More bad news. M

Oil reaches $142 on view dollar will keep falling
By JOHN WILEN, AP Business Writer

Oil reaches $142 on view dollar will keep falling - Yahoo! News

Oil futures climbed briefly to a new record above $142 a barrel Friday on expectations that the weakening dollar, a major factor in crude's stratospheric climb, will keep falling and raising 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 $142.26 a barrel in premarket electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange before pulling back to trade up 45 cents at $140.09. On Thursday, the contract shot past $140 and rose more than $5 to a new settlement record.

Oil rose Thursday in part on comments by OPEC officials; the organization's president predicted prices will rise further, and a top Libyan oil official suggested his nation may cut production.

Meanwhile, traders were coming around to the belief that the dollar, whose long decline has contributed greatly to oil's stratospheric rise this year, will continue to weaken. The market now expects that the Federal Reserve is unlikely to raise interest rates until much later than many analysts have forecast; since higher rates tend to strengthen the dollar, traders are anticipating that it will continue to fall and, consequently, that investors will turn to commodities including oil as a hedge against inflation.


On Friday, the dollar was slightly higher against the euro, with a euro buying $1.5744.

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.

In other Nymex trading Friday, July gasoline futures rose 0.35 cent to $3.5148 a gallon, and July heating oil futures rose 3.61 cents to $3.9195 a gallon. August natural gas futures rose 7.4 cents to $13.322 per 1,000 cubic feet.

In London, Brent crude futures rose 68 cents to $140.51 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange.

More rises please. The more the price goes up the more capitalism is proven ineffective and the more we are forced to change our lives and live sustainably.

__________________
Trust me, I'm a socialist!

There's power in a factory,power in the land, power in the hand of the worker. But it all amounts to nothing if together we don't stand, there is power in a union.
The union forever defending our rights, down with the blackleg, workers unite. To our brothers and our sisters in many far off lands, there is power in a union.
Money speaks for money, the devil for his own. - Billy Bragg

And, in yet another indication that the ordinary person is ahead of the politician, we're adapting. Our pollies are bull****ting away about what they can do about the price of petroleum but we know they're full of it and are adapting. Now, if we can only get the idiots to realise we know what's going on and we can look for solutions rather than crapping on about how they will reduce the cost of petroleum.

The system's more likely to implode into a serious depression in the future, rather than anything being done to change or mitigate the problem. It's about 35 years too late. Capitalism works if there's a source of cheap energy that you assume is limitless that can fuel limitless growth and waste. Given this isn't true, eventually, Capitalism craps itself out and everyone drives over a very big, obvious cliff when you get to the end of happytown.

__________________

Heckuva job, neocons.

__________________
There is no sig. There never was a sig. The sig is a lie.

I don't want to ever see a positive sentence again with "Bush" and "Economy."