Almost There!

It looks like Ghadaffi (Khadaffi, Qadaffi, spell it any way you want; I like Quite Daffy) isn't going to last very long, his fall will pretty much complete the set of "South-Shore of the Med" dictators to become unemployed. One has to hope that the contagion spreads to Syria and Iran, it would be nice to see the evil bastards that rule (ruin) those sorry countries be thrown out on their ears.


Much tribulation attends The Colonel's demise as Libya is actually a net oil exporter and supplies much of Italy's oil and natural gas, and Italy can little afford the sort of financial shock that an interruption of those supplies would bring.

Oops, looks like that was too late. Check this out;



Looks like the "quiet one" from the PIIGS just became very noticeable as a high-risk situation.

Anyways, even a slight drop in overall oil production can lead to a significant increase in at-the-pump prices (+15 cents, just today, in these parts) as well as encouraging speculators to jump in and run the price up a bit. This bodes ill for the "nascent economic recovery" as rising energy costs will even further compress the rapidly shrinking margins for any business that relies on any sort of power. Timmy Turbo-Tax-Man Geithner's assurance that the "..Central Banks can manage this situation.."  leaves me thinking that I should have bought more ammo and food back when it was cheap.

Add to this the Dollars current imitation of a Kamikaze pilot on his way to meet his ancestors combined with the drop in the Stock Market and the Bond Market it looks like we are heading for the proverbial "interesting times".

UPDATE; I now find that the Saudis are the target of a planned revolution set for 20MAR11. This will get very interesting indeed, if the the KSA princelings cannot buy the loyalty of their subjects, then one is left to ask if can be done at all.

BTW street protests have been popping up in Wisconsin and Ohio, these don't seem to be the spontaneous sort for the MidEast but the product of the Democrat/Union-Boss cabal that feels threatened by the Repulican Governors crackdown on outlandish pay and pensions for the sort of useless bureacrats that make government "work".