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Shipping News – Floating Storage/Tanker Rates & Pirate Update
For years there has been a large supply of crude floating on big oil
tankers. A significant portion of this is not under contract and does
not have a specific delivery date. Typically these vessels head for Asia
or the Americas. They do it at slow speed. They wait for contact from
the owners that the crude has been sold and a delivery date has been
set. When that happens the ship picks up speed and heads to the intended
port.
It is my understanding from talking to some shippers that this is
happening in a very big way as I write. It makes perfect sense. If you
were China Inc. and worried this morning about the predictability of
supply, the first thing you would do would be to secure as much of the
floating crude that was out there. We saw this same pattern in the early
days of Egypt. Back then the rush was to bulk up on supplies of wheat.
Today it is crude.
Two consequences from this. First a minor one. The cost of chartering an
oil tanker has falling from a high of $200,000 per day to as low at
$20,000 of late. We are going straight up on this number. Transportation
is part of the cost we pay to import the 10mm barrels of oil a day we
consume. This increased cost will flow very quickly into the cost of
gas.
More importantly is that the cost of spot crude (not futures) is going
to skyrocket. It already has. Look at the price being paid for spot
crude at the Gulf of Mexico. It opened this morning at $112. There is a
$20 premium for physical crude versus WTI Should the current
uncertainties on supply continue (or worsen) $4 gas in the next few
months is a foregone conclusion.
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PIRATE ACTION
So the Somali pirates killed the four Americans on the sailing ship.
This appears to have been prompted as a result of some effort by US
forces to liberate the ship before it made land. As of now the report is
that all of the pirates were captured or killed.
This is a terrible result. I wrote about this on February 11th. I concluded that report with the following:
Military action is not far off.
The apparent failure of US Special Ops to save the Americans confirms my prior observation. The only solution is boots on the ground. Keep
in mind that the pirates are sitting on (at least) 2 million barrels of
crude. Enough to despoil a good chunk of the African coastline for a
very long time.
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Flag will be flown at half-mast until they take their Vi-arrrgh-ra...
Laughing
Even bat nut fuck countries like the USA; you don't go out and twist the tail of the tiger and think he ain't going to bite your ass.
My gawd, we have met people even dumber than us. Milestones
We need to go Kaiser Sose' on their ass, kill them, kill their friends and families, kill their village, kill their facebook friends and kill anybody that ever perused their facebook page.
Careful, Keyser Soze shot his wife and kids first, then his enemies.
Turn the friggin' country into a parking lot, I say. The seas must be made safe for yachting!
You're joking, of course. These are President Obama's peeps. He's going to negotiate with them, downtrodden as they are. What they need is 99 weeks of unemployment insurance, food stamps, and a Democrat voter registration card.
Yep, just doin' a little community organizing according to the Gospel of Saul.
<\sarc>
- Ned
And, don't forget the 'Fast Track' visas so they can move to Maine and collect those bennies, or move to Minneapolis and continue their criminal pirate culture.
Thanks for the insight, guys. I would never have attributed the Somali piracy issue with Obama but now I see it's all his fault.
Looks like the maritime version of Obamatron's "open borders" policies...
I agree multi-millionare tourists with crew on their private yachts must be kept safe at all costs.
lol! Whatever...
Anyone within 1,000 miles of Somali coastline clearly has a deathwish and should not expect military assistance or rescue.
Not really, if you look at it from the angle of a bean counter/statist, you could justify a 300k rescue operation versus a multi million dollar insurance payout. Only now the insurance company has to pay out the life insurance and the legal fees of two dead wealthy Americans and their crew. The Somali's don't matter, they aren't insured with anyone so fuck'em.
So now the "good" idea of a rescue operation of a couple hundred grand, probably initiated by the insurance company on some level is now a multi million dollar fuck up.
Now the question is, Why did it fuck up? And today who's getting fired at the insurance company for making the excutive decision.
First that boat is 56', about $260K to replace her, and in the current market that is on the high side. Second YOU WILL NOT get insurance sailing into those waters, shit you can't even get a boat insurance policy (for US documented vessel) to sail to Venezuela or Columbia (much safer waters than Somalia)!!! Third, the other couple is NOT "crew", as in they are being paid. They are just along for the ride and to help stand watch on long passages.
If you are going to circumnavigate you have to sail by those waters.... you place your bets, you takes your chances ..... I am sure they thought long and hard before they did it and they knew the risk.
To be funded to take a sailing voyage around the world uninsured on the attempt to, as mentioned by another ZH'er, to distribute bibles to the unwashed masses of the Somalian pirate community I'm going to have say "yup, they are insane".
It's a too good to be true story. Sail the world on a 56 footer with friends, on a lark, with bibles to deliver, when there is no shortage of missionary interests in Africa...in Africa. Christain Childrens Fund, Christain Poverty...blah blah blah blah.
