Oil near $143 on view dollar will keep fallingBy JOHN WILEN, AP Business WriterFri Jun 27, 4:53 PM ET
Oil futures climbed to a new record near $143 a barrel Friday as the dollar weakened against the euro, confirming expectations that the falling greenback, a major factor in crude's stratospheric rise, will extend its decline and add to oil's appeal.
Retail gas prices inched lower overnight, but are likely to resume their own trek into record territory now that oil futures have broken out of the trading range where they had been for nearly 3 weeks.
Light, sweet crude for August delivery rose as high as $142.99 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange before pulling back sharply in a spate of late-day profit-taking to settle up 57 cents at a record $140.21. On Thursday, the contract shot past $140 and rose more than $5 to a new settlement record.
The latest record came as the dollar fell against the euro in afternoon trading, having traded roughly unchanged for much of the day.
"The dollar was slightly stronger, and when it gave up its gains, that gave oil the green light," said James Cordier, president of Tampa, Fla.-based trading firms Liberty Trading Group and OptionSellers.com.
The market now believes the Federal Reserve is unlikely to raise interest rates in the near future; since higher rates tend to strengthen the dollar, traders are anticipating that it will continue to fall and, consequently, that investors will keep turning to commodities including oil as a hedge against inflation.
"Oil's back in favor, especially with people bailing out of the stock market," said Jim Ritterbusch, president of energy consultancy Ritterbusch and Associates in Galena, Ill.
The stock market's recent swoon is also sending investors in search of higher-yielding investments. On Thursday, the Dow Jones industrial average fell nearly 360 points, and in afternoon trading Friday was down more than 100 points.
"When money has nowhere to go, it is parked in commodities as it is one of the few investment instruments that actually rises the more money you pour into it," said Oliver Jakob, an analyst at Petromatrix Gmbh, in Switzerland in a note.
With oil over $140 a barrel, traders are now expecting to see $145 and even $150, analysts say.
At the pump, meanwhile, gas prices slipped 0.1 cent overnight to a national average of $4.066 a gallon, according to a survey of stations by AAA, the Oil Price Information Service and Wright Express. Gas prices have fallen slightly from their June 16 record of $4.08 a gallon, but will likely resume their record breaking rise if oil futures keep trending higher.
That seems likely. Oil has more than doubled in the past year due to the dollar's decline, but also because of rising global demand, particularly in fast-growing economies such as China and India. Supply outages in the Middle East and Nigeria have also contributed, as has falling production in Mexico.
The sharp increase in oil prices has driven a similar rise in fuel prices. Gas prices are $1.09 higher than a year ago, and diesel prices were up $1.85 over the past year at a national average of $4.763 a gallon on Friday. Diesel is used to fuel most industrial vehicles, trucks, trains and ships, and its increase is a large part of the reason food and consumer goods prices are rising, putting additional pressure on consumers already paying $4 and more for gas. Diesel prices peaked at $4.797, also on June 16, but are likely to push past that record if oil futures keep rising.
In other Nymex trading Friday, July gasoline futures fell 1.01 cents to settle at $3.5012 a gallon after earlier rising to a trading record of $3.585. July heating oil futures rose 2.32 cents to settle at $3.9066 a gallon. August natural gas futures fell 5 cents to settle at $13.198 per 1,000 cubic feet.
In London, Brent crude futures rose 48 cents to settle at $140.31 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange.
They are charging money and suing -Oil near $143 on view dollar will keep fallingBy JOHN WILEN, AP Business WriterFri Jun 27, 4:53 PM ET
indeed:They are specifically targeting people who are using the AP references to build a case or manufacture a story, Like Peter is doing.
That's gotta be at least strike 3, or 4, or... ? So is the "tactic" for you to post as many "creative interpretations" of Zeshua as you can think up, and then when you get one right to scream "Zeshua prophecy fulfilled?". Yes, I think that is it. I know you won't confirm it, but that is certainly what you are doing.She seems to have to jump thru some challenging hoops in order to provide us the information she wishes us to have, as if the crack in the laws of physics that she is using to achieve this communication is very small, and imposes unique demands on her communication techniques. As a case in point, at one point she had me solve a complex riddle based on a few obscure clues. The solution to the riddle turned out to be the Portuguese flag, of all things. She said that there was a story associated with the flag, and wanted me to know something about that story but couldn't tell me directly. Now, she and I sent emails back and forth over this riddle for some time, and she was always very prompt and responsive to all my questions. But that all changed when I finally figured out the solution to the riddle, and reported my conclusion to her that she was referring to the Battle of Ourique on July 25, 1139 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_flag ), and that the whole reason for this exercise was for her to draw my attention to the date on July 25th. As soon as I sent that email, her participation in our discussion about this exercise suddenly stopped, and she has not mentioned it again, just as if she had accomplished her intended goal, but also the weird rules of her time travel communication prevented her from overtly confirming it. Anyway, this is all just another bunch of unsubstantiated hypothesis on my part, as readers of the Zeshua chronicles have no doubt come to expect from me by now. But I wanted to get this documented online in advance just in case something Zeshua-significant does happen on July 25th.
Well I know that I was in "Aw" of July 25th. It was "Aw man, X-Files 2 is pretty dismal." From the box-office results so far all of America seems to agree.I feel fairly comfortable concluding that her words 'At some point in 2008, a date which I cannot state, but have hinted at' is a direct reference to the July 25th date.So, well, there it is. Today is June 24, 2008, so we have a month and a day to find out if this is correct or not.
- Peter
with this:In a single moment the Majority of Americans will all be in awe at one defining moment for the year of 2008.
by saying:Congress started semi-impeachment hearings against Bush, and NASA Apollo Astronaut Edgar Mitchell publicly claimed that aliens and UFOs are real.
far as news days go, it was bigger than most
Oh, well then you haven't even read the "best part" of the Zeshua hoax. You see, in Zeshua's story being wrong about predicting the future is actually a good thing! The (lame) explanation goes that Zeshua has to maintain a "critical mass of disbelief" that she is really from the future. Because, you see, the future could be in danger if too many people actually believe she is real! So where, in Titor's case, he had to resort to "I don't really care if anyone believes me or not", Zeshua has ratcheted-up the rhetoric to set it up that even by being "wrong", she is still "right".Time travel from the future or even information from the future can't be less successful at prediting future events than normal human speculation if it's true. That doesn't even make logical sense. Inability to clearly state events that will happen is a side effect, not of time travel, but of hoaxing or an attempt to create a cult movement.All of these mouthpieces for mysterious time travellers are just the modern version of the old priests who would scuttle into the back room of a temple to talk to god... Catch is the back room was just an empty store room. There was and is no superhuman force to tell us what will happen and what to do. There is no proof of it, there is no need for it and there is no evidence it even has a place in the universe.
Information "leaking" from what we think of as the future- maybe. But a human(oid) time traveller bothering to stage manage events- AND DOING IT VIA AN INTERNET FORUM- is ludicrous. It isn't even accurate enough to be wrong, as a paradigm of how to travel in time and communicate what you know.
I am with you. This kind of idiocy and ignorance is all over the internet. From an innovation like the WWW that makes the world smaller, information easier to access, and therefore it SHOULD make people smarter, this kind of tripe causes ingorant people to stare and drool at their screens like vegetables.Have we struggled to keep books from being burnt for centuries to throw it all away now? Is the end result of the Windows / Simpsons / illiterate generation... THIS?Unbelievable. If wrong then right, if right then right. Unbelievable.