Sales were up 3% or so on Black Friday, due in part to deep discounts. A fall in the price of oil by $100 a barrel didn’t hurt either. Actually the fall in oil futures prices was $99.02 a barrel. Bloomberg:

Oil fell $99.02 a barrel from its July record, making the four-month slump steeper than crude’s drop from its 1996 peak to the low set in December 1998…

Ministers from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries…haven’t done enough this time around to halt the 67 percent drop. Merrill Lynch & Co., forecasting the first contraction in global demand in a quarter century, sees crude bottoming at an average $43 a barrel in the first quarter, 21 percent below where it ended last week. In December 1998, crude tumbled 61 percent from its peak to as low as $10.35 when OPEC failed to eliminate a supply glut.

It’s getting hard to believe that it was only four months ago or so that oil was $147 — triple the current price. It’s very hard to keep up with these wild changes in such short periods of time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 12:15 am and is filed under business, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.