Nobody knows, but remember that between now and the end of 2011 the value of the US dollar (which is what that index is stated in) could change dramatically.

Most people are assuming either a "V" or a "U" - a recovery on the way, either sooner or later. Not me: I am assuming an "L" - a leveling out with no real recovery - folowed by further "Ls" in a stairstep path downward over the next few decades.

I believe this is likely because the US has multiple huge problems which are not being addressed, and are unlikely to be addressed effectively. Absent effective action (in contrast to running around like headless chickens, throwing money we don't have around mindlessly), I see little reason to believe that the US economy can sustain any real economic growth. Absent any real growth, there is no good reason for the stock market (which is a leading economic indicator) to move up. Given what we know about oil (and all other non-renewable resource) depletion, there IS good reason to believe that the long-term trend will be downward. Given that these things never seem to follow smooth pathways, my stairstep pattern seems as good a model as any.

The market may go down some more before leveling off, or it might level off soon. I do think that average p/e ratios are finally getting close to where they should be, so that further trending downward at this point would be a function of lowered expectations for earnings. That could well happen; I am not totally convinced that the overall market has become appropriately pessimistic enough about future earnings outlooks, even at this late date. I don't think that this dynamic is likely to drive further declines on a percentage basis quite as drastic as what we have seen over the past year.

Bottom line: DJI may decline possibly another 20% or so at most, but in any case will level off within the next year and trade within a relatively steady range for the following two or three years at least.

So why invest in stocks at all? I can only see two reasons that make any sense at all: dividends and diversification.

Way back in the mists of history, dividend yield was an important consideration. The advantage of dividends over interest is that they are not so locked in. In an inflationary environment, if the company is positioned in a manner that allows it to raise prices and maintain real profits, then its dividends can be a good inflation-proofed source of income. In a recessionary/deflationary environment, if the company is very sound and positioned in a manner that allows it to maintain its prices and income, then its dividens can be a good, secure, deflation-proofed source of income. Because stockholders come at the end of the line when it comes to liquidating assets in a bankruptcy, stocks are more risky than interest-bearing securities; that is why dividend yields SHOULD be higher than prevailing interest rates - unless both the company and its investors are looking for capital gains instead. Over the past 3/4 century, capital gains have become the main game, and dividends mostly an afterthought. I believe that those days are over, that we are going to see a huge paradigm shift away from the emphais on capital gains (which are going to be rare in a long-term declining market) and back toward decent dividend yields.

As for diversification, I still believe it is a good strategy. I could be wrong about all of the above, of course. Maybe the market will rocket into the stratosphere. Then one would feel pretty foolish having had nothing at all invested in the stock market. As I suggested above, there are many inflationary or deflationary scenarios where carefully-selected stocks in very sound, well-positioned companies paying good dividens can be an important part of one's portfolio.

IMHO, anyway. YMMV.

No one knows what the markets are going to do in the near-to-midterm future, or even if there will be markets. So don't worry about them. I did some investing in the '90s & made some money, then got out when I started losing money around the time of the neocon coup at the turn of the millenium. Instead of playing the markets I focused on paying off my property. The markets are rigged against you & even if you do make some money, it's ill-gotten gains. Participation in evil condones evil. Focus on growing food instead. Invest in hand tools that will aid you in growing food, not in market scams.

All you people focused on your charts & graphs and what the markets may or may not do are delusional. You are so thoroly socialized to a anthropocentric paradigm that you actually think economics is a rigorous science. Even those on TOD who claim creds in "Human Ecology" or "Energy Ecology" know very little actual ecology or even basic biology. You fiddle around with your projections & predictions & models within a wholly BAU paradigm. That paradigm is collapsing by the very minute. The human population exceeds the carrying capacity (K) of the biosphere by well over an order of magnitude. The only way so many people have managed to be fed is thru exploitation of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are rapidly being depleted at the same time that their utilization is rapidly reducing K. Whatever the markets do in the near-to-midterm, the only markets there are going to be in the long term will trade labor for food, shotgun shells for shovel blades, 3 dead rats for 1 dead 'possum, etc. That's our future, ready for it or not. Focus on what financial markets may or may not do indicates that you sure aren't ready for it.

