Cramer on BloggingStocks: All the king's horses and all the king's men ...
Today we learn that "dozens of world leaders and executives" are going to Saudi Arabia to find out how to lower oil prices this weekend.
Yep, there we go. Short the oil futures. They will no doubt come up with a plan that will produce much more oil and curtail its use, bringing oil down sharply -- perhaps to $100.
Yeah, right.
Weak dollar, speculators, funds indexed to commodities, intransigent Saudi Arabians, terrorist activities.
I believe that all of those factors combined have lifted oil by about $20. But that could be overstating things -- it's no more than that.
Because if there was a lot of oil, you would see those futures smacked down to levels where all sort of cockamamie ideas for oil alternatives would disappear. Right now, with oil at $130, we could produce an alternative from oil shale that would be bountiful and that has been the spare capacity that can be brought on in the next four years.
Other than that, forget about it.
Everything else that creates energy with the exception of coal can be measured in gallons, not barrels, in this country. As long as that is the case, you can have as many executives and muckety-mucks on the case in Saudi Arabia as you want.
Offshore drilling is part of the pastiche of an answer that could bring the oil futures down in 2015, but most likely not, because if we find oil of any size it will required deepwater rigs that we don't have enough of -- they are locked up, and only Transocean (NYSE: RIG) (Cramer's Take) really has the capacity to explore successfully and Petrobras (NYSE: PBR) (Cramer's Take) has them all locked up.
ANWR would be a closer substitute for some barrels, but that's really not going to happen either.
To put it simply, oil isn't coming down because we are using it faster than they can drill it, and we are only one part of the equation. The ultimate truth is that $130 oil has barely cut consumption, and the only way we are going to find a price that is done going up is when we see a major curtailment in oil's use, and we are nowhere near that. Nowhere near it at all.
So when you see the stocks go down on the story in today's paper and you see the futures go down at the same time, remember: it's all the same story, oil's not where demand's being cut, alternatives are years away, drilling's just as far and all you can expect is a lot of hot air.
Coal and natural gas are our only hopes, and the politicians don't like either or are fixated on liquefied natural gas, which can't happen because of the terrorist threat or because local authorities in this country have the ability to block just about anything with a complicit judiciary that has no mandate to do anything but keep the environment clean.
Buy the oil cohort on the way down.
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Jim Cramer is a director and co-founder of TheStreet.com. He contributes daily market commentary for TheStreet.com's sites and serves as an adviser to the company's CEO. At the time of publication, Cramer had no positions in the stocks mentioned.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
6-19-2008 @ 5:07PM
James said...
It don't make any sense.
The price of crude has skyrocketed, yet the price of big oil stocks has risen only slightly. Why?
6-21-2008 @ 10:19PM
JOHN SENNOTT said...
yOU CAN LET THE Rich grEEDY oil companies drill and ruin the natural rcources of our land and it will only make these companies richer and the few thousand share holders richer but the millions of us will still pay the same at the pump. why are these oil barans exempt of taxes??? AND getting subsidized. What about all the alaska oil ??? all going to japan---who is kidding who on all this exploration ,they have sies that they havent even drilled yet. get with it!@!!