Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

If you listen to any oil and gas experts and ask them which president was the best for the oil and gas industry, do you know who they'll say? Trump? Absolutely not. Bush? No. It's Obama.

Why? Because policy was stable during Obama. Whatever the policy is, if it's predictable, businesses can work around that. This was a real problem during the Biden term when there was constant policy shifts.

We're seeing that now with the tariffs. The problem isn't the tariffs so much as it is the uncertainty. They change from day to day.

One might be tempted to think the administration is intentionally trying to crash the economy. No, they just have absolutely no idea what they're doing and there's a dementia patient in charge nobody can so no to.

> If you listen to any oil and gas experts and ask them which president was the best for the oil and gas industry, do you know who they'll say? Trump? Absolutely not. Bush? No. It's Obama.

Hmm, it's not that I couldn't believe it was Obama, but this is like a 2nd-hand appeal to authority. I would be interested in a bit more data to see why this is.

> Why? Because policy was stable during Obama.

Now of course we can see there was a record period of near all-time high high oil prices from 2011 to 2014 which corresponds to US employment boom in the sector. Was that the Obama good times that oil and gas experts would refer to? That started to crash in 2015 though, and petroleum industry employment with it. Was that crash due to Obama policy or just global drop in oil prices behind taht?

Some might argue the high oil prices of 2011-2014 years are related to Obama's presidency, but it would probably be less about stable trade policy and more like references to the Arab Spring, peak of ISIS, capitulation to Russia's annexation of Crimea.

Here's a chart of US daily crude oil production [1] and you see it takes off around 2010 or so. Now this is when fracking started to enter production and we started drilling in the Permian Basin but all this happened under Obama.

Now the 2015 oil crash is something I could talk a lot about. I'll try not to turn this into a wall of text.

In Obama's last term he faced a hostile Congress and wanted to pass some wind and solar rebates [2]. The deal he made with the Republican controlled Congress was to lift the ban on exporting crude oil in exchange for the renewable subsidies. This happened in 2015.

So why were crude oil exports banned? This happened about 40 years earlier during the OPEC oil crisis. As an aside, net crude oil exports stand at about ~3M barrels per day. Pretty much all production increases since have been for the export market. US domestic oil consumption has remained relatively stable, despite population increases.

In 2015, OPEC in general and Saudi Arabia in particular crashed the oil market by ramping up production. You can see this here [3]. Saudi Arabia in particular increased production by ~1M bpd in a short period of time. A lot of people think this was to crush the fracking industry, which was heavily in debt. I personally don't buy this explanation because as soon as the price recovers, someone else will buy their assets out of bankruptcy and you're back when you started.

I think it was punishment for lifting the crude oil export ban.

A whole bunch of oil producers and services companies did file for bankruptcy [4] and this whole incident set the stage for what later happened in 2017-2018 and 2020 where Trump basically screwed the energy sector multiple times.

[1]: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/leafhandler.ashx?n=pet&s=m...

[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-35136831

[3]: https://en.macromicro.me/charts/35226/opec-persian-gulf-regi...

[4]: https://graphics.wsj.com/oil-bankruptcies-tracker/?gaa_at=ea...

> Here's a chart of US daily crude oil production [1] and you see it takes off around 2010 or so. Now this is when fracking started to enter production and we started drilling in the Permian Basin but all this happened under Obama.

Yes around 2012 it started to rise, but that was a long way into his first term. Although if you're just going by production, it has been and is far higher after Obama's presidency. So I'm not sure what we make of that. And as you say, the crash happened during his term too.

So I think any kind of careful stable energy policy is really over selling it, yes the industry did well under him for a period of several years, but that looks more like being "lucky" with disastrous Middle East and North Africa interventions and destabilization (not all initiated by Obama of course) coming to a head, along with the birds of "the 1980s called" attitude toward Russia coming home to roost, which drove up oil prices to sustained near record highs that did it. And it wasn't just the prices, but the general attitude from energy companies and consumers that oil production must be diversified away from OPEC and Russia.