Lower Rig Counts Still Stabilizing (BHI, USO)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published

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Baker Hughes Inc. (NYSE: BHI) has released the weekly rig counts.  The bad news is that these rig counts are still declining.  The good news is that this really appears to be stabilizing at least some on the rate of change.  Here is this week’s count:

U.S. Rig Count is down 10 from last week at 945; down 894 year over year.

Canadian Rig Count up 2 from last week at 67; down 28 year over year.

The U.S. Offshore rig count is 51, unchanged from last week; down 18 year over year.

We have noticed how oil inventories keep rising and rising.  That is obvious demand destruction taking effect, and the unemployment rate heading closer and closer to double-digits may keep that demand subdued for longer than normal.

We can’t pull out any stops here and call an absolute drop in rig counts.  But again, the rate of change is much lower and even if there is a further drop through time we would guess that this will come at a much slower rate than what we saw in the first months of 2009 and late in 2008.

So far we have not seen any sharp reactions in oil.  The United States Oil ETF (NYSE: USO) is still up 4% at $29.82.

JON C. OGG

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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