Donald Trump is frequently faulted, and rightly so, for attempting to take credit for things he had nothing to do with. With Trump, though, you get the feeling it’s the habit of the real-estate mogul and showbiz kingpin talking. He doesn’t actually think (does he?) that the stock market goes up…
Eastern Mediterranean gas creates new allies—and deepens old enmities
Don't look now, but gas prices are climbing.
State Department official warns that countries that refuse risk sanctions.
Remember the good old days when experts decided that the power of the OPEC oil cartel to control oil prices had come to an end? That fracking had made the United States the swing producer, ramping up production any time prices started to rise? That the future of the world’s economy would be based…
The Trump administration made clear on Friday, with what it described as the largest set of sanctions against North Korea yet, that it will continue to isolate Pyongyang even as the South seeks to engage with the North.
For 37 years, efforts to open the remote Alaskan tundra known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling for oil and natural gas got nowhere. It’s a barren, uninhabitable area that looks like the surface of an asteroid. But environmental groups and their Democratic allies treated it like a…
Kurds in northern Iraq control their own land, maintain their own military, and share a common culture and language. They also have an overwhelming desire to separate from Iraq and become an independent state. But can a de facto nation become a real country if it isn’t recognized by the diplomatic…
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) painted watercolors throughout his European childhood. Like his family, the dependents of the peripatetic Dr. Fitzwilliam Sargent, watercolors were portable and picturesque. Sargent continued to paint watercolors in the 1870s as a student in Paris and in the 1880s…
Remember when Obama and others said we “couldn’t drill our way out” of an oil crisis? They were wrong.
One of President Donald Trump's most urgent policy priorities is to cut taxes for businesses and workers. It's a promise that Republicans must fulfill if they want to restore American prosperity. But the tax plan—which one of us, Moore, helped write—has a $2 trillion to $4 trillion revenue…
Saudis, Russia, shale. That is all ye need to know in order to understand the oil market. The Saudis lead the OPEC oil cartel, Russia is their largest potential fellow traveler, and the Permian Basin in the Southwest is the oil-rich shale that stands between the other two and $100 per barrel oil.
Saudis, Russia, shale. That is all ye need to know in order to understand the oil market. The Saudis lead the OPEC oil cartel, Russia is their largest potential fellow traveler, and the Permian Basin in the Southwest is the oil-rich shale that stands between the other two and $100 per barrel oil.
One of President Donald Trump’s most urgent policy priorities is to cut taxes for businesses and workers. It's a promise that Republicans must fulfill if they want to restore American prosperity. But the tax plan—which one of us, Moore, helped write—has a $2 trillion to $4 trillion revenue…
Fifty is only half as good as one hundred, but it's twice as good as twenty-five. That's how anyone who is anyone in the international oil business saw it earlier this week when they gathered in Houston for the annual CERAWeek conference sponsored by HIS Markit, the data and information firm. They…
It promises to be a fracking good year in some of our oil producing regions. To understand why, you need to keep four numbers in mind: $100, $25, $50, and $60. The first is the approximate price of a barrel of crude oil in the summer of 2014, the second the price to which it plunged early in 2016,…
On Tuesday, President Obama announced a ban on offshore drilling for oil and natural gas within several areas of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans.
