So the dance of the oil prices continues today with the Saudi’s saying they are planning on cutting production yet again.  I still have dreams of a $29 barrel of oil this year and hope it comes true.

Oil prices edged higher Tuesday morning, after falling for six days in a row, amid reports that Saudi Arabia will aggressively cut production.  Light, sweet crude for February delivery was up 36 cents to $37.96 a barrel.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil producer, plans to reduce output even further than its previous target, according to published reports.

The kingdom has already lowered supply this month to 8 million barrels per day as part of OPEC’s agreement to reduce overall supplies by a record amount from Jan. 1.

Members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries have been scaling back production in an attempt to put a floor under the rapidly declining price of oil.

“I think the Saudi’s are trying to single-handedly support the price of oil,” said Amanda Kurzendoerfer, a commodities analyst at Summit Energy, adding that the country is large enough to impact on oil prices.  Still, the market remains concerned about weak demand for oil and gasoline as the global economy continues to deteriorate.

The price of oil lost more than half its value in 2008 and suffered a staggering decline of more than $100 a barrel from its peak last summer.

“The market is worried that the continuing global slowdown will have a negative impact on demand,” said Andrew Lebow, a broker at energy futures trading firm MF Global in New York.

More negative news, but no real big reaction from the markets.  It is almost like traders are willing 2009 to stay positive regardless of the bad news pilling up.  Orders to factories fell for a record fourth straight month in November, and analysts believe manufacturing will continue to suffer in coming months as the country slogs through a recession entering its second year.

The Commerce Department said Tuesday that orders declined by 4.6 percent in November, nearly double the 2.5 percent drop economists expected. Orders have been falling since August, including a 6 percent plunge in October, the biggest setback in eight years.

The weakness in November reflected a big drop in demand for commercial aircraft. Weakness also was seen in autos, primary metals such as steel, and defense communications equipment.

Separately, the Institute for Supply Management reported Tuesday that a closely watched gauge of activity in the services sector rose slightly in December but still remained at recessionary levels. The services sector index rose to 40.6 from 36.3 in November. Any reading below 50 signals contraction.

The factory orders report showed that demand for durable goods, items expected to last three or more years, fell by 1.5 percent in November, even worse than the government’s initial estimate two weeks ago that durable goods had fallen 1 percent.

Demand for nondurable goods, items such as food, paper and petroleum products, dropped by 7.4 percent in November following a 3.8 percent decline in October. The declines for nondurable goods reflect falling demand and a big drop in prices, particularly for energy products.

The declines in November were led by a 37.7 percent plunge in demand for commercial aircraft, an extremely volatile series. Boeing Co. has been seeking to resume normal operations following the interruptions caused by a strike last year.

Demand for autos slipped by 0.1 percent following an even larger 4.1 percent fall in October as automakers continue to struggle with the economic downturn.

The Bush administration last month announced that it would lend $17.4 billion to General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC from the government’s $700 billion rescue fund in an effort to buy them time to reorganize and avoid having to file for bankruptcy.

Excluding transportation, orders would have posted a 4.2 percent decline in November. Demand for primary metals such as steel fell by 2.7 percent, while orders for defense communications equipment were down 12.1 percent.

Demand for heating and air conditioning products fell by 11.6 percent in November, reflecting in part the hard times the nation’s homebuilders are enduring.

The National Association of Realtors said Tuesday that pending home sales in November fell to the lowest level in the eight-year history of its index. The trade group said its seasonally adjusted index of pending sales for existing homes fell to 82.3 from a downwardly revised October reading of 85.7. That was far worse than the reading of 88 that economists expected, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters.

Economists are concerned that the manufacturing sector is being hit not only by a recession in the United States but spreading weakness overseas which has pushed many of America’s major trading partners into downturns and cut into domestic export sales.  My guess is the market can’t handle much more of this bad news.

