Tuesday afternoon, December crude fell as low as $57.05, weakest since June 2005.

Don’t get your hopes up though. Prices recovered to end the month of October at $58.73. Up from earlier in the day, but still still an 8% loss for the month.

The Big Five in the oil biz reported profits last week to the tune of $31 billion for the quarter. This is almost as high as the the last quarter of 2005, when prices went through the roof following Hurricane Katrina’s wrecked rigs and refineries.

ExxonMobil, world’s largest, reported $10.49 billion. Chevron made $6 billion. ConocoPhillips, hampered by Prudhoe Bay, reported $3.88 billion. BP (Prudhoe Bay and Texas refinery explosion) saw profits decline to $6.23 billion. Royal Dutch Petroleum (Nigeria) managed a profit of only $5.94 billion .

Iraq is looking for investment $$. What better place than getting back to the deal Saddam signed with Beijing in 1997 to develop al-Ahdab oilfield in the southern region? The West is just too nervous about the whole situation to invest their precious money there.

China, on the other hand, is willing to go out on a limb as far as investment risk goes. It had signed the agreement with Saddam and was just waiting for UN sanctions to end, when the USA invaded.

Time for a new proposal.

Look out for Russia in 2008! It is squeezing out Western companies, setting the stage for an oil price spike in its election year of 2008.

Other than that, it’s business as usual in the oil biz – civil war, violence and unrest in the Middle East and Africa, but nothing to really worry about.

Toyota is on track to overtake GM as the world’ #1 automaker. Its global production up 3.8% in Sept., the company’s 23rd consecutive monthly advance.

Drivers are favoring fuel efficient cars, and Toyota has got them: Corolla, Camry(best-selling model for 8 of the last 9 years) & the Prius hybrid. It’s now making a Camry hybrid in a Kentucky plant (first outside of Japan) positioning itself for an even larger share of the hybrid market.