Good news/bad news

Two bits of news have come out this morning.

First, it looks as though President Obama's $825 billion stimulus bill will go through.

For better or worse--and we hope not worse--hopefully this will be a positive stimulus to the economy, what we need to get banks and businesses working again so more people don't lose their jobs.

Hopefully, too, it won't just be pork barrel politics with millions and billions wasted.

Hey, I'm an optimist.

The Dow is up on this news so that's good, too.

The second note is that the price for a barrel of oil just jumped, too, to $42.00 a barrel.

And there's a rub.

Can you imagine how many speculative dollars are going to flow into oil futures if anyone senses that even the American economy begins to recover, let alone the world? How about just the United States, China and India?

There will be so many people buying oil futures, there's no telling how high it would return.

This points out that we have to put back into place the curbs on speculation that our government took out in 2000. The ones we were missing when oil went to $147.00 a barrel and it was in the range of $4.00 a gallon at the local Kwiky Mart.

If we don't, forget about business recovery.

We'll have a small contingent of oil millionaires and everyone else choked off from work.

Here's the links:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/obama_economy
http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=72189