Comedic Relief

Now here’s a truly bizarre article from Canada, by a guy named Jeff Rubin regarding oil prices. This guy is babbling away to explain why his forecast of oil priced at $200 per barrel did not come to pass, and you have to read all the way to the end of his inane and idiotic prating to find his profound conclusion, “Quite simply, the end of growth,” which by pure coincidence, happens to be the title of a book he wrote. The man is effing brilliant.

In between is some rather stunning lack of basic ability to even read newspapers printed in English. They do speak English in Canada, right?
I know they speak it a little bit differently than we do, what with sitting on "chesterfields" and all, but…

He admits that his projection of oil reaching $200/barrel, “unfortunately, didn’t adequately address the stifling impact that rising oil prices would have on economic growth,” for which he rather amazingly makes no apology. That’s like projecting a football team to win a game when eight of its 22 starting players are sidelined with injuries and then, when they lose, saying that failing to take injuries into account in your prediction was no big deal.

He then talks about the effect of the rising price of oil, even well short of $200/barrel, as a “chain reaction of events - including spurring higher interest rates which pricked the U.S. sub-prime mortgage bubble.” And I’ll bet you thought that what triggered the bursting of that bubble was people not paying their mortgages because you failed to notice the rise in interest rates. Don’t worry, everybody else also failed to notice the rise of interest rates, because there wasn’t one. Jeffy may be thinking about the rate adjustments in ARMs, because maybe they don’t understand ARMs up there. Or maybe he was just confused because we kept calling them ARMs and he didn’t know that stood for Adjustable Rate Mortgage.

He then says that “[t]he return of low prices was taken, by some, as proof that oil will continue to be as cheap and abundant as ever.” Ah yes, the famous “some” returns. “Some” was, probably, actually he himself until oil started back up in price immediately, because I certainly never heard anyone make that claim.

He then tells us that “If a mea culpa is in order, its roots can be found in the decision to underplay the demand side of the equation,” which is almost as bad as “mistakes were made.” What he’s actually saying is that, “Since I said something that was incredibly stupid, you should excuse that since I am actually as dumb as a bag of rocks.”