America, keep your wits on election day..OIL $63/barrel and on the express elevator to hell, GOING DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWN

SINGAPORE (AP) - Oil prices fell to 17-month lows at $63 a barrel Monday in Asia as investors weighed Friday's OPEC output cut against growing evidence of a severe global economic slowdown that would undermine crude demand.

Light, sweet crude for December delivery fell 32 cents to $63.83 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange by midday in Singapore.

Investors brushed off a 1.5 million barrel-a-day cut announced by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries on Friday, focusing instead on falling crude demand as economies across the globe reel from the impact of a credit crisis.

On Friday, oil fell $3.69 to settle at $64.15. Prices have plunged 57 percent from a record $147.27 on July 11.

"The mood is fairly negative reflecting worry about the international economic outlook," said David Moore, a commodity strategist at Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney. "If there is further weak economic data in the U.S. or Europe, prices could come under more downward pressure."

Iran's OPEC governor Mohammad Ali Khatibi said Sunday a reduction in production "will be considered" at the group's next meeting in Algiers in December--a meeting that might even be held early if necessary.

"I thought the OPEC cut was a fairly decisive act, but concerns of recession in the major economies remain dominant," Moore said. "OPEC's cut does take a step toward tightening the market."

Investors have been paying close attention to signs that a slowing economy and higher gasoline prices earlier this year have hurt crude demand in the U.S., the world's largest oil consumer.

The U.S. Department of Transportation said Friday that Americans drove 5.6 percent less, or 15 billion fewer miles, in August compared with same month a year ago--the biggest single monthly decline since the data was first collected regularly in 1942.

Anyone else wondering if the discretionary dollars and mandatory dollars removed from the American economy in order to fill tanks as gas costs skyrocketed in the last 2 years, and go to work and have ANY chance to keep paying mortgages, had anything to do with the inability to pay mortgages, even the ARM's which contributed to the foreclosures, and oversupply of housing, which gutted the values of homes and then mortgage backed securities that has caused all this?
The dollar value is increasing, and T-bills are going up as capital seeks safety like water flowing downhill. Are we going to be in a superior condition COMPARATIVELY at the end of all this?