Market bottoms when we have a 2008 valued 12 dollar barrel of oil.
:)

The markets from here on out will be characterized by wild volatility. This state is a result of increasing nonlinear pressures on multiple critical points in the system (eg, involving energy and food), which then produce unexpected feedback in other points in the system.

And as time goes on, the proximate reasons for each price swing will be harder and harder to pinpoint and understand.

In other words, it's going to be chaotic and specifically unpredictable.

There have been a lot of helpful responses to my market-prognostication question; thanks. Perhaps I should explain why I raised the question: Like the skyrocketing oil prices earlier this year, it has been my experience that precipitiously declining equities markets lead to a "teachable moment." Many who would not be open to the Peak Oil perspective have a way of becoming open to it at least a little bit when suddenly they find themselves in a state of fear about their long-term expectations for material security and comfort. In that regard, a continued rapid market decline could be beneficial for spreading the Peak Oil meme.

Leanan or others,

There was concernd a couple weeks ago about Iceland having issues with food security and shelves of imported food running empty. Any updates on food supply in Iceland? Any Icelanders reading?

Car sales down 95%:
http://di.se/Nyheter/?page=/Avdelningar/Artikel.aspx%3FO%3DRSS%26Article...

Several shiploads of new cars have been turned away from ports:
http://di.se/Nyheter/?page=/Avdelningar/Artikel.aspx%3FO%3DRSS%26Article...

I know a country, also with nukes, many, many nukes, one that has already used them, and is threatening to use them again, and is still developing them, and whose economy is also imploding, and the implosion is taking the rest of the world down it. That's the country I'm worried about -- my country.

The US going down it's own Yankee built global-corperate-world-economic-flusher and its military bullying everything in sight you woof about Pakistan? It looks like the US has four times as many types, let alone numbers, of nukes than Pakistan has bombs.

Sheesh Totoneila, it is bad enough that your rulers do what they do to instigate strife and instability in the world, but do you as an, I assume, ordinary citizen have to fall in line so blindly?

Isn't Bin Laden hanging out in Pakistan? I mean, think of this... This guy is a hero to folks near the Afghan/Pakistani border... Could you imagine the fallout if we get another videotaped speech with him, but instead he tells us he's nuclear capable?

You keep talking about Martin Freidman. Do you mean Milton Friedman?

Classical/neoliberal economics works beautifully when it comes to the exchange of pure private goods in a market of many buyers and sellers, undistorted by monopolies or other market failures, and with no externalities involved. There might actually be a few things in the real world that this describes.

The trouble is, private goods are not everything. You also have public goods, toll goods, and common-pool goods. Each are different in character in ways that assure a serious market failure if a purely market-based approach is attempted on them.

The "solution" of the Chicago School boys lately has been to try to deny that these other types of goods exist, and to privatize everything. If you are looking for the origin of the phenomenon of "privatization of profits, socialization of costs", here is where it is.

Their solution doesn't work, just as the Marxist prescription of nationalizing and socializing everything doesn't work either.

There are other points of view about economics besides the either/or neoclassical Capitalist vs. Keynesian vs. Marxist, for example, Ecological Economics. Herman Daley and others started the movement which became International Society for Ecological Economics back in 1989 and has grown to include members from many countries around the World. In the commentary you point to about "Hip Heterodoxy", Christopher Hayes has nothing what ever to say about the fact that all our economic activities occur within the limited boundaries of the Earth and that most all economists ignore that fact. Even the Technocrats realized (before the environmental movement) that energy was the key factor in industrial production and the energy theory of value was the proper definition of money. But the economic priesthood has pushed us into a corner based on debit money, with the resulting cycles of boom followed by bust, one of which we are seeing just now. Greed is good. So it goes...

E. Swanson

I attended a Climate Change conference about 5 years ago and was almost driven to hysterics and tears by the economists. I wrote about it here: http://globalpublicmedia.com/the_climate_wrecking_ball

UC Berkeley professors dominated the opening sessions. They stood up at the front in nice suits and ties and pronounced the results of their new econometric models of the California state-wide economy for the next 100 years. Housing would fill up the prime ag soils in the central valley. The electric grid, freeway system, levees, water and sewage treatment systems, etc. would all have to enlarge massively, not only to cope with the 2-3 fold increase in population (60-90 million by 2100), but the great stress we'd all be under from the heat waves, flood events, storm surges, etc.

I kept asking questions like, "Where does the food come from if the farm land is all paved over?"

