Category Archives: Commodities

Regulators (and New York Times) Discover Bank Use of “Customer” Trades to Place Bets

The very minute the Paul Volcker, who proposed the sound idea that government backstopped banks not engage in proprietary trading, said that trades done on behalf of customers were meant to be excluded from this proposal, anyone familiar with trading could see he’d just deep sixed his idea. Proprietary trading existed LONG before banks decided […]

Read more...

Not All Banksters Fat and Happy: JP Morgan Commodities Unit Shows Layoffs, Losses

Even in this TARP and Fed supported, “heads I win, tails you lose” of the banking industry, the “you live by the sword, you die by the sword” element has not been entirely removed. Witness the schadenfreude-gratifying distress at JP Morgan’s commodities unit, headed by Blythe Masters (a supersaleswoman who has already gotten a fair […]

Read more...

Is BP Rejecting Skimmers to Save Costs?

Readers may recall that we harped on BP’s refusal to try to contain oil around the site of the leak, and later, its failure to do proper booming to contain and remove oil and so reduce the amount that came ashore (note that the US also failed abjectly as a second line of defense; the […]

Read more...

Concerns About BP Relief Well Success Rise Along With Evidence of Chemical Damage, Spread of Oil

The Financial Times highlights a concern we had raised early on about the effort by BP to drill a relief well to stop the flow of oil into the Gulf. While many analysts have acted as if the BP forecast, that the well would be completed by August, there is no reason to assume the […]

Read more...

BP: Gulf Resident Gives Behind the Scenes Account, Slams Cleanup and Safety

Gulf resident and fisherman’s wife Kindra Arnesen took advantage of the offer extended to her to visit cleanup sites and staff meetings: At any rate, I was invited the following week to go behind “enemy lines.” They gave me, of all people, security clearance to go into the base of operations meetings in Venice, Louisiana […]

Read more...

Will Planned Bank Taxes Go Far Enough?

The UK emergency budget, which will impose a £2billion tax on banks, both domestic and foreign bank operations domiciled there, along with the upcoming G20 meetings, is pushing a contentious issue to the fore: how and how much to tax banks. There are two motivations at work. First, with most advanced economies keen to narrow […]

Read more...

Afghanistan: Pentagon Payments to Warlords Undermine Central Government

The Pentagon, to secure supply lines, is effectively making payments to warlords in Afghanistan. Not only is that undermining the central government (as in by reinforcing competing centers of power), but it also appears to be helping to fund the insurgents. Now before you put that overview in the “You cannot make this stuff up” […]

Read more...

Guest Post: The Second Energy Revolution

By Wallace C. Turbrville, the former CEO of VMAC LLC who writes at New Deal 2.0 In the 1930s, a great many Southerners had no access to electricity. The Roosevelt administration perceived an enormous opportunity to restructure the region’s economy. By building facilities to bring power to the rural South, jobs would be created from […]

Read more...

Countries That Support US in Afghanistan Get Preferred Access to Minerals (Updated)

Readers may recall that we highlighted the report last week in the New York Times of an estimated trillion dollars worth of valuable materials, including copper, gold, and lithium. We pointed out that this announcement was awfully convenient, coming on the heels of reports that the efforts to pacify the country weren’t going terribly well. […]

Read more...

Glenn Stehle: BP’s Hayward Before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce

By Glenn Stehle, an engineer who began working in the oil industry in 1974. After a two-year stint with Cities Service Oil Company, he worked for two years for Henry Engineering, a petroleum engineering consulting firm. Upon leaving Henry Engineering he worked as an independent engineering consultant in all facets of the oil and gas […]

Read more...

BP to Create $20 Billion Fund for Leak Damage

Note the fund is to be established over two years, through a combination of dividend cuts and reduction in spending. Moreover, a planned dividend payment for June 21 is being halted, which would appear to be a meaningful concession. From Bloomberg: Svanberg and Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward agreed to set aside $20 billion over […]

Read more...