According to a report out on Bloomberg today, China is continuing its curb on vehicles put in place on July 20th to help with the pollution problem ahead of the Beijing Olympics, which apparently was quite effective.  The air quality is better now than it has been in over a decade, and in fact, pollutant levels dropped by as much as 50% during the Olympics.

The city will “seal off” 30 percent of government and Communist Party-registered vehicles Oct. 1, the Beijing government said on its Web site today. It will also limit the time the remaining government vehicles, as well as company- registered …

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An Iranian OPEC official on Saturday mentioned that OPEC members are trying to decide whether to cut output to “shore up” market prices for crude oil.

“The market is oversupplied by at least 1 million barrels a day. If OPEC would like to remove this additional oil out of the market, then OPEC has to cut some production,” OPEC governor Mohammad Ali Khatibi told Dow Jones in a telephone interview. -Source

Oversupplied by only 1 million bbls per day?  Is that all?

Perhaps they should wait to see what demand looks like after China restarts manufacturing operations after the closing of the Olympics.  As I mentioned in a …

For the last couple weeks I’ve been sitting on the sidelines trying to figure out how to play my hand in the market. There appears to be some semblance of rationality forming, but I think there are going to be new fundamentals arise that continue to beat back the bulls.

Crude oil ($wtic: chart) prices continue to drop, closing out the week under $114 per barrel, and natural gas ($natgas: chart) is maintaining ground just above $8 per MCF. Oil prices have dropped based on waning global demand, and natural gas prices have moderated for the same reason, just on a National scale.

On the topic of global demand, …