For weeks, protesters in the thousands have been have been playing a tense waiting game with police on the banks of the Missouri River an hour south of Bismarck, North Dakota. The protesters gained a partial victory on Sunday, when Jo-Ellen Darcy, the Army's assistant secretary for civil works,…
There was a recurring sketch on the late, great, still-underrated comedy show SCTV in which two farmers in overalls, Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok, reviewed obscure foreign films and highbrow fare with one common feature: They showed people and things exploding. "I'll tell you one film I really…
There was a recurring sketch on the late, great, still-underrated comedy show SCTV in which two farmers in overalls, Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok, reviewed obscure foreign films and highbrow fare with one common feature: They showed people and things exploding. “I'll tell you one film I really…
Venezuela. Algeria. Russia. Even Saudi Arabia. These are countries that always seem to top the list when we consider who was hurt the most economically by OPEC's multi-year price war on oil. In 2014, when OPEC countries opened the petroleum floodgates in an attempt to break the U.S. fracking…
The next big crisis facing commercial banks and corporate bondholders doesn't involve mortgages, but it has everything to do with the mortgage crisis that began in 2008. The knee-jerk reaction of Congress that created the legislative mess known as "bank reform" has driven lenders away from…
As Sinatra might put it, this time we almost made some sense of it. We almost made that long hard climb to reduced dependence on Saudi Arabia for our oil supplies and diminished its ability to affect the fate of the American economy. Not that the technological feat of our frackers made us…
In January the Los Angeles Times reported that California attorney general Kamala Harris is investigating ExxonMobil for securities fraud and violation of environmental law. Harris hasn’t confirmed this, but leaks from her office say they are building a case on the premise that Exxon (back in the…
Between the middle of 2014 and early 2016, oil prices tumbled from $110 to between $30 and $35 per barrel, a drop of 70 percent. The change represents an enormous shift of income from oil-exporting countries to oil-importing countries: $1.6 trillion annually, slightly more than 2 percent of the…
The latest dead-on-arrival lame-duck proposal from the White House came Thursday. In a statement about its “21st Century Clean Transportation System" plan, the Obama administration said it would pay for new infrastructure spending with a "new fee paid by oil companies." Here's an excerpt:
President Obama announced today to much fanfare (and to much angst on the right) that he is killing the proposed KeystoneXL pipeline, which would transport Canadian tar sands oil through the United States. But as much as he would like to claim the mantle of environmentalism (this is the man who…
Just after midnight on August 2, 1990, an invasion force of approximately 100,000 Iraqi troops crossed into Kuwait. As mechanized and armored Republican Guard divisions breached the border and sped southward across the desert, Iraqi Special Forces commandos launched airborne and amphibious assaults…
A new report by the American Action Forum, a center-right policy institute, details adverse economic consequences of the Keystone XL pipeline's delay. The report highlights billions of dollars in untapped economic activity, and the over $1 trillion the U.S. has paid other countries for oil. It also…
Two big deals were signed this week, with one thing in common – can-kicking. The Eurozone countries, more precisely Germany, kicked the Greek debt can down the road for three years by lending the already over-indebted country another €86bn. And the P5+1, the permanent members of the UN Security…
The original corn laws put tariffs on imported grain in an effort to help domestic producers. That was nearly two centuries ago, in England, and the experiment is taught as an example of bad economic policy. But people never learn and in this country, today, we have the renewable fuel mandates…
Iowa took umbrage, last week, over something an operative for Scott Walker said. Or, to be precise, something she once tweeted. For her indiscretion, Liz Mair was forced to resign from Walker’s political action committee. Walker is not yet an officially declared candidate for president but that…
Rivers have rights, they say down in Mora County, New Mexico—“inalienable and fundamental rights,” beyond the power of any government to touch. Aquifers, too. Wetlands, streams, ecosystems, and even “natural communities,” whatever that undefined term means: All of them have rights to “exist and…
A former IRS tax examiner was indicted Friday along with three conspirators for filing false tax returns and making false claims for lost income related to the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The IRS worker, Jimmie McCorvey of Pensacola, FL, helped the other three obtain $95,200 from…
We are in a war with Saudi Arabia—and losing. The Saudis aim to regain substantial control of our oil supply by driving from the industry many of our shale-oil-producing frackers who have reduced the power conveyed to the kingdom’s rulers by the underground ocean of oil on which their palaces sit.…
"We can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices.” As recently as two years ago, that’s what the president was saying—with his usual self-assurance—about the nation’s dependence on foreign oil and on oil in general. And he wasn’t the only one. The line was widely echoed on the political left, where…
We should “stop thinking about the economy as being in a perpetual crisis” commented Charles Plosser, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, after the government announced on Friday that the private sector added 267,000 jobs in January, and that upward revisions to November and…
Following the death of King Abdullah Bin Abd Al-Aziz, at 90 or 91, on the night of January 22-23, Saudi Arabia is very likely to continue its policies of opposition to Iran and the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, and its participation in the coalition effort against the Islamic State. These…
The ZeroHedge headline nails it:
The economic news has been getting better, especially regarding the price of oil. Which the consumer sees as what he forks over at the pump. And that, as we all know, is one price the trend of which we follow every day.
