and the rest of the upper management's salaries by 90%.

It's way past time to stop the subsidies to the oil giants.

Venezuelan credit default swaps are going parabolic and the country is in search of cash wherever it can find it.

Mr. Maduro...Goldman Suchs on line 1.


Meanwhile, too big to fail banks in the US are telling large customers they don't want their deposits unless they pay hefty fees. Fancy name for it is Negative Interest Rate Policy (NIRP). I call it an ops fashioned "ripoff".

fry so should I be concerned or should I pretty much not worry until I hit the powerball?

Greedy corrupt bastards budget for the price of their worker's lives when they didn't want to fix all of the most dangerous things wrong in a plant in Texas City they got from their merger with Amoco. Thought they would only kill " one or two", instead they killed 15.
Deepwater Horizon happened because they cut corners to speed up transition from the drilling rig to the production rig, despite Transocean's and Halliburton's objections.
Now they have lied about the settlement that they have rigged, screwed hundreds of thousands of American victims, advertised so heavily that the media will not report the truth for fear of losing the money, they only report BP's lies. They bought up almost every documentary that was coming out to bury the extent of the damage and all of the lies that they have told.
They bought off Obama before the 2010 midterms so they could get the Coast Guard to spray the Corexit to sink the oil to the bottom, out of sight, so it could not be sucked up and counted for the enevitable fine. Now it haunts the Gulf, killing, or sterilizing and mutating the sea life. They hand picked Ken Feinberg to be the "Independant" head of the Gulf Coast Claims Facility so he could put the shaft to the fishermen. Refusing to pay required quarterly income payments beyond a couple of quarters so that when they were really desperate they would take $5,000 to settle all claims. The judge later ruled that Ken Feinberg had always been BP's representative. He had lied and repeatedly told the victims at town halls and in the national media that he was Independant and therefore they did not need to get an attorney.
Can a company get anymore despicable? I am sure BP will find a way or two!

If it takes (for instance) 100 employees to produce a million barrels of $100 oil, how many employees does it take to produce a million barrels of $70 oil?

OH, wait a minute.... could it be that BP top brass is worried about about protecting their short term bottom line, stock options, etc. and are sacrificing the livelihood of thousands of employees to do so?

If it wasnt they would just suck it up as the price will eventually go back up so instead of waiting they are going to just jettison some people now because then they will try to hire replacements down the road for less money.

Obama's a job killa! Socialism!

Handed it all out in bonuses I suppose. Too bad. I'm not feeling too bad though. It's about time these companies feel a little humbling poverty for a change. Of course, I doubt an oil company will experience true poverty as a corporation, but it's nice to see them sweating the price drop and having to return to "normal" profits for a few years.