What U.S. presidents seeking re-election fear most is the wrath of a rising misery index. And nothing brings more misery to the world’s largest oil consuming economy than high oil prices. During the 1960s, Arthur Okun, an American economist, created the idea of a misery index to measure economic hardship. It was simply the sum [...]

Heading down to Washington to speak at the Association for Peak Oil-USA‘s Truth in Energy conference on Nov. 2, I sense a general malaise within the peak oil movement. The pequists, as they have become known, appear to be on the defensive these days as they once again roll back their dating of the dreaded [...]

You might have thought things had changed in world financial markets since the U.S. subprime mortgage disaster. After all, we were told at the time that if taxpayers didn’t open their wallets and bail out the banks, we could face a complete meltdown of the global financial system and an economic fate rivaling the Great [...]

The more you hear about the extraordinary efforts that governments around the world are taking to promote economic growth, the less confident you can be in the result. With the clock ticking on a Greek default, members of the European Monetary Union are considering sweetening their bail out pot for a second time since the [...]

When virtually every global financial institution is exposed to one other in today’s world of free flowing capital markets, where do you hide when bankrupt borrowers like Greece default? Certainly not in French banks, which have lost almost half of their share value over the past year due to their Greek exposure. And if French [...]