A couple of links:

Dude where is my cheap oil?

It's obvious from the above price charts that it makes no economic sense to add gallons of ethane or propane to gallons of crude oil to try to summarize global oil supply. But growth of natural gas liquids has been a key factor in the reported increases in "world oil supply" over the last few years and is also a key component of recent optimistic assessments of future oil production by Leonardo Maugeri and the IEA.

There is no question that the boom in production of natural gas liquids is providing a great benefit to industrial users of ethylene. But if you're waiting for it to lower the price you pay for gasoline at the pump, you may have to wait a while longer.
I enjoyed this nice short blog entry. So far it doesn't make much sense to see ethane or propane as good enough substitutes. They should become such goods if we see enough cars running on them with the proper network aka pump support.

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From Krugmans blog I posted an important argument about a topic which has made headline thanks to story in which more is at stake then an Apple and an Ei(nhorn). [Sorry for the bad pun which only a few will understand ]

In short it is what to do with all that cash on the balance sheet of sometimes highly profitable companies? My personal take is (unsurprisingly) heavily influenced by Buffet and Graham. If the company is not able to find something with a high enough ROI it should check first if it is sensible to buy back stock if the price is higher then it's value. (Highly efficient and no taxman involved). If it isn't it should start to pay out more dividends.

The macro view:

Still Say’s Law After All These Years

When John Maynard Keynes wrote The General Theory, three generations ago, he structured his argument as a refutation of what he called “classical economics”, and in particular of Say’s Law, the proposition that income must be spent and hence that there can never be an overall deficiency of demand. Ever since, historians of thought have argued about whether this was a fair characterization of what the classical economists, or at any rate his own intellectual opponents, really believed.

Not being an intellectual historian myself, I won’t venture an opinion on that subject. What I will say, however, is that Say’s Law (Say’s false law? Say’s fallacy?) is something that opponents of Keynesian economics consistently invoke to this day, falling into exactly the same fallacies Keynes identified back in 1936.

In the past I’ve caught Brian Riedl and John Cochrane doing it; now Peter Dorman finds Tyler Cowen in their company.

Cowen can’t see why corporate hoarding is a problem. Like Riedl and Cochrane, he concedes that there might be some problem if corporations literally piled up stacks of green paper; but he argues that it’s completely different if they put the money in a bank, which will lend it out, or use it to buy securities, which can be used to finance someone else’s spending.

But of course there isn’t any difference. If you put money in a bank, the bank might just accumulate excess reserves. If you buy securities from someone else, the seller might put the cash in his mattress, or put it in a bank that just adds it to its reserves, etc., etc.. The point is that buying goods and services is one thing, adding directly to aggregate demand; buying assets isn’t at all the same thing, especially when we’re at the zero lower bound.

What’s depressing about all this is that Say’s Law is a primitive fallacy – so primitive that Keynes has been accused of attacking a straw man. Yet this primitive fallacy, decisively refuted three quarters of a century ago, continues to play a central role in distorting economic discussion and crippling our policy response to depression.
In simple terms 1€ spent on an investment means 1€ of increased demand while 1€ spent on an asset means that only a part of that dollar creates demand - especially if the rates are so low due to the liquidity trap.