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#BIG #PLAYERS SEE #OIL AT $200 By 2022-End

  OILPRICE.COM Top Oil Traders See Oil Topping $200 By End-2022 By  Irina Slav  - Mar 24, 2022, A number of big oil traders now predict crud...

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Tuesday 13 September 2016

EYE on the World - "Teacher Seeks Pupil" - Ishmael






 Stories Going Beyond The Mainstream 


 

"Teacher Seeks Pupil"- Ishmael


Without Gorilla Will There be Hope For ...? 



 
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Earth's Future At Risk As Great Apes Face Extinction



Image result for ishmael gorilla

http://www.ishmael.org/origins/ishmael/

Four out of six great apes one step away from extinction – IUCN Red List


Today’s IUCN Red List update also reports the decline of the Plains Zebra due to illegal hunting, and the growing extinction threat to Hawaiian plants posed by invasive species. Thirty eight of the 415 endemic Hawaiian plant species assessed for this update are listed as Extinct and four other species have been listed as Extinct in the Wild, meaning they only occur in cultivation.
The IUCN Red List now includes 82,954 species of which 23,928 are threatened with extinction.
Mammals threatened by illegal hunting
The Eastern Gorilla (Gorilla beringei) – which is made up of two subspecies - has moved from Endangered to Critically Endangered due to a devastating population decline of more than 70% in 20 years. Its population is now estimated to be fewer than 5,000. Grauer’s Gorilla (G. b. graueri), one subspecies of Eastern Gorilla – has lost 77% of its population since 1994, declining from 16,900 individuals to just 3,800 in 2015. 


Realty Check: The Whole Economic System Is On Welfare


Central Banks = Welfare for the Wealthy

Central banks can only do one thing, and that's provide monetary welfare for the wealthy.

The fact that central banks provide welfare for the wealthy is now entering the mainstream. The fact that all central bank policies since 2008 have dramatically increased wealth and income inequality is now grudgingly being accepted as reality by mainstream economists and the financial media.
The central banks' PR facade of noble omniscience on behalf of the great unwashed masses has cracked wide open. Even The Wall Street Journal is publishing critiques of Federal Reserve policies that suggest the Fed has no idea how the U.S. economy actually works because their policies have failed to help the bottom 95%.

Suncor Unloading Oil-Sands Assets


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Suncor Energy Seeks Permission to Abandon Some Oil-Sands Assets

Suncor Energy Inc., SU -0.58 % Canada’s largest oil producer, is in talks with government officials for permission to “strand,” or abandon, some high cost and greenhouse gas-intensive crude-oil deposits, the company’s chief executive said Wednesday. The Calgary-based company is seeking an easing of rules designed to maximize oil-sands production from leases on government land, CEO Steve Williams said at a Barclays BCS -0.66 % energy conference in New York, reiterating a strategy he first announced in July. “We’ve begun to have conversations with the government of Alberta and the current regulators about the design of their policy, which actually requires the maximum amount of resource to be extracted regardless of the economic or environmental value,” he said. The request comes as Suncor and other oil producers struggle to cut costs...

The Wall St Lambs: Wells Fargo Terminates 5,300 Rank & File Banksters


What About These Guys?


"The Oversight Dream Team"

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Major Problems Announced At One Of The Largest Too Big To Fail Banks In The United States


Wells Fargo Bank, one of the nation's largest banks, has been hit with $185 million in civil penalties for secretly opening millions of unauthorized deposit and credit card accounts that harmed customers, federal and state officials said Thursday. 


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  Top Global Bonds Manager Positioning For Higher Rates


Unusual move sees manager Richard Woolnough protect £15 billion M&G Optimal Income fund from high bond prices and rising inflation.



Woolnough moves to 'negative duration' on UK bonds

The country’s leading bond manager, Richard Woolnough, has moved to ‘negative duration’ on UK debt for the first time in response to the rising threat of inflation and the surge in bond prices since the EU referendum.
Expressed in years, duration is the measure used to show a bond fund’s sensitivity to interest rate changes.
The current overall duration  for  Woolnough's  15 Billion M&G Optimal Income fund is currently at a low 2.6 years, reflecting the view that interest rates in the developed world are expected to slowly rise following the first increase in US rates at the end of last year.