Answer: "We import it."

I went on: "Where does all the extra electricity come from to keep those air conditioners running?"
(Note that under their models electricity for air conditioning ALONE will be greater than TOTAL electricity use today).

Answer: "This will be a challenge."

I don't think I have ever been more disappointed in the "intellectual elite class." There no more clothes among any emperors.

"1) Free markets are inviolate and infallible. They are always efficient and rational and are the best way to allocate scarce goods and resources. Or, as Paul Krugman explains, the adherents of classical economics hold that the answer to almost all problems is “to let the forces of supply and demand do their job.”

Not even Freidman believed that markets were "infallible." But what makes you think politicians, central planers, bureaucrats, or whatever is better?

From the Coyote Blog:

Government and Regulation

One argument about regulation that seems to be gaining traction through the recent financial crisis is "See, private action and enterprise is not infallible. They can make mistakes that have costs for everyone. Therefore they need to be regulated."

I don't have time for the full refutation of this, but a few thoughts:

* No one ever said that private actors in the economy are infallible or even universally honest. However, no one has ever been able to make the case that government employees are any more infallible or honest.
* There are a couple of reasons government regulators are going to be demonstrably worse than the marketplace in making decisions. The first is information -- a few actors in Washington can never have the same access to information as thousands of actors across the country or around the world. The second is incentives -- while regulatory hawks cite private greed as a bad incentive in the marketplace, bureaucratic incentives can be at least as problematic.
* Governments are subject to all sorts of rent-seeking initiatives, not to mention regulatory capture, that undermine regulatory effectiveness. Just look at the bailout bill. Wooden arrows?

For some reason, the argument "private actors screwed up" seems sufficient justification for regulation. The burden of proof should instead be "the government could have done better."

Here is a nice example of how regulation really works, from an interview with Warren Buffett:

QUICK: If you imagine where things will go with Fannie and Freddie, and you think about the regulators, where were the regulators for what was happening, and can something like this be prevented from happening again?

Mr. BUFFETT: Well, it's really an incredible case study in regulation
because something called OFHEO was set up in 1992 by Congress, and the sole job of OFHEO was to watch over Fannie and Freddie, someone to watch over them. And they were there to evaluate the soundness and the accounting and all of that. Two companies were all they had to regulate. OFHEO has over 200 employees now. They have a budget now that's $65 million a year, and all they have to do is look at two companies. I mean, you know, I look at more than two companies.

QUICK: Mm-hmm.

Mr. BUFFETT: And they sat there, made reports to the Congress, you can get them on the Internet, every year. And, in fact, they reported to Sarbanes and Oxley every year. And they went--wrote 100 page reports, and they said, 'We've looked at these people and their standards are fine and their directors are fine and everything was fine.' And then all of a sudden you had two of the greatest accounting misstatements in history. You had all kinds of management malfeasance, and it all came out. And, of course, the classic thing was that after it all came out, OFHEO wrote a 350--340 page report examining what went wrong, and they blamed the management, they blamed the directors, they blamed the audit committee. They didn't have a word in there about themselves, and they're the ones that 200 people were going to work every day with just two companies to think about. It just shows the problems of regulation.

The problem, of course, is that Fannie and Freddie were doing exactly what Congress wanted them to do -- systematically lowering mortgage underwriting standards. They won't put it that way now, but that is what spreading home ownership to lower income families really amounted to.

Posted on October 7, 2008 at 10:43 AM

Whenever the economics issue comes up, I like to point these people to their Bible of economic dire consequences IF we (the US) adopted the Kyoto Treaty. There is this little position paper written by the EIA that predicts terribly expensive gasoline (up to $1.60 per gallon in 1996 dollars if memory serves) by 2012. there was another little think tank paper on the number of manufacturing jobs tht would be lost (somebody forgot to change the water in that think tank) that is much smaller than the amont the US has actually lost in that same period.

Of course, there was always Julian Simon.

Thanks for putting all of these together.

All five of these countries are, or were, major net oil exporters--exporting one mbpd or more. The initial decline is measured from the approximate final production peak. For the UK and Indonesia, the final decline rate is the last year of net oil exports. For the other three, it's the 2007 data.

Key point: five countries with vastly different demographic factors, such as per capita income, and vastly different energy policies, e.g., the UK taxes energy consumption, while Indonesia subsidizes energy consumption, but all five show a consistent pattern, an accelerating net export decline rate.