We’re hearing from all over just how good things are – and are becoming ever more so – and how on top of the game the president is. There is that 5 percent GDP growth last quarter and an unemployment rate that has dropped below 6 percent (the bar has, obviously, been lowered) and the stock market…
An estimated 90 million of us will drive 50 miles or more during this holiday season, and recent years’ gnashings of teeth at the pump are being replaced with smiles. The price of gasoline is down 36 percent since April, to a national average of around $2.40 per gallon, with some cities reporting…
Reason for good cheer. The Wall Street Journal reports that:
Thanks to (mostly) fracking you can not only drive to work for less than before, you may now be writing a smaller check to cover the mortgage. As the Wall Street Journal reports:
The fiesta is over. Mexico, a remarkably important nation of some 120 million people—indeed, the world’s fifteenth largest economy—is descending into crisis. Students have been slaughtered en masse with the complicity of a corrupt police force. The country’s young president and his finance minster…
As if the plunging price of oil were not enough to doom the market for electric and hybrid automobiles, there is this from ABC News:
DW reports that:
Kyle Stock of BloombergBusinessweek reports that, while there is undeniably good news for the driving class in the falling price of gasoline:
They had a good run, those oil rich countries that formed a cartel back in 1973 and called it OPEC. Its first act, as John Waggoner of USA Today reminds, was to declare:
Charles Lane speculates on just what collapsing oil prices will mean for Russia and Vladimir Putin’s grip on power. This depends, Lane writes:
Bloomberg reports that:
Many of the world’s most serious security threats are enabled—directly or indirectly—by revenues from the high oil prices (about $100 per barrel) prevalent in world markets in recent years. If these prices were reduced substantially (e.g., by 20-30 percent), the liquidity that fuels the threats…
Anyone who doubts that the deployment of the technologies we have come to call fracking constitutes a revolution should consider this. U.S. oil production has soared by 70 percent in the past six years. American refineries have cut in half their imports from the OPEC cartel, setting off a scramble…
Seems Canada is tired of waiting – and waiting – for a decision on the Keystone pipeline and has come up with an alternate plan for moving the oil to market. As Bloomberg reports:
When a class action lawsuit gets settled, the deal has to prescribe how the defendant will pay the members of the injured class and who can be part of that class.
New Hampshire Democrat Jeanne Shaheen is hitting her likely opponent for the U.S. Senate, Scott Brown, in a new TV ad over the Republican's ties to "Big Oil"—even while Shaheen invests in energy companies herself.
A new poll finds Colorado Republican Cory Gardner neck and neck with the Democratic senator Mark Udall in what's become one of the hottest Senate races of the midterm elections. Rasmussen Reports finds Udall with 43 percent support and Gardner, a two-term congressman, with 42 percent support, a…
And we thought the bad old days of oil shocks were over. Embargoes, price spikes, gasoline lines in America, a sweater-bedecked president ordering the end of hot water in many facilities, collapsing retail sales as high gasoline and energy prices hit stores as much as a big tax increase would,…
In Iraq: Sameer N. Yacoub and Qassim Abdul-Zahra of the AP report that:
Jeanna Smialek and Shobhana Chandra at Bloomberg report that:
The Keystone pipeline has been under study for five years and will be studied further. It will be built, or scuttled, when the politics are right. For now, the pipeline, as Coral Davenport of the New York Times reports:
The news that the administration would like kept quiet, and which it therefore announced in the afternoon, on Good Friday is that it has:
America is a fracking cornucopia of crude oil, independent of the rapacious OPEC cartel. And has an inexhaustible supply of natural gas, putting us in a position to become a major exporter able to use its gas reserves as a geopolitical weapon. Take that, King Abdullah and Vladimir Putin. Too good…
Curtis Williams, of Oil & Gas Journal, reports that former Energy Secretary Steven Chu had this to say about the Keystone pipeline project:
The State Department releases its final environmental report on the Keystone Pipeline today. Justin Sink of The Hill reports:
There is something about the energy business that is conducive to the creation of myths. So Roger Sant, a long-time and highly respected participant in the energy policy game and in the industries that energy legislation and regulation affect, told a group of Houston oil men recently. Energy myths…