Rigged Stock Markets Won't Signal Economic Collapse


These are the signs of an economic collapse


Image result for bond market 200 hundred years

What does the beginning of an economic collapse look like?
Do you see grocery stores closing? Do you see other retailers, like clothing stores and department stores, going out of business?
Are there shuttered storefronts along your Main Street shopping district, where you bought a tool from the hardware store or dropped off your dry cleaning or bought fruits and vegetables?
Are you making as much money annually as you did 10 years ago?


Future Grid Electricity Cannot Rely On Intermittent Renewables



Many people are hoping for wind and solar PV to transform grid electricity in a favorable way. Is this really possible? Is it really feasible for intermittent renewables to generate a large share of grid electricity? The answer increasingly looks as if it is, “No, the costs are too great, and the return on investment would be way too low.” We are already encountering major grid problems, even with low penetrations of intermittent renewable electricity: US, 5.4% of 2015 electricity consumption; China, 3.9%; Germany, 19.5%; Australia, 6.6%.
In fact, I have come to the rather astounding conclusion that even if wind turbines and solar PV could be built at zero cost, it would not make sense to continue to add them to the electric grid in the absence of very much better and cheaper electricity storage than we have today. There are too many costs outside building the devices themselves. It is these secondary costs that are problematic. Also, the presence of intermittent electricity disrupts competitive prices, leading to electricity prices that are far too low for other electricity providers, including those providing electricity using nuclear or natural gas. The tiny contribution of wind and solar to grid electricity cannot make up for the loss of more traditional electricity sources due to low prices.

Thursday 8 September 2016

#Enbridge Pays $28 BILLION For Spectra Energy





Enbridge to Buy Spectra Energy in $28 Billion Deal


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Under the deal, announced jointly by the companies, Spectra Energy shareholders will receive shares of Enbridge valued at around $40.33 each, or a premium of about 11.5%, based on the closing price of Enbridge shares on Friday. The arrangement has an enterprise value of about $127 billion and the deal, which has the full support of the boards of both Enbridge and Spectra, is expected to close in the first quarter of 2017, the companies said in a release. On closing, Enbridge shareholders are expected to own about 57% of the combined company, to be called Enbridge Inc., and Spectra Energy shareholders will own the remaining 43%. The merged company will have assets spanning crude oil, liquids and natural gas pipelines, terminal and midstream operations, a regulated utility portfolio and renewable power generation operations. […]


Shadow loans had already reached 12.6 trillion yuan at the end of last year, according to calculations by UBS, about a fifth of China's entire annual economic output. And credit rating agency Fitch said in July that around a third of system credit resides outside bank loan books, undermining asset quality data.



Sanofi and Henkel AG are poised to become the first non-financial private companies to sell debt that yields below zero as the busiest year for investment-grade corporate bond issuance resumes.

Pressured by a year-and-a-half of weakening profits and splurges on buybacks and dividends, the once-towering piles of money at American companies have started to topple. Cash and equivalents slipped to a median $860 million at S&P 500 Index members last quarter, touching levels not seen for three years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.


What About These Guys?

"Oversight Dream Team"

Image result for banksters



Major Problems Announced At One Of The Largest Too Big To Fail Banks In The United States


WELLS FARGO FINES


Wells Fargo Bank, one of the nation's largest banks, has been hit with $185 million in civil penalties for secretly opening millions of unauthorized deposit and credit card accounts that harmed customers, federal and state officials said Thursday.


Employees of Wells Fargo (WFC) boosted sales figures by covertly opening the accounts and funding them by transferring money from customers' authorized accounts without permission, the Consumer Financial Protection BureauOffice of the Comptroller of the Currencyand Los Angeles city officials said.

Wednesday 7 September 2016

#Volkswagen Scandal Persists With EU


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Volkswagen faces fresh EU claims over emissions scandal


Volkswagen faces claims that it broke consumer protection laws in 20 European countries by marketing cars at the centre of the “dieselgate” scandal as “green”.  Vera Jourova, the EU justice commissioner, is pushing national authorities to investigate if Volkswagen broke the law on their territory, and if so to take action against the company. She wrote to capitals earlier this summer requesting information on what they had done to probe VW’s actions.  She told the Financial Times the responses showed it is “likely” the German carmaker breached Europe’s “unfair commercial practices directive”, which prohibits misleading advertising claims, in many EU nations.  Whether the law was broken in a particular country could depend on factors such as the type of advertising strategy used by VW there or on exactly how EU law has been incorporated into national statute books, she said.