Just sounds like a hollywood script. Shit, FedEx delivers to Somalia. Overnight...in cargo planes. Guys on a donkey deliver to Somalia in carts. The idea of four Christian loons sailing around the world and stopping off in Somalia to drop off the good word seems like a total fabrication built on nonsense with a side of lies.
On a 56 foot boat with four people on a world sailing venture, how many bibles were they planning on delivering. One...four...maybe ten Bibles? And agreed, walk into bad waters and people take their chances. I would put money on insurance somewhere in this nonsense. What church were they delivering this package for? I would like to know what insurance policies were placed on everything on that boat just for shits and giggles.
No insurance..... I haven't sailed to that area of the world (I have friends that have) but if it is a flagged US vessels, last I checked you can't get insurance in that area of the world. Regarding the books, well, the boat "Hands Across the Sea" moored next to us for 6 weeks on the island of Dominica in Rousseau, nice couple, this is their web site
http://www.handsacrossthesea.net/WhatHandsDoes.htm
it's not a fabriciation nor is it built on lies, not a road I would walk down, but their are people like this out there...
You can fit a lot of shit on a offshore sailboat if you know how to pack, just keep in mind everything will get wet and the whole boat might go upside down and sometimes in really nasty shit off shore you can "fall off" big waves. (Tie the leah cloth tight and pack the pillows around you in your bunk, cause your body is more in the air than on the bunk kinda night, those are the nights the crew yells to the captain to "slow the fucken boat down" and reef the goddamn sail!!! )
Sweet Jesus on the cross. Hearts are full and minds are empty but of the Lord. May they find their way to heaven half an hour before the devil knows they are dead.
Poor bastards, but it still takes wealth to do that voyage though and insurance is always a moniker.
The idea of four Christian loons sailing around the world and stopping off in Somalia to drop off the good word seems like a total fabrication built on nonsense with a side of lies.
wag the dog...
Not "wag the dog".
Cruising offshore sailors are "not normal people"...... extremely eccentric, for the most part and very few are wealthy by most US standards.
It never would have come to this in Lord Nelson's day.
They need to hang every pirate in a public execution in front of their home town and families with the warning:
"If you pirate an American ship you forfeit your life - no negotiations - no trials."
Every pirate onboard that American family's ship was equally guilty of murdering the four Americans; every single pirate should be worm food by tomorrow morning.
No Quarter.
Live by the sword - die by the sword.
aye, ebworthen, aye: no bones about it, matey, none at all. call out the rascallionZ and see if the 7th Fleet makes it thru the week, for sure. i'll take the pi-rats, for $20. just give me 5-to-3, ok?
those navy toy boys are having so much good, clean FUN with their awacs and their laser eggs (only slightly radioactive), their missile co-ordZ, and their joy stcks, they mighta failed to notice...their skirts are up. again.
btw, bro, anybody noticed, yet, that the AMERICAN ship of STATE has been, uuuhhnh...hijacked? by banksters? and their "legal" teams? anybody? huh?
hey Bruce K: you wrote this:?:
"The apparent failure of US Special Ops to save the Americans confirms my prior observation. The only solution is boots on the ground. Keep in mind that the pirates are sitting on (at least) 2 million barrels of crude. Enough to despoil a good chunk of the African coastline for a very long time."
whose boots, you shit-headed bankster crotch-puppet asshole? my children's? cindy sheehan's? code pink's? the slaves yet unborn to your chattel prisoners, massah?
why don't you see if you can get the Swiss Guard in there, you pencil-necked little asswipe?
Yes, the American Ship is a much bigger ship to hijack; it appears...mission accomplished.
"Live by the sword - die by the sword."
Which is precisely why you won't see ane Russian flagged ships getting taken. A few months ago in response to a pirate attack they went out tracked down a few of the mother ships, boarded them, confirmed that they were pirate vessles (lots of weapons), handcuffed everyone on the boat to the ship and sunk it. Videotaped the whole thing too.
Got a cite?
Live by the sword - die by the sword.
Live for the fraud - incarcerated for the fraud.
I think the once all the information is extracted from them that is just what will happen.
.
What about pirates that invade other countries to plunder their oil using non-existant WMD's as an excuse? Should they recieve the same treatment?
Pirates should be executed. Presidents and elected officials that illegally order the invasion of other counties and commit crimes against humanity should be tried for war crimes. (then they should be executed!!)
Your comparing apples and oranges. lol
Agreed, by all means marine law exists for that purpose. The whole thing smells of kangaroo court it's unreal.
Works for the US too?
Since when do you capture pirates? This nation really is unrecoverable.