In a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Canada's foreign minister, John Baird put things plainly:
It's not often officials from the nation’s largest business lobby and an AFL-CIO-affiliated union speak to one another, let alone work together. But last week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and North America’s Building Trades Unions held a joint press conference on Capitol Hill in support of the…
The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports today that sales of fossil fuels produced on federal and Indian land continue to decline, dropping 4 percent in fiscal year 2012. The slide continues a decade-long trend that accelerated in 2010, as the chart accompanying the report shows:
The momentum to restrict Iranian oil exports has stalled, and it is time for Congress to eschew a more gradualist approach and mandate zero oil exports with zero waivers. This, along with more concrete military pressure, could increase the otherwise slim chances for success in expected new talks…
Remember the Keystone pipeline Well, if you had forgotten about it, no matter. There has still been no decision on whether or not to go ahead with construction. This, in spite of the fact that:
Williston, N.D.
Can American workers “cut it” in today’s labor market? Not according to an anonymous aide for Marco Rubio, who was recently quoted by Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker making the case for the Senate’s immigration reform bill.
Mark Drajem of Bloomberg reports that “U.S. crude oil production in the fourth quarter will exceed imports for the first time since 1995, as booming fields in North Dakota and Texas put the nation on track to surpass a quarter-century output record.”
Mark J. Perry of AEI tweeted:
“The tectonic plates are shifting” is a much over-used expression. But when it comes to the international energy industry, the expression is apt.
In a post yesterday waxing enthusiastic about Chuck Hagel as defense secretary, Michael Moore called attention to a statement of Hagel that I don't believe had been previously much noted. Here it is, from September 2007:
The AAA has joined the side of the crackpots resisting the burning of food in internal combustion engines:
We heard throughout the campaign of President Obama’s “all of the above” energy policy. That was then. This is now. About 48 hours after he was assured of reelection, the president’s Interior Department issued a plan to close to oil shale development 1.6 million acres of federal land in the West to…
At last night’s debate, President Obama said gas prices were under two dollars per gallon when he took office because the “economy was on the verge of collapse.” And that if Mitt Romney were elected he “could bring down gas prices, because with his policies we might be back in the same mess.”
We are entering an age of energy abundance. Or not. In keeping with the great tradition of economics, dubbed by Thomas Carlyle the dismal science, let me raise a cautionary note. What God has showered upon us, politicians can make unavailable. Not only because they have to balance our need for…
Seems like everybody has now seen it, either when it happened (that would be in "real time") or on replay. Even players who benefitted from the call agree that the Packers got hosed. The remedy?
Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke now has two reasons to disappoint those who are hoping he will use his speech next week at the conclave of central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to launch the good ship QE3. The first is that the economy continues to move ahead, albeit at a slower…
Media bias consists of more than partial quotes, deliberate misreporting, and economy with the truth. Doubt that, and read the New York Times last week, reporting—on page one—“U.S. Reliance on Saudi Oil Goes Back Up: Security Concerns Rise With Gulf Imports.” If you think this has anything to do…
The price of gasoline is rising and may reach $4 a gallon, which is considered critical in the minds of consumers and political consultants worrying about how to seduce them. In an economy that is otherwise stalled in the weakest recovery since World War II – real wages in decline, job growth…
Slow growth here and in China—as well as a recession in Europe—is reducing demand for oil. Inventories in the U.S. are at a 22-year high. The Federal Reserve Board’s QEs that pumped paper money into the economy and drove up the nominal price of oil have come to an end. And the twelve OPEC oil…
The Obama administration announced today plans for lease sales for "available all unleased areas in the Central Gulf of Mexico Planning Area, offshore Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, including 7,276 blocks on about 38.6 million acres," according to a Department of Interior press release.
