Bob CollinsSo now these old times are the good times? What kind of weird economy do we have when we have to start rooting for higher oil prices and maybe even a shortage here or there?
But root we must, at least if you believe some of the specialists in how our economy works.
The Dow today is down another 200 300 points and experts are suggesting the collapsing price oil — it dropped below $60 a barrel today for the first time in five years — can do a lot to sink our economy.
That’s because while we were complaining about high gasoline prices, reflecting the high cost of a barrel of oil, it was doing a lot to get the economy churning again after the Great Recession.
“It will subtract 0.5 percent from GDP, bare minimum,” Steen Jakobsen, the chief economist at Danish investment bank Saxo Bank, tells CNBC.
That’s a big enough threat to our economy that he suggests the U.S. might bail out the energy industry.
“We bailed the banks out and the public’s anger has been very real and very long standing,” Dennis Gartman, a commodities investor and the editor of The Gartman Letter, told CNBC. “Bailing out the oil companies would be even more seriously hated.”
In an article today, the Telegraph carries a fascinating graphic on the best and worst of the collapse of oil. The positive seems obvious — a rise in personal wealth and a higher standard of living. But the extreme of the negatives includes the notion that Russia President Vladimir Putin puts his nation on a war economy.