Note that there is a big difference between percentage declines, and decline rates per year. For example, consider production increases. A 100% increase in production in one year doubles the production, but a 100%/year rate of increase in production increases production by a factor of 2.7 in one year. It works the same way with production declines. A 230%/year decline rate causes production to fall by about 90% in one year.

Reminds me of that article about Brooksley Born.

In 1997, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal agency that regulates options and futures trading, began exploring derivatives regulation. The commission, then led by a lawyer named Brooksley E. Born, invited comments about how best to oversee certain derivatives.

Ms. Born was concerned that unfettered, opaque trading could “threaten our regulated markets or, indeed, our economy without any federal agency knowing about it,” she said in Congressional testimony. She called for greater disclosure of trades and reserves to cushion against losses.

Ms. Born’s views incited fierce opposition from Mr. Greenspan and Robert E. Rubin, the Treasury secretary then. Treasury lawyers concluded that merely discussing new rules threatened the derivatives market. Mr. Greenspan warned that too many rules would damage Wall Street, prompting traders to take their business overseas.

“Greenspan told Brooksley that she essentially didn’t know what she was doing and she’d cause a financial crisis,” said Michael Greenberger, who was a senior director at the commission. “Brooksley was this woman who was not playing tennis with these guys and not having lunch with these guys. There was a little bit of the feeling that this woman was not of Wall Street.”

Heard a great quip at a seminar yesterday, "If you're not at the table, you're on the menu".

"I suppose there are lessons here, yet I'm not sure exactly what they are."

I forget who said it the other day but it has stuck in my head since;

"Your either a rancher or your ranched" if you opt out of both you are dismissed.

Iv'e been dismissed so now I get to go out and play. Yea!

Yes, there is a lesson: People who tell the people at the top of large organizations what they don't want to hear never make it to the top of those large organizations. A few top dogs, if they are exceptionally wise, might keep a few dissidents around just to provide an early warning system and an antidote to groupthink. I emphasize, these are very much the rare exceptions and not the rule. None of those token dissidents should ever labor under any delusion that they are on the ladder toward the top; they are strictly hired help. Furthermore, they are usually the very first to get the axe when the new top dog ascends to his lofty throne.

This isn't the way it should be, and it explains a lot of what is wrong with our governments, businesses, universities, and other institutions. Unfortunately, this is the way it is. Too bad no one was able to explain this to her up front.

"Prophet" has never been a very rewarding profession, at least as far as any worldly rewards are concerned. If that is your chosen career path, you had best adjust your expectations to look for purely psychic or spiritual rewards, because those are about all that you are going to get.

What irritates me and angers me, is that she, in my opinion, had the ability to go really far, yet she was 'filtered out' by the system, and now she's been effectively marginalized, far away from real influence and power. I suppose there are lessons here, yet I'm not sure exactly what they are.

The lesson is that people get in power by telling others things they want to hear, not things they don't want to hear.

She was telling them things they didn't want to hear... That much of the economy, as it is currently structured, is disfunctional; that there was impending economic disaster; and that change was needed to avoid or mitigate future issues.

They wanted to hear that everything is running smoothly and things will continue to run smoothly (Who wants someone to tell them they're a captain of a sinking ship?). And, to reinforce this, many of the folks in power surround themselves with folks who believe the status quo is "Situation Normal", and then hand the reins of power over to them. I beleive we've seen this in many places... The handling of the terrorist problems prior to 9/11; the handling of the current economic mess; and the Iraq war are a few. This herd mentality has gotten us over many a cliff...

And I truly feel bad if she was marginalized because of her gender. I beleive that women have as much to offer to the world as men do, and anyone who beleives differently is just a bigot.

Writerman,

My guess is that your friend is up against much more than a prejudice against women in economics: She is up against a big oversupply in economists. How many economists do we need? Not very many. How many economists do we have? Lots, and the graduate schools keep churning them out. Notable women have done well in economics since the time of Joan Robinson, in the thirties. Two of my daughters have degrees in economics, and they both have good jobs at a fairly young age.

We don't even need more economists to get more good ideas. There are plenty of good ideas presented by economists (e.g., Implement a stiff tax on gasoline.) that nobody pays attention to in the U.S. Economists have come up with better ideas on the redistribution of income, namely, a negative income tax, than we now have in place. There is an extensive literature on steady-state economics.