EXACTLY
You videotape Special forces shooting them off the bow of the ship one by one then youtube it facebook to their village.
Negotiation and trials for pirates, what a joke.
Take a boatload of pirates and shoot them one by one? Why bother? Pirates are what napalm was made for.
Hang 'em on the deck. Then say "arrrgh." And don't forget the eye-patch. i've got you covered on the parrot thing.
AAAWWWKKKKK!, Polly wanna cracker?
We used to have a yellow-nape amazon, she died from cancer several years ago. DO want another, but she was such a character, hard to replace that.
Hear about the new pirate movie?
It's rated "Arrrgh!"
many may know this and many may not, so thought it was worth posting.
The root of somali piracy lies in thoughtless western actions, at least in part.
Definitely worth a look.
http://sustainabilityandthecommons.wordpress.com/2010/10/18/somalia-nuclear-toxic-waste-dumping-and-foreign-fishing-piracy-2/
Even wikipedia talks about it...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_in_Somalia
The root causes are easily lost in the winds of the present.
ORI
http://aadivaahan.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/oil-crisis-in-a-thousand-words/
"It's steering me nuts!" <for some reason that punchline jumped in my head>
The problem with piracy is the exact same problem with drug dealing. The risk for someone with nothing and between the options of starvation vs. making money to eat, guess how fast the relative moralism of people gets thrown out. To have a moral position requires that some basic staples of life are readily available.
When I read these articles all I envision is the swarming mass of people on shore waiting for their chance to become a pirate, make some money and feed themselves. Much like the war on drugs taught law enforcement, there is literally a line up of people waiting to take a shot at what ails society.
Eventually, if thinking around how the drug trade evolved, the pirates will evolve to compensate for the swat tactics that were messily used to only provide the outcome of 4 dead Americans and a handful of third world pirates. I hear the same arguements as before in the war on Drugs of putting boots on the ground and managing the problem with military. Didn't work then, won't work now. It might feel good to make sure a couple of the pirates never see another sunrise, but in terms of escalation think of Mexico and the US Southwest. There is no "law" anymore, it's more or less fiefdoms of the drug cartels regardless of the taxes being spent on municipal levels.
With the call to mobilize the same method on the pirates, all that is going to happen is the actions and environment will only create a better pirate. Not remove the problem. Unless the military action is to nuke Somalia into a glass covered desert, bullets aren't going to solve it.
How did the British, French and Spanish deal with privateers (cough - pirates for hire)? Easy, they bribed them and eventually they died off or joined the Navy and faded into military command structures.
Piracy died out when we shifted high value cargo shipping from sail to coal. Even though we shipped low value cargo (wheat, guano, coal itself, etc) by windjammer, it wasn't as valuable or saleable as the pirates needed to turn a profit.
CPL: i've always enjoyed hemingway's pi-rat-icality and artististry. Islands In The Stream comes to mind, offhand: family, great kids with a great fish story, sane and insane women and a pirate's s'curvy loves, suspense, war, and a happy death, feelin yer blood drain into the sea, laid out upon a salty deck, while the men around you don't know whether to laugh or cry...
Made me laugh. "Its driving me nuts", though, I think it is. Aaarrgh.
A pirate walks into the bar and orders a drink the bartender says hey you know you have a steering wheel in your pants? the pirate reply's Arrghhh its driving me nuts.
Basic needs ( + what ever they see on cribs) vs laws... is it possible to be a nice pirate and still get paid?
"Eventually, if thinking around how the drug trade evolved, the pirates will evolve to compensate for the swat tactics that were messily used to only provide the outcome of 4 dead Americans and a handful of third world pirates."
How do you know there were no spec ops killed?
That's the point isn't it? Nothing is being reported on the story. It's a byline. A header. Nothing else. Shame if one did get killed, cost a lot of money to build "it", a lot of resources and at least four years of training.
Obviously something fucked up on that boat that managed to get the crew and a handful of third world pirates donating their organs.
From the 40-60 Somali pirate hijackings that have occured in the last twelve years PER YEAR, this is the first time I have heard of Somali's killing the crew, ever. They purposefully target insured vessels and understand that the insurance companies will pay. Why? Because that is what the insurance policies state. It is in the pirates best interests at any point in the hijacking process of merchant ships or multi-million dollar vessels to keep their capitives alive. I've read in some cases where the Phillipino sailors were treated better by the pirates than the officer crews of their own ships. How true that is, no clue and it's doesn't matter.
How did this current excursion fuck up so amazingly is what I'm curious about.
Don't expect the military to divulge anything resembling the truth anytime soon!
The moral hazard was unleashed a long time ago when the financial sector of the world economy decided that fraud would be the status quo. Much greater piracy in the future, many will call it quantitative easing or a tax, or a fee, etc.