) are rising after Libya's eastern government reported a halt in exports. Tensions in the Middle east also continue to escalate as Israel and Hezbollah exchanged fire over the weekend.
For Libya's announcement, Smith states:"Because the country exports the vast majority of its production, when you see their production shut in, then you see that showing up pretty pretty soon afterwards, straight in the real-time data in terms of affecting their exports." And as you mentioned though, we have got the the rate cut there that could maybe juice things, but I really have an oil environment right now where you have OPEC that's putting a floor under prices around kind of $75 something like that because they're keeping production cuts in place.And so Chinese demand is really putting a ceiling on prices as well.
They are just in a period here or, or, or, or uh developing and evolving as, as a country that is just having slower economic growth.And so it's taken some analysts some reckoning to understand that we're not going to see half a million barrels a day of demand growth out of China year on year on year, just as we did last decade, we're seeing them slowing.The problem, the biggest problem with China is that as they, they want to undertake stimulus to get their economy going.
Then Matt, I'm, I'm curious what this all means for, uh, for folks who are wondering what prices at the pump are gonna look like in, in the kind of near to intermediate term national average here is around 335 per gallon.We, we're 50 cents lower than we were this time last year, we're down about 1215 cents as well.And then suddenly we have oil prices rallying again here.