It's all about being liked in a sense,the more well liked you are, the more influence you have.

Robert Cialdini studied how “influence professionals” exploit our reflexes. His findings, along with those of other psychologists, explain the ways in which optimism can trump logic.

Cialdini pointed out that we are more apt to comply with those we like—that is, people who are similar to us and people whom we find attractive. We are therefore more likely to shun someone who pours cold water on our pet ideas. Thus, people who want social influence will reinforce—or, at least, not dispute—optimistic assessments.

To smooth their dealings with others, people resort to white lies—large and small—with startling frequency: A study by social psychologist Robert Feldman found that 60 percent of his subjects told lies, at an average frequency of two to three lies per ten-minute period. No surprise that our co-workers and colleagues reinforce and amplify our rose-colored views more often than they dispute our assessments.

On the other hand, Nouriel Roubini suddenly has rock star status:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article5014463.ece

But after making a series of uncannily accurate predictions about the global meltdown, Roubini has become the prophet of his age, jetting around the world dispensing his advice and latest prognostications to politicians and businessmen desperate to know what happens next – and for any answer to the crisis.

yes, it usually doesnt pay to be right, especially when you are right about something "they" dont want to hear. conform, go along to get along, dont rock the boat.

corporations are paying big bucks for mediocrity. same applies to university athletics.

Her name would't be Cassandra by any chance, would it?

All animals seek pleasure and avoid pain.

Information can be either a source of comfort or discomfort.

Therefore, anybody who causes pain by providing information will be discredited by those potentially most affected by it.

The Greeks came up with a myth ("Cassandra") as a kind of warning to people and societies to not filter out voices that might give apt advice before a disaster. But anything that threatens the status quo is of course filtered out, and the myth pays heed to this fact.

It has been observed that in the face of a threat the society will redouble efforts to continue going down the same path it has always followed. No matter how hopeless, no matter how useless, no matter how ineffective.....the previously trodden path is the only one under consideration. In fact, perhaps as things become more hopeless, people feel the need to find security in the status quo.

I think this is a ridiculous idea.

We are not the only oil consumers in the world; it's beyond our power to force oil prices down to $20/barrel and keep them there.

Power use for telecom/datacom will double by 2020 (from 61TW estimated today) on the current path

Perhaps you mean 61GW, for the world doesn't have 61TW available.

I personally am not too concerned about the power consumption of telecom and computer data centers. Anyone who is sitting in one place talking on the phone is someone who isnt out driving somewhere, riding a snowmobile, jetski, or ORV. Everyone staying home browsing the internet, watching TV, or playing video games is someone who is using relatively less energy than if they were out buying stuff, jetting around the world, or eating at a high end restaurant.
I say give the data centers all the power they want. Anything to keep the people at home and not consuming fossil fuels.

Credit and trust are pillars of capitalism. Without either capitalism is finished. I suspect that the recent laxity of regulation and securitization have basterdized lending to such a degree that some serious damage to the economy cannot be avoided. This shall pass however, and when more normal credit markets prevail, these large infrastructure projects will be financed again (albeit at a much higher interest rate!)

So true rain. Today's price of oil isn't much of a factor. It takes 5 or 6 years to build the big rigs. Payout can take another 5 to 8 years. Thus the rig builders today would be looking at oil prices from 2013 on to determine the economic value. Credti/cash flow will be the determining factor in which rigs get built, delay or cancelled. And many rigs are built as JV's with operators so any credit difficulties with the E&P companies will show up in the build out schedule too.

Dow up about 900 points, closed back over 9,000

What was that Nephilim was saying yesterday...

Another day of Depression era stock movements. Beware of the company you keep. (Today rang in at 10.9%)

Macro Man compiled this a couple of weeks ago...

A few months ago, I talked to an older gentleman who was in high school in Dallas in the Second World War. He said he took his date to the prom on a streetcar.

One of the things I learned at the recent Electrification of Transportation symposium was that Dallas at one time had almost 200 miles of streetcar lines, with 400 streetcars, not counting the electric Interurban system. All that is left is the small McKinney Avenue Trolley system, which they are trying to expand.

