipment is idle.  The oil that American producers had already removed from the ground now has a market value of zero — or less than zero, because the producers still have costs.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in March 2020, the oil and gas sector employed 156,500 people.  If that sector collapses, 156,000 jobs go with it.  If the industry cannot recover, we're again dependent on oil and gas from places such as the Middle East, Russia, or Venezuela, where the oil and gas industries survive because the governments prop them up.  Those collapsing oil prices will affect them too, which should clip Putin's wings, at least for a while.
Another downstream problem is that an oil and gas collapse will drive inflation.  Because everything we do has petroleum underlying it in one form or another (e.g., transportation, farming, heating and cooling, manufacturing, etc.), losing domestic production means increased costs per barrel, driving up consumer prices.
In Washington, D.C., the news about oil prices resulted in two different responses.  The one that got the most press was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's celebratory "green gloat" tweet:
Donkey Chompers, as Ace calls her, subsequently deleted that tweet, probably when Nancy Pelosi (the Marie Antoinette of gourmet ice cream and $10,000 refrigerators) pointed out that celebrating lost jobs and the potential destruction of the American economy is not a good look.
President Trump, thankfully, had a different response.  He's hoping to take advantage of low oil prices to restock the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a move that will also send cash to struggling oil-producers:
President Donald Trump said Monday the U.S. is "looking" to add as many as 75 million barrels of oil to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, after an historic day for markets that saw crude prices turn negative.
The soon-to-expire May contract CL.1, -103.40% CLK20, -103.59% for West Texas Intermediate crude on the New York Mercantile Exchange traded, and closed, in negative territory, as MarketWatch reported.
Trump said he was considering the move "based on the record low price of oil," and that the action would "top [the SPR] out."
Speaking at a White House press briefing, Trump said, "we'd get it for the right price."
Perhaps because of Trump's plan to purchase oil or perhaps because more states are opening up from their lockdown, by Monday's end, things started looking a little brighter:
West Texas Intermediate crude futures for May delivery turned positive in overnight trading, after plunging below zero for the first time in history on Monday. The contract in question is set to expire on Tuesday, fueling Monday's 100% wipeout. 
The May contract traded at $1.17 per barrel, after earlier trading at negative $14.04 per barrel, meaning traders would effectively pay to have the oil taken off their hands. As the contract approaches expiration, trading volume is typically thin, so longer-term contracts can be more indicative of how Wall Street views the price of oil. The most active contract, for June delivery, traded 7.29% higher at $21.92 per barrel. The July and August contracts were also firmly above the $20 level.
Whew!
Leftists see the Wuhan virus as an opportunity to push their socialist green agenda.  They don't seem to realize that most Americans, seeing in this pandemic a preview of what socialism and the green agenda look like, are not enthused.  One can only hope they remember this lack of enthusiasm in November.



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