Via
the Bellows, Mr. Setser notes the
Transfer of Wealth.
If oil -- using the price for sweet light crude -- stays to $125 a barrel for the rest of the year, the average price of oil over the course of 2008 will be around $115 a barrel. The average 2007 price was around $70 a barrel. The $45 a barrel y/y increase in the average price of oil is equivalent to going from $25 a barrel oil to $70 a barrel oil in a single year. It is a large jump. It would lead to something like a $650-700 billion transfer of wealth from the oil-importing economies to the major oil-exporting economies.
It's very very disgusting. Actually, you know I saw an article on
Wired's blog about Dubai's awesome Metro today. The sad thing is that it was basically funded by us.
The system will carry 200 million passengers a year, about 547,000 passengers each day. Officials hope to have almost 200 miles of subway lines built by 2020, at which point it would be one of the largest automated subway systems in the world.
That could have been
LA.
2 comments:
I suppose it doesn't hurt to have a pro-transit absolute monarchy either. The local emir can just declare that there will be a subway, and this is where it will go, and not bother with environmental impact reports or asking the FTA for money or any of that.
It's a massive amount of wealth being transferred - I'd love to see this quantified for California for the HSR blog, but I suppose his rough global calculation will have to convey the picture.
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