Thanks Vladimir Putin for the Oil Price Drop. Now, Will Big Oil Pass on the Benefits?

(Before It's News)

Gas prices are falling dramatically all over the western world largely because of Iran’s oil position and 
Russia’s reaction.

It would be a peaceful Christmas if American gas pump prices lined up with the rest of the world’s. We shall soon see if we are indeed slaves to “Profit before People” Capitalist System - Tom Dennen

“Great powers and empires are, I would suggest, complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organized, which means their construction more resembles a termite hill than an Egyptian pyramid. They operate somewhere between order and disorder – on “the edge of chaos,” in the phrase of the computer scientist Christopher Langton. Such systems can appear to operate quite stably for some time; they seem to be in equilibrium but are, in fact, constantly adapting. But there comes a moment when complex systems “go critical.” A very small trigger can set off a “phase transition” from a benign equilibrium to a crisis – a single grain of sand causes a whole pile to collapse, or a butterfly flaps its wings in theAmazon and brings about a hurricane in southeastern England.

“Not long after such crises happen, historians arrive on the scene. They are the scholars who specialize in the study of “fat tail” events – the low-frequency, high-impact moments that inhabit the tails of probability distributions, such as wars, revolutions, financial crashes, and imperial collapses. But historians often misunderstand complexity in decoding these events. They are trained to explain calamity in terms of long-term causes, often dating back decades. This is what Nassim Taleb rightly condemned in The Black Swan as “the narrative fallacy”: the construction of psychologically satisfying stories on the principle of post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

 Niall Ferguson, “Complexity and Collapse”

Read more from John Mauldin

Bad Yen Falling

The Obvious Impacts
Every Central Bank for Itself
Seriously, the Fed Is Doing What?
Complexity and Collapse
The Fragile Eight
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