“La sabiduría de la vida consiste en la eliminación de lo no esencial. En reducir los problemas de la filosofía a unos pocos solamente: el goce del hogar, de la vida, de la naturaleza, de la cultura”.
Lin Yutang
Cervantes
Hoy es el día más hermoso de nuestra vida, querido Sancho; los obstáculos más grandes, nuestras propias indecisiones; nuestro enemigo más fuerte, el miedo al poderoso y a nosotros mismos; la cosa más fácil, equivocarnos; la más destructiva, la mentira y el egoísmo; la peor derrota, el desaliento; los defectos más peligrosos, la soberbia y el rencor; las sensaciones más gratas, la buena conciencia, el esfuerzo para ser mejores sin ser perfectos, y sobretodo, la disposición para hacer el bien y combatir la injusticia dondequiera que esté.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES Don Quijote de la Mancha.
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12 de junio de 2016
Why the Oil Price Rally Might Falter By Julian Lee
Last
year's oil price rally ran out of steam in early May after 112 days.
This year's has already lasted longer (140 days so far) and prices have
risen further, but there are worries that, it, too, may be running ahead
of market fundamentals. While prices seem unlikely to collapse again,
there are good reasons to expect a pause in their upward march.
Crude
prices have nearly doubled from the lows reached in mid-January. Brent
rose above $50 a barrel last Monday and stayed there all week. West
Texas Intermediate crude narrowly failed to do the same after breaking
through the psychological barrier on Tuesday. Brent prices have risen an
average 18 cents a day since mid-January, remarkably similar to the 19
cents a day early last year.
Sure,
there's a real risk of structural supply shortages down the road, as
oil companies have slashed spending on new projects, but they're not
here yet. What we do have is a number of unforeseen disruptions, most
recently in Canada and Nigeria, with a further deterioration in Libya,
which have helped eliminate the surplus.
The U.S. Energy
Information Administration saw disruptions removing more than 3.6
million barrels a day of potential supply in May, probably more than at
any time since Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. Many stoppages have lasted
years already and may last many more. Some output may never be fully
recovered.
But some might return quite quickly. The biggest new
disruption is already being resolved: the wildfire that swept through
Alberta's oil sands and cut daily production by about 1.2 million
barrels. Canadian production is returning slowly and will continue to
add supply.
And while even the cheeriest optimist would hesitate
to call an end to U.S. output declines, production there has just risen
for the first time in three months on a week-by-week basis. Continental
Resources has started fracking wells that
it had drilled, but left uncompleted as prices collapsed. There were
4,290 such wells in the U.S. at the end of 2015 and others may follow
Continental's lead, although Bloomberg Intelligence's Peter Pulikkan
believes crude may need to rise another $5-$10 per barrel before that
happens.
It's true that other lost supply is much less likely to
return quickly. Nigerian output remains highly uncertain, with Shell
indicating that workers' safety will remain a priority over
repairing infrastructure and every day bringing reports of fresh
attacks. “There's clearly better organization and targeting," Shell's
finance director Simon Henry said this week, comparing the latest
attacks with those of 2009. Nevertheless, they remain focused on
nearshore and onshore facilities, with deepwater platforms untouched so
far.
Libya's political chaos also means there's little chance
of output there recovering soon. It fell to 250,000 barrels a day on
average in May, the lowest since February 2015, though it was reportedly
back above 300,000 barrels by early June.
Yet despite the outages, the EIA still sees global
inventories building through August. The resumption of Canadian supply,
or any lasting evidence that U.S. output has stopped falling, could
quickly tip bullish sentiment bearish again. Doubly so if there's
any improvement in Nigeria or Libya. Crude's upward trajectory is still a
fragile thing.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.