In any case, here is a link to the excellent interview with Alan Drake and Jay Kline (VP of DART, Dallas Area Rapid Transit) on the local NPR station yesterday:

http://www.kera.org/audio/think.php

Click on the MP3 download for Electrification of Transportation

Here is a better article I read the other day:

http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/28/28977/1.html

Meanwhile scientists at Rowan University in New Jersey have scrutinized and confirmed the 50k Watt claim. To generate the according amount of heat (1 million Joule) 1.5kg of a catalytic substance were used. "These results are unexpected given conventional chemistry and may represent a validation the BLP scientists have indeed uncovered a novel technology for producing energy from the hydrogen atom," a recently published interim [extern] report concludes. Controlled experiments have been conducted by students led by engineering professor Peter Jansson in Rowan laboratories under initial guidance by BlackLight scientists. According to Jansson they have shown that "repeatable heat experiments based on [BLP] technology can be replicated by independent scientists." It is still unclear if the study was commissioned by BlackLight Power.

Is Rowan a legit university?

airdale posted on it a few days ago.

SamuM,

"physics defying"

Errr, isn't that what makes
good science ?

The article is over a month old (dated Sep. 19).

Not sure if he's right about the reason for the meltdown, but it certainly did happen. Oil fell to half the peak price - lower, even.

You beat me to it. I just prepared an almost identical post and did a quick check to see if someone else had made one...

This would have been a big story a few weeks ago. I wonder if it will get much exposure now?

Officially the IEA's World Energy Outlook will be released on 12 November.

They obviously still think that the fairies are replenishing oil fields every night:

It expects oil consumption in 2030 to reach 106.4m barrels a day, down from last year’s forecast of 116.3m b/d.

They've also managed to sneak it out at a time when it is least likely to attract attention, with the financial crisis and the election.
If that was my watchdog I would have it put to sleep, but that would be a bit redundant as it seems to have been asleep for years and show no signs of waking up.

Some other sources that have taken up the story from the Financial Times.

International Herald Tribune
Watchdog warns on declining oilfield output

Bloomberg
Global Oil Production Is Falling Faster Than Expected, FT Says

The Telegraph
World oil output declining faster than thought

Not much new info, though. Just quoting the FT piece.

Holy Moly--9.1 %, that is damn ugly if true. Seems like the IEA has now admitted that superstraw tech [horizontal drilling, multiple reservoir contact, etc] applied to these aging giant fields, plus the same tech applied to any new found, but smaller fields, has turned the Hubbert Curve into the Hubbert Cliff.

Using the Rule of 72:

72/9.1 = 7.9 years

72/6.4 = 11.25 years

That's HUGE!!

Without extra investment to raise production, the natural annual rate of output decline is 9.1 per cent

Does anyone know the definition of natural decline rate? Does it mean no new extraction or injection wells in a mature oil field?

Magus,

The price of oil on 31 Dec is a critical number for the oil patch. All public oil companies have their reserves audited by outside consultants as per SEC regs. These numbers represent the in ground reserve values as well as a schedule of production projected years forward. But the reserve values and cash flow estimates must include a pricing factor. Again, by SEC regs, the price of oil on 31 Dec of each year is the value used. As most operators run their drilling program from their credit lines this price becomes all the more critical since it impacts directly upon credit. If oil is relatively low on 31 Dec it will have a big negative impact on budgets. Combined with the current credit tightness we could see many big projects delayed or cancelled if we see a low price on that date.

Amazing how many comments he got, from the totally uninformed (hydrogen will save us) to those who have simply given up on humanity:

"But here we are again. A whole new generation [since the 1970's] of empty-pocketed energy drunks [have emerged] asking the same damn questions, getting the same damn answers. Economists often spouting half-truths about energy supplies and consumption mainly to get notoriety. Politicians misquoting stews of economists hoping to produce the right blend of guilt, fear and hope to get votes. Nothing much has changed in 30+ years."

If these numbers in fact is what IEA will present November the 12th then the issue of oil supply destruction is what will overshaddow everything else.

I don't think so. If the leaked report is correct, they are expecting new production to more than make up for the decline in existing fields.

It expects oil consumption in 2030 to reach 106.4m barrels a day, down from last year's forecast of 116.3m b/d.

In short, this is a very minor modification of their original forecast, and given the demand destruction caused by the current economic crisis, nobody will pay much attention to this.