Oil prices in a declining world economy

It’s been three full days since I stopped going out of the house because Cebu City has gone into community quarantine, even asking senior citizens from age 65 and up to stay home. With the Cebu archdiocese finally deciding to suspend the holding of the holy mass… we are all watching the mass on our television screen. In the meantime, thanks to YouTube, we are able to view how the world is handling this global crisis… which has literally ruined the world economy. 

For instance, I noted with great interest the fight for world oil prices between Saudi Arabia and Russia… and it seems that world oil prices have dropped from the usual $80 plus  per barrel to as low as $30 per barrel. In a discussion we learned that Saudi Arabia must sell its oil at $80 per barrel to make this business profitable. However it seems that Russia can sell its oil at a lower cost at $40 per barrel. But today the cost of fuel has now gone down to $30 per barrel, giving the Saudi economy a serious headache. 

While this situation on the pump prices of fuel products has become so affordable… for sure this would greatly benefit the consumer except that… thanks to COVID-19 the global situation is that most nations or economies have gone on a serious lockdown that while prices of fuel products are so cheap… and the roads are now traffic free… no one is going out of their homes except only for vital things like groceries. Most of the world’s airlines that consumed a huge amount of fuel have also stopped flying its routes… thus this is really a very unhealthy situation for the world economy. 

Meanwhile this global phenomenon called COVID-19 has truly captured the world in a very unprecedented way. With the use of Google, you would be able to find out that there were times when the nations of the world faced horrifying plagues and pestilence. I didn’t dwell anymore on the ancient centuries, I just started with the Black Death in 1350 which devastated almost one third of the world population. This was the second time that the Bubonic plague made havoc to the world. Dead bodies became so prevalent that many remained rotting on the ground and created a constant stench in cities.

As I checked on Google, in 1492 was the time for the Columbian Exchange when the Spaniards arrived in the Caribbean bringing with them diseases such as smallpox, measles and bubonic plague were passed along to the native populations by the Europeans. With no previous exposure, these diseases devastated indigenous people, with as many as 90 percent dying throughout the north and south continents. In 1520, the Aztec Empire was destroyed not only by the Spanish Conquistadors, but via smallpox infection brought by African slaves.

Then the year 1665 brought the Great Plague of London, bring untold death and misery to the once flourishing city that killed 20 percent of London’s population. As death tolls mounted and mass graves appeared, hundreds of thousands of cats and dogs were slaughtered as the possible cause of the disease spread through ports along the Thames. The worst of the outbreak tapered off in the fall of 1666, around the same time as another destructive event, the great fire of London happened.

Then in 1817 came the first Cholera Pandemic. This was the first of seven Cholera Pandemics over the next 150 years, this wave of the small intestine infection originated in Russia, where one million people died. Spreading through feces-infected water and food, the bacterium was passed along to British soldiers who brought it to India where millions more died. 

Then came the 1918 Spanish Flu that killed 50 million people, however in a year’s time… a vaccine was invented that put a stop to this pandemic. It was the first pandemic that was helped by the world tourism economy. Then we had the 1957 Asian flu that started in Hong Kong and spreading throughout China and then into the United States. The Asian flu became widespread in England where, over six months, 14,000 people died. A second wave followed in early 1958, causing an estimated total of about 1.1 million deaths globally, with 116,000 deaths in the United States alone. A vaccine was developed, effectively containing the pandemic.

Finally in 1981 we had the HIV/AIDS, which was the result of the promiscuous sexual revolution, then by the year 2003 we had what we called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which most of us already know this by now. Of course today the world is suffering from the COVID-19, which literally equalizes the people on this planet. It victimizes even world leaders or ordinary people. So the Philippines like most of the nations on this earth are on what we call a lockdown. For how long? Hopefully by the end of April we would find a vaccine to prevent the spread of this virus so the world can recover our devastated economy.

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