Within the edible oil industry, the Chinese olive oil market is now the focus of global attention

The first US president with a Yale B.A. and Harvard a M.B.A. has finally clarified what led to the country’s crippling bank bailout and credit crisis.
At a closed Republican fund-raiser in Houston last week – one at which video recording was banned, but one attendee captured on a mobile phone – President Bush described what caused the US’s current economic malaise this way:
“Wall Street got drunk – that’s one reason I asked you to turn off your TV cameras – it got drunk, and now it’s got a hangover. The question is, ‘How long will it sober up and not try to do all these fancy financial instruments?’”
On Monday the White House tried to clean up the President's statement.
A Bush spokesperson said,
“The markets were using very complex financial instruments that had grown up over the years, and when confronted with the shock of this housing downturn, they did not fully understand what the consequences were going to be.”
Oh baby, you know this one is right in my wheelhouse.
I can’t stop singing the chorus of The Band’s “Up On Cripple Creek.”
But, other than to reveal my new excuse for getting hammered – “The bartender and bar were using a very complex system of service and pricing while I failed to grow up over the years and when I was confronted with closing time I did not fully understand consequences of ordering three doubles…”
I will demure on this one.
Instead, I’ll just leave this one teed up for you.
On “Wall Street got drunk,” I eagerly await your comments via the exercise of your First Amendment guarantee of free speech – use it while you still have it – this White House still has six months left to work on that.
And, I promise, if you grip it and rip it; I’ll run a bunch of your responses next week.
Now, onto more oily thoughts.
Up, With Two Olives Please
I spent the past two weeks researching Iraq’s oil industry for a story I wanted to run today.
It’s a heck of a story.
Then every financial writer on the planet spent the same time writing, on alternating days, about oil or the failure of deregulation as expressed by federal mortgage lenders.
So, I am going to spike the Iraq piece and save it for a time when the financial media have moved onto to their next obsessions such as – gold that’s found in offshore oil wells that were purchased with loans from Freddy Mac… and about an ex Fannie Mae accountant who’s now a gas station attendant who refuses to let customers buy $4.50 gas with gold or bottles of first growth Bordeaux, because neither are legal tender.
Just like sticks aren’t money… just like birch bark isn’t money… just like yak poo isn’t money… just like gold is not money. Unless, that is you own a website or you write books about grand monetary conspiracies... that’s just pure gold.
Though, I do wonder how the customers of those websites’ manage to pay for the stuff they buy. It must be very time consuming to get all that the gold into the little wires that brings the Internet from house to house.
So, no oil this week, okay, maybe just a drop or two, later, down at the bottom – but nothing heavy like a discussion of Iraq’s geology. Like you, I am simply awash in oil stories.
Instead, this week, I want to share with you a story about outrageous consumption. You see, since 2005, China has been the world’s biggest consumer of oil… edible oils that is.
In fact, the Chinese now annually consume about 44 pounds of edible oil per person.
And, for the past six years that rate has risen at a steady 10% a year, which is a trend that should peak around 2111.
In the next couple of years, the country’s bean oil, palm oil, olive oil and grape seed oil imports will top a combined 350 million tons.
Within the edible oil industry, the Chinese olive oil market is now the focus of global attention.