The higher oil prices allow for less spending elsewhere, so equities may suffer, leading to debt looking more attractive and that will outweigh the potential of inflation as it seems to be tame right now.

Keep in mind moving forward the inter-connectivity of markets. One bump in one market can ripple thought causing lots of problems. Also this becomes important when we look to diversify portfolios and find that there is so much correlation between the markets that diversification becomes very difficult.

Should the government bail out Ford and GM? We did bail out chrystler and it worked, they paid back the loans ahead of schedule. (of course now they are foreign owned). But that notwithstanding, bailouts are bad. I would be surprised if the politicos bailed them out from this, given that the red states won.

This is really a union issue for the most part as fuel and airplanes cost about the same for everyone. This wouldn’t be a problem at all as they would just raise prices to cover it, except that Southwest and others are undercutting them buy not having all these perks for their employees and running a more efficient shop. We have all heard the pundits talking about lower paying jobs, this is an example. Bust the union, pay Southwest wages and lower prices to consumers. We pay less, they get less and competition becomes even. In fact, the only thing keeping Southwest wages as high as they are is the competition is still union and paying higher wages. If they all go nonunion, wages will drop even further to gain competitive advantage.