Warren Buffett expressed support for the Keystone Pipeline on Fox News last night. "I'm not an expert, but it certainly seems like it makes sense to me,” said Buffett. He added: "There are an awful lot of pipelines running in the United States and net, they've certainly been a huge plus for the…
The New York Times reports:
According to an AP story, President Obama, who is feeling the pressure on gasoline prices, has a plan for action which comes down to the usual, instinctive reaction of those in political power who find themselves frustrated by events in the real world. Namely ... prosecute somebody. Or threaten to,…
Mitt Romney's latest campaign ad says that President Obama's "attack machine" is "spending millions to sling mud, err oil at" the Republican candidate "because in the five states where Obama is attacking Romney, gas prices have roughly doubled."
A student in Norfolk, Virginia had a simple question for Vice President Biden: "Why is prices on gas increasing? You know what I mean?" Biden, after promising a "brief answer," takes 11-minutes not to answer the kid's question:
President Obama today attacked Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for his close ties to oil companies.
Gallup finds that an overwhelming 57 percent of American adults believe "the U.S. Government Should Approve of the Keystone XL Pipeline."
Charles Krauthammer, writing in the Washington Post:
Late last week Spanish authorities announced that they’re extraditing Egyptian businessman Hussein Salem, a close associate of former president Hosni Mubarak. Salem is a central figure in the post-Mubarak narrative of the regime’s rampant corruption. He has already been sentenced in absentia to…
President Obama is digging in on the Keystone XL pipeline. He is "personally lobbying Democrats to reject an amendment calling for its construction," Politico reports.
Speaking at the University of Miami on February 23, Obama again revealed his remarkable gift for oratory. He denied any responsibility for the rising gas prices and instead took the credit for dramatically increased domestic oil production. This took real artifice. Even as a candidate Obama…
Don’t feel embarrassed if you can’t figure out where the American economy is headed. I don't. After all, Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke told the House Financial Services Committee last week that the economy is sending “somewhat different signals” about growth. The good news is that the…
The good thing about election campaigns is that they force both parties to do things, or at least to promise to do things they should have done long ago. President Barack Obama is a born-again tax cutter. He wants the top rate of corporate income tax cut from 35 percent to 28 percent, and the…
In a letter sent today to the White House, Senate Budget Committee ranking member Jeff Sessions urges President Obama “to take overdue but necessary action to confront soaring gasoline prices.”
With a gallon of regular around $4 and climbing, the White House is paying close attention to the price of gasoline. President Obama and his team are, no doubt, wondering how high it can go before it takes them down.
The Hill: "Paul Ryan: Obama contraception ruling reveals ‘paternalistic, arrogant’ attitude"
Joe Nocera, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, has an astonishing piece titled, “Poisoned Politics of Keystone XL.” Most of the piece rehashes criticism of President Obama’s decision to reject the Keystone XL pipeline, which is designed to bring oil from the tar sands in Alberta, Canada, to…
On Monday, the European Union is expected to decide to boycott Iranian oil. If it does—nothing is ever certain when EU policymakers gather, least of all a firm decision—Iran says it will close the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil moves to market. That country’s navy…
President Obama’s rejection of a pipeline to bring more Canadian oil to the United States is enormously revealing. He sided with the environmental lobby, a major Democratic interest group, over the majority of Americans who favor the job-creating pipeline. And that’s not all.
Is Barack Obama pinning the blame for his failure to approve the Keystone XL pipeline on Hillary Clinton? Look at this White House statement from yesterday (emphasis mine):
The attack on the British embassy in Tehran came just days after the Iranian “parliament” voted to expel the British ambassador, and therefore reeks of official complicity. The attack—complete with an invasion of the grounds, looting, and a brief hostage-taking—is an always useful reminder of the…
American energy policy is increasingly defined in terms of what is prohibited, not what is promoted. Coal, nuclear, and natural “shale” gas all have been hampered by the current administration. And the last three weeks have offered two more examples of how America’s byzantine energy laws and policy…
The American, the online magazine of the American Enterprise Institute, has an article that's an absolute must read on the Keystone XL oil pipeline. Obama's decision to postpone a decision on building it until after the next election has been in the news a lot lately, but precious little of that…
Speaker John Boehner and Alberta premier Alison Redford met yesterday to discuss the proposed Keystone XL pipeline project--and how President Obama has delayed his decision on the pipeline until after next year's election. As the speaker's office explains:
As heartening as it is to see Muammar Qaddafi lose his grip on power, our expectations of Libya's future need to take into account this ethnically diverse country’s complicated reality. The biggest problem is Libya's enormous oil reserves.