Another industry touched by the looming and deepening credit crisis.  Workers are scrambling to build an $800 million coal-fired power plant on a patch of farmland here, a crisis that began on faraway Wall Street threatens to stretch the nation’s power supplies to the brink — driving up prices and laying the stage for future shortages.

The power industry is under extraordinary financial pressure just five years after North America suffered its worst blackout ever, when rolling outages turned out the lights on 50 million people. Even before the extent of the global credit crisis was fully known, the nation’s largest power providers warned of even bigger blackouts to come with the power grid under ever growing strain.

The industry has faced criticism for blackouts, but it also faces opposition to new plants and stringing new power lines.

With the economy teetering toward recession, it may face its toughest obstacle yet.

If credit woes put the brakes on scores of proposed plants, observers say a shift to other, more expensive fuels could end up soaking customers. The alternative is more frequent and potentially extended outages.

“We have to have new (power generation) capacity at some point, or we’ll have brownouts, blackouts,” said Mary Novak, an economist with the consulting firm Global Insight. “The problem is, too many (utilities) are betting on delay.”

For Montana’s 250-megawatt Highwood plant, a Nov. 30 regulatory deadline forced developers to start building with only enough cash to lay the concrete foundation. If additional financing fails, the electric cooperatives behind the plant will have to get their power from the more expensive open market — with customers footing the bill.

“It’s not without risk and a lot of anxiety,” John Prinkki, a Southern Montana Electric cooperative board member, said of breaking ground on the project. “But we’re between a rock and a hard place. We don’t have any choice — people are using more power than they ever have before.”

Utility representatives insist their projects still deserve financing. Yet even before the credit markets froze up, the industry had delayed dozens of coal plants, over climate change pressures and construction costs that effectively doubled in recent years.

Those cost spikes have reinforced the power industry’s position as one of the most capital-intensive in the economy. Before the crisis, investor-owned utilities had plans to spend upward of $1 trillion over the next two decades on new plants, transmission lines and maintenance of the power grid, said Richard McMahon with the Edison Electric Institute, a utility industry association.

Whether they get that money depends largely on the economy.

Some project developers aren’t waiting to find out. In recent days, Florida Power and Light trimmed its 2009 capital expenditures plan by nearly 25 percent to $5.3 billion. Instead of 1,500 megawatts of new wind-power generation, the company is now looking at building just 1,100 megawatts.

In West Virginia, Synthesis Energy Systems and Consol Energy shelved an $800 million coal-to-liquid fuels plant, with Synthesis chief executive Tim Veil citing “the current state of U.S. credit markets.”

Those are just the latest in what has emerged as a tidal wave of project delays and cancellations over the last two years, according to government sources and interest groups.

The Department of Energy had forecast earlier this decade that 36,000 megawatts of new coal-fueled power supply — enough to power an estimated 36 million homes — would come online by 2008. Instead, only about 5,000 megawatts of supply were built, or enough for about 5 million homes.

In the last two years, 76 coal plant proposals have been abandoned or postponed, according to the advocacy group Source Watch. In 2007 alone, that amounted to more than $45 billion in shelved projects, the group claims.

Other parts of the energy sector, particularly oil companies, are sitting on large cash reserves that allow them to self-finance major projects such as wildcat exploration and deep water drilling. By contrast, even the largest utilities typically go into debt to finance at least half their capital costs.

Plants like Highwood that are backed by smaller electrical cooperatives are even more heavily leveraged. The five cooperatives involved in the project are investing a combined $40 million — about 5 percent of the total cost. Government loans — once a mainstay for small cooperatives — dried up in March when the U.S. Department of Agriculture indefinitely suspended its rural utilities loan program.

The converging pressures on the industry make the duration of the tight credit market critical to its long-term outlook, said Todd Alexander, a New York lawyer who advises plant developers on financing.

Over at least the next several months, Alexander said everything from coal plants to pipelines to wind farms face an uphill battle to seal deals on debt. He added that could quickly turn around if the markets loosen in the first quarter of 2009.

Some analysts and industry executives see a silver lining for large power projects in the wider economic downturn.

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