The cure for our economic cancer is not printing dollars and cars for clunkers, it's getting rid of the cancer. That means banks and suburbs will enter a 100 year decline. Suburbs are inefficient, they waste heating oil, gasoline, electricity, and space. They aren't ideal for community, and they steal from farming which will become important in the near future. Add in the effect of growing research into solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and batteries, and you have all the makings for a repeat of what happened to oil back in Edison's day-- the oil lamp. Only this time, there's nothing to save oil this time (unless maybe it's space travel?). Before we start figuring out how to fill spaceships with oil, we'll need it to be a very cheap commodity. Deflation and consumer choice has a way of accomplishing that. Lastly, USO is a flawed instrument. Use of an active futures portfolio is smarter. Lazy buying of USO is simply handing money to traders. Like we need more of that.
$40.57 (10/20/09)
