Oil Falls Below $70 A Barrel

News: From FOX Business

A broad commodities selloff hit the markets on Thursday, with oil and gold both declining notably.

Oil plummeted to a 14-month low under the $70 level on Thursday after the government reported a bigger-than-expected jump in crude inventories.

The benchmark oil contract was recently trading lower by $5.93 at $68.61 a barrel. Oil is now trading more than 50% off its midsummer high.

The Energy Information Administration said crude stocks jumped by 5.6 million barrels last week, which comes in well above the 3.1 million barrel increase analysts expected.

“The crude stock increase was a big surprise,” said Ritterbusch & Associates president Jim Ritterbusch. “It was enough to tilt the scales lower.”

Gasoline stocks also soared, rising by seven million barrels last week, more than double the increase analysts had expected.

“The increase in gasoline stocks … was an even bigger surprise,” Ritterbusch said.

Wholesale gasoline futures plummeted about 16-cents to $1.63 per gallon as a result. The rapid reduction in gasoline prices on the wholesale level are slowly chipping away at retail gasoline prices.

Regular retail gasoline hit $3.084 per gallon on average nationwide, according to the AAA's Daily Fuel Gauge Report. This is about 25% below its July 17 high of $4.11 per gallon. The $3.00 mark holds a certain level of psychological significance for drivers buying retail gas, according to analysts.

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The Perspective: Do you remember when all the media could talk about was oil and the price of gas? Well get ready...there going to start talking about it again.

But this time its for a good reason.

14 months ago oil was at a record high of $147 a barrel. AAA's national average for gasoline was nearly $3.50 a gallon. Everybody wanted to drill, drill, drill.

But now look. Just 14 months later oil is off 50%!! in price. The National average for gasoline si down to $3.08 a gallon. No one is really bitching about the price of gas or the price of oil.

But why in God's name did this just suddenly happen? Its pretty simple really.

The American people finally stopped being oil hungry. This nation uses nearly 22 million barrels of oil a day. And we import nearly 65% of all the oil we use. We send over $700 billion a year to countries that don't like us, and whose oil profits are supporting terrorism...just so we can drive our precious SUV's.

So what did we do? We wised the fuck up. We decided to trade in those gas guzzlers and get ourselves a compact car...or even God forbid a Hybrid!!

Fuck OPEC, fuck Saudi Arabia and King Abdullah. We'll use our own fucking oil, drive better cars. And overall stick it to your fucking ass.

Sure, a bad economy helps, but every time a new oil report comes out it says the same thing.

Supplies are up, demand is down...so the price falls. For now that is.

OPEC will be meeting next month to decide if they should lower their production and their exports to places like the United States...just so they can raise the price of oil back to that $100 mark.

This is just one reason(of many) that we need to drill offshore for.(we won't get into that argument for now.)

To me OPEC can go fuck themselves...we'll just keeping using less oil. And then lets see what they do. $1.50 for gas anyone? I'm all for it.