I agree with you that in reality the US is seen as less of a threat than other large countries like India or China, or Russia. That is what makes the current international anti-American drumbeat so aggravating.

In any case, your blog is excellent and very informative.

I wasn’t advocating the Asia Times position. The US is clearly badly overextended.

I simply found it curious that a paper which is generally pretty cynical about the US still found it preferable for us to intervene than India or China. That would seem to say that while we are mistrusted, the big Asian powers are even more so.

Reporting to the EIA on oil inventory is mandatory, by the way. The report above covers this.

Moe Gamble

Iran is holding some high-sulphur oil in tankers at the moment, and the entire world has reports on how many tankers and how much oil.

Production reserves are much disputed and not at all transparent, but not inventories. Krugman is right–if the high price was due to speculation, we’d see high inventories, and we’re just not seeing inventory builds anywhere.

Moe Gamble

Both oil and grain are easy to keep track of, the farmer has to house his grain in silos.
The oil is stored in huge above ground tanks. Oklahoma has the largest tank farms in the US.

The EIA keeps track of this compared to last year the US is down 20 million barrels of petrol products from May 2 2007 (1,000 million barrels) to May 2 2008 (973 million).

Basically a 1% increase in US population combined with 2.5% decrease in oil products equals shortage.

Bobo
I wouldn’t hold my breath on tar sands. We have already had 5 years with oil above $40. Production takes too much water. In Canada they have enough water to perhaps double current production. In the Rockys diverting 10 million barrels a day of water to produce 1-2 million barrels a day of oil would produce a range war between farmers and oil men.

I have no formal training in economics and so therefore found the articles from Cassandra on deflation and the Angry Bear referral to Money Illusion to be very unsettling to what I had understood to be common wisdom — i.e., that inflation (above say 2%) was, to paraphrase Friedman, at all times and all places a bad thing. Indeed, adding these views to other articles you have referenced, I am coming to see the fundamental problem for the United States is not inflation / deflation but rather income / wealth distribution. I had long thought that this development was not only morally repugnant and socially destabilizing, but now I can see is likely to be economically very corrosive. To be precise, inflation in the U.S. with its skewed income distribution is likely to be more damaging to our economic system than inflation in, say , Denmark or Sweden or Europe as a whole or deflation would be in Japan due to a more equitable distribution of income (and pain and benefits). For example, public benefits such as health care, education, and unemployment assistance and retraining are more likely to be jettisoned if the super rich have no stake in them. (The social segregation that follows from this maldistribution of wealth also enables the rich never acknowledge the role chance plays in their success, but that is a topic for another day.) I am now eager to start testing this thesis — but I wanted to thank you for giving me the information to formulate the thesis.