Many Chinese pension funds are under renewed pressure to break even as local governments race to increase pension payments to meet central government requirements, state news agency Xinhua said in a commentary on Tuesday.

Events, not personalities, are going to demonstrate where things are at in the late-stage techno-industrial crack-up at hand. The shamans at the Federal Reserve have exhausted their repertoire of incantations for levitating the financial markets and, more ominously, the value of the US dollar. The prankish god they serve has arranged things so that the very faith needed to sustain their illusory influence will run down the drain as November 8 creeps closer. They must be getting awfully nervous down at the Eccles Building.

The world’s biggest oil exporter is taking unprecedented steps to rein in a budget shortfall that ballooned to 16 percent of gross domestic product last year, curtailing fuel and utility subsidies as well as cutting billions of dollars in spending. The International Monetary Fund expects the shortfall to drop to below 10 percent of GDP in 2017.

G20 is losing its focus, purpose

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The proceedings of the G20 summit which concluded in Hangzhou in China and the statements that came at the end showed how far the grouping has come away from its original purpose and agenda. The G20 came into being after the 2008 global financial crisis and was conceived as a forum which could avert and address future crises through consultation, cooperation and coordinated action among countries. It represented about 85% of the world’s GDP and two-thirds of its population. The G20 did good work in the early years and had a role in guiding the world out of an economic meltdown and slowdown. It also pushed the fight against black money and the need for the best financial practices to the top of the world’s agenda. But once the crisis passed, the grouping seems to have lost its savviness and even utility, and countries have gone back to their own narrow interests and limited agendas.

Deecan Herald

Tuesday 6 September 2016

Norway Critical To #Europe's Future Gas Supply

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Can Norway Supply Europe With Gas Long-Term?


Arctic pipeline As the EU has pushed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and lower the portion of energy that comes from nuclear sources, the greatest benefactors have been natural gas producers. The single biggest EEA benefactor has been Norway. According to the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate, hydrocarbon production on the Norwegian shelf is expected to remain relatively stable for the next 10 years. In the long-term, new discoveries will be crucial to the sustained production of Norwegian Oil and Gas. However, according to the Wall Street Journal, declining oil and gas revenues could prompt the country to tap into its sovereign wealth fund, as oil and gas fields contributed 29 percent less to government’s oil revenue for the first half of 2016. This discrepancy suggests Norway needs to look deeper to keep producing oil and gas at its current levels. Falling UK gas production has necessitated the UK to start […]


Central bank intrusions into markets. The Fed has helped the 1% but hurt most others. The Bank of Japan, Swiss Central Bank, and the EU are buying equities. Interest rates have been forced to the lowest levels in history. Economies are struggling even though central banks have aggressively “stimulated.” Perhaps the purpose of the stimulation was to boost the wealth of the 1%…

Blessed with lots of open space, consistent and strong winds, and farm owners eager to garner extra income from planting wind turbines alongside corn, Iowa has been one of the epicenters of America’s long-running wind boom. In 2008, about 4 percent of Iowa’s electricity generation came from wind. But so many wind farms have been built in the state that in 2015, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “wind provided 31.3% of Iowa’s total electricity generation in 2015, a larger share than any other state.” (In the U.S. last year, wind accounted for about 4.7 percent of electricity generation.) In raw production of wind-powered electricity, Iowa is second only to Texas.

In the very near term, while traders continue to monitor any other comments from Fed officials they will also be focused on the monthly U.S. jobs report due out on Friday as a strong number could heighten expectations for monetary tightening, and vice-versa.
Meanwhile, according to the latest report published by the World Gold Council , it seems that investors are losing faith in the current financial system as well as being fed up with monetary policy in particular negative interest rates, and have therefore put their money into hard assets such as gold.



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Drop in Greek exports again sounds

 alarm bells in sector 


A drop in the value of Greek exports in the first half of the year, which aggravated an already recession-plagued economy, has been mostly attributed to still low oil prices, which affected fuel product exports.

Nevertheless, a 1.4-percent decrease in exports of non-fuel products, compared with the same period in 2015, again raised acute concerns over the anemic – and now sliding – course of Greece’s exporting sector.


Economic planners have repeatedly pointed to robust exports as an essential ingredient in reversing the economic meltdown and placing the Greek economy on more solid foundations for future growth. Boosting competitiveness and an outward-looking business model have long been identified as the “keys” to achieving greater exports, yet seven years into the economic crisis exporters’ groups are now issuing urgent calls for more action and measures.


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