Another term of the US Supreme Court has come and gone and, as I have for years, I will encapsulate it in this blog. Welcome to the discussion of this and the following three posts. This term began in the midst of the Presidential election campaign, last October, only two weeks after the demise of Justice Ginsburg, only one week after the confirmation of her successor, Amy Coney Barrett. This was an extraordinary political context. It was almost as if the Republican leadership in the US Senate, which four years before had loudly announced its devotion to the principle that the Senate should not deliberate on a Supreme Court vacancy during an election year, regardless of who might be helped or hurt by that deliberation ("keep this tape"!), had been acting hypocritically and opportunistically in making those solemn avowals. Ah, what an unfortunate appearance. Also, we saw that this Supreme Court, with Justice Barrett on board, steadfastly refused to be drawn ...
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Brian Hunter, as some of you may remember, was a trader in natural gas and oil for an investment firm named Amaranth. Due to certain reckless Hunter trades, Amaranth melted down in 2005-06, and caused a good deal of volatility in the oil and gas derivatives markets in the process. Why am I interested in this? I covered it at the time, as a reporter for Reuters, but it was one of many things I covered back in the day and I'm sure I've forgotten many of them. One reason that this is on my mind is the coincidental significance of the year 2006 in a very different corner of the oil and gas world, the executive suites of Exxon-Mobil. That was the year one Rex Tillerson, a future Secretary of State, became the CEO of that company. The two companies, Amaranth, and Exxon-Mobil, have almost nothing in common except that they both have or had something to do with oil and gas. But Exxon is a vertically integrated firm that pumps the stuff out of the ground, provides ...
Chevron may have thrown, or may be about to throw, some cold water on the dreams that some have cherished for the near future of western Canada. Chevron may be pulling out of its stake in the big Kittimat liquified natural gas project. Even the very possibility of such a pull-out has had an enervating effect. https://business.financialpost.com/commodities/energy/chevrons-possible-exit-from-kitimat-lng-project-dents-canadas-hopes-of-building-lng-hub
Joe Biden's Democratic rivals are going to have to try to cut him down to size. Biden was becoming the Cascades Bigfoot of their fight for their party's nomination even before he announced he was running. Now that he has announced that he IS running, Bigfoot is likely to turn into a Himalayan Yeti. (Yes, I'm assuming that's larger.) They may well use the tale of Hunter Biden's Ukraine adventure to this end. I'm looking at news reports and trying to get a handle on this. Hunter Biden, the former VP's younger son, is not to be confused with his brother Beau, the fellow who succumbed to cancer in 2015. Hunter was a director of eCommerce policy issues in the Department of Commerce under President Clinton. He much later (in 2014) became a member of the board of something called Burisma Holdings, the largest non-government natural gas producer in the Ukraine. That's where our story starts to pick up. Only FOUR DAYS after Burisma announced that Hun...
At this time of year I ask myself what were the biggest stories of the past twelve months in business/financial news. Here are the twelve stories, by month, that especially caught my attention and that in retrospect I recommend to yours. I'll make no effort to rank their importance against one another, so I will simply order them by month. January: Multilateral Trade Agreement. The Trans-Pacific Partnership reconstituted itself despite the US withdrawal, in an agreement announced on the 23d. This is a fine example of a broader and (for the US) an unfortunate trend. The US is locking itself out of free trade areas. To the extent free trade does work to stimulate economic productivity, the US is withdrawing from that. February: Offshore natural gas. A dispute between Cyprus and Turkey over offshore drilling rights for natural gas nearly became a war as the Turkish navy obstructed a drilling vessel. This, too, I take as a token of a broader develo...
Quite suddenly, a web based operation called OptionSellers.com went dark last month.A casualty of the spike in natural gas prices. More accurately, it was a casualty of hubris, as manifest in a failure to hedge against natural gas prices. The suckers -- excuse me, its investors -- received an email November 15 with the subject line "Catastrophic Loss Event." The catastrophic loss was that OS.com had bet heavily that natural gas prices would NOT suddenly spike any time soon. As the chart I've pasted on to this blog post indicates ... nat gas prices spiked in a big way. This was part of the pitch that you might have encountered had you gone onto their website before the spike. "Stocks are great, until they aren't. Options are better, but most make the mistake of buying them." OOOOOh, I see, so the trick is to be on the SELLING side. Taking a small amount of money in return for a promise to pay off later if specified events happen in ...
According to a Reuters report posted on October 24, there's been a good deal of ambivalence in the oil patch during the recent Presidential campaign. Yes, more than a week has passed since then, but this gives me a distinctive take for what will be my last pre-election campaign-related posting in this blog, so I'll take it. One of the Trump campaign's themes -- admittedly a sort of second-tier theme, one assigned to VP candidate Pence -- was that the Obama administration is guilty of a "war on carbon," which the HRC administration will continue, so the coal, oil, and gas industries should all have boarded the TrumpTrain in self defense. The reasoning would have been more sound if Sanders had been the Democratic Party's nominee, but they did what they could with it. Anyway, the Reuters story, working from federal campaign finance filings, says that the oil industry's contributions have been about evenly split between the two campaigns. During an e...