$500 paypal looking for a new home

[Rubber Duck]

The biggest laugh is all the speculators buying oil futures. They are buying commodities to hedge against the plummeting dollar.

Deliveries are up, but consumption is down, so expect the US to be awash with Oil and time soon. Those buying futures should price in the cost of storage. Futures markets are linked to real commodities. This is not like domain markets. If you buy oil and you cannot sell it on, you need to invest in a f*cking great tank. Still at least land is for free at the moment!

It would make far more sense to buy foreign currency and invest in foreign stock-markets. I am in Czech Republic at the moment. Their currency is hard (it is appreciating quickly agains the Euro!) and inflation is racing away. Apparently what the World needs right now is to be able to lend buckets full of money to people that will just go out and spend it. For the last ten years that has been the US, as it was assumed that they would be the most likely to pay the loans back. That daft arsed assumption has now been blown to the four winds. Capital is cascading into Eastern Europe just as it is cascading into China, India, Russia, Australia and elsewhere.

Is this causing a problem? Well only in the US! (Germany's exports are booming but they are not all going where they used to!) Otherwise, it is simply balancing out huge distortions in the World economy that have been there for decades. When the music stops, everyone is going to have a much fairer share than before, which in the case of the US means an awful lot less. Forget 2025! Price Waterhouse are far too conservative. If you have Currency appreciating by 15-20% per annum combined with double digit growth and nearly as much inflation, it all ads up to GDP in dollar terms doubling every 2-3 years.

[atoms2me]

You made a valid case that wealth is flowing away from US. I always believed the nature law of maximum entropy applies to global economy as well, nations' wealth has a tendency of reaching to equilibrium, more or less .
The problem with commodities is that US has less than 5% of world population and consumes 25%+ of world resources. If the rest of the world is getting richer, I just don't see how 5% population's belt-tightening can make US "awash with oil". The biggest oil consumption growth comes from OPEC themselves and BRIC countries, not US.
Oil is a global commodity isn't it.