If you are an oil trader, the daily jiggles in the price of oil are of interest: if you guess right, it’s champagne and caviar; if you bet wrong, it’s beer and potato chips. But if you are a policy maker trying to make sense of oil markets so that you can plan your nation’s energy security, or an…
After struggling to come up with an explanation that doesn't admit a policy failure, the White House seems to have settled on an answer to questions about what led to the grim unemployment numbers last week: Gas prices. The president said the other day that the latest jobs numbers are a "blip"…
It’s anybody's guess whether Sarah Palin will run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. If she does, she’s likely to benefit from a highly favorable documentary that highlights the part of her career least known to most Americans.
In today's Wall Street Journal Reuel Marc Gerecht and Mark Dubowitz discuss a novel approach to sanctions on Iran:
"Bill Clinton to Paul Ryan on Medicare Election: ‘Give me a Call’"
The weakening of the dollar since 2008 has added 56.5 cents to the price of gasoline, the congressional Joint Economic Committee (JEC) has found. The average price of gasoline would be $3.40 per gallon, instead of the current average price nationally of nearly $4, if the dollar hadn’t declined.
Hope and Change: "85% of New College Grads Move Back in with Mom and Dad"
Just before 10 p.m. on April 20, 2010, disaster struck the giant Deepwater Horizon oil rig. Crew members aboard the rig were in the final hours of attempting to secure a “nightmare well” about a mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico for temporary closure and later production. Undetected, a large quantity…
The jobs market continues to improve: 200,000 jobs were added in March. Corporate profits are exceeding forecasts for about three out of four firms, and the quarter that ended yesterday is the best first quarter for stocks in twelve years. Real consumer spending (adjusting for inflation) is up a…
The disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, and the upheavals in the Middle East are the sort of events that send economists back to their forecasters’ drawing boards. As usual, there is a tendency to confuse the long-run and the short-run, and to blame developments that were due to…
That headline should be the policy mantra of sensible politicians. Unfortunately, President Obama believes he has to do something to get prices down lest he pay a terrible price at the polls. Equally unfortunate, Republicans are using high gas prices as a stick with which to beat the president.
Some 60 percent of Americans want to see more offshore oil production according to the latest Gallup poll. That's up 10 percent from last May. And that's not all:
Send your prayers across the Pacific.
Ah, January of 2009. Hope was in the air, but more importantly, gas was under two dollars a gallon. Since then gas prices, have gone up 67 percent and it's an ominously upward trend. Interestingly enough, the Heritage Foundation also took a look at the first 26 months of Bush's presidency -- gas…
Pity the poor economist trying to create a coherent picture of the U.S. economy from the bits and pieces of the data jigsaw puzzle, the most recent piece of which was Friday’s jobs report. Non-farm payrolls were up 192,000 in February, and the estimates of the previous two months’ jobs growth were…
Eight years ago, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., was wrestling with the fact that America did not have a comprehensive energy policy.
Why a U.S. government shutdown is worth it
Because he's apparently unaware there's an election next year, Obama abandons the Defense of Marriage Act.
Worried the Obama administration won’t do enough to spur the economic rejuvenation of the Gulf region, a new organization of state and local officials and businessmen is seeking to have federal funds that might be spent elsewhere redirected to states suffering from the oil spill and a series of…
With little fanfare, this year marks the 30th anniversary of the Carter Doctrine, when President Jimmy Carter warned against “outside” control of the oil-rich Persian Gulf. The U.S. effectively enforced an implicit corollary to that doctrine—to prevent control by a regional power—in the Iraq wars…