As Canadians are becoming all too aware, the spectre of a recession, no matter the definition, looms large during an election campaign. Despite such prominence, the recent debate made it abundantly clear that none of the candidates understand why the economy stopped growing in the first half of the year and they have even less [...]
What’s more important to world oil demand- gasoline prices in the U.S. that are nearly $4 a gallon, or power rationing in China? To Americans, of course, it’s the former. But to world oil markets, the latter may be a far more significant indication of where oil prices will be heading this summer. At today’s [...]
A $10-per-barrel drop in oil prices seems a curious response to the ongoing disaster at BP’s Deepwater Horizon wellhead, and to its potentially devastating repercussions on future world oil supply. But when the Dow loses 1,000 points in the same week, there’s obviously something else going on. If the world’s economic outlook is the same [...]
What does $80-per-barrel oil say to you? Three years ago, it would have told you that global oil markets were at record tightness. Back then, the US president was making a personal pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia to vainly plead for more production. And economists were worrying about the implications for global economic growth. Today, it [...]
It’s Wednesday, and the week’s US oil inventories numbers will soon be out. I have no clue what they will say, nor much interest, either. But others do. Exactly why oil traders and speculators think the data has anything to do with the state of world oil demand is beyond me. I suppose, like Pavlov’s [...]
Don’t confuse North American voter skepticism about the recent farce in Copenhagen with indifference to environmental issues. Photo ops for local schmoes trying to make it big on a world stage don’t abate a single ton of carbon going out into the atmosphere, and neither does anything else coming out of that environmental summit. Nor [...]