Nt quite Doug Mataconis

Watch Doug Mataconis of Outside the Beltway bury himself:

Like I said, it’s likely that increasing energy prices at the start of the recession made an already bad situation worse, but the cause-and-effect argument that Santorum is making here makes no sense whatsoever. Outside the Beltway

Great, he buries digs in on his position

2) On content, this seems like a pretty clear case of getting the direction wrong. Lehman fails in September 2008 and the economy collapses. That leads gasoline prices to plunge precipitously (check out the price series at http://gasbuddy.com/gb_retail_price_chart.aspx and click on the 5 year or 4 year graph) according to all analysts at the time because people understand output will be falling, not the other way around.

Doug says we have cause and effect wrong.  What caused the gas price hike in 2005, and how did the financial shenanigans caused the price spike in spike 2008?  Why is it that since 2001 the real and nominal price of oil track so closely?

Doug cites another post by Zeke Miller::

Santorum’s comments appear to stretch the limits of credulity. The words “gas,” “gasoline,” and “energy” to not appear in the conclusions of the congressionally-appointed Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission,tasked with exploring the root causes of the 2008 recession and financialcrisis.

If we can recall, the Financial Crisis committee was only allowed to investigate finacial issue, they were bot charge wit looking at energy shortages in 2005-2008.

The problem here is bad math.  Doug should know that when the real price of a good tracks the nominal price to a correlation coefficient of .9 over a ten year period, then we have a shortage, and we have suffered severe energy shortages since 2000..  There is no way around this math, if money means anything.

Denial:

There as been a huge denial of the problem, though I do not know why. We talk about Peak Oil endlessly, then when the crash comes, we deny it happened!