On the same day the Obama Administration put the kibosh on the Keystone XL pipeline, two engineering contracts totaling $12.2 billion were awarded to two U.S. companies for work in the Alberta oil sands. One included a $750 million contract to a Chicago-based company for work on Exxon’s huge Kearl Oil Sands project, one of [...]
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 [...]
No matter what their organizers and participants want us to believe, economic summits aren’t the remedy for an increasingly dysfunctional global economy. President Obama’s call for countries other than the US to carry more of the burden of sustaining world economic growth is likely to fall on deaf ears, just as Europe’s call for massive [...]