Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Delta Air Lines Inc. reported a much wider third-quarter loss despite a rise in revenue and warned that its financial situation has worsened to the point where it needs to significantly reduce its costs quickly to turn things around.
I’m not sure why, but every time I walk into the coffee shop, somebody immediately asks me what the latest doomsday scenario is…. Lately I’ve been telling them the end is near because world oil production seems to be peaking, and as far as I can tell, we’re all going to end up riding skateboards and scooters to work.
What is the scenario in which oil hits $100 per barrel in the next five or six years? Simmons speaks of a phenomenon called “Peak Oil” and says it is “as inevitable as death,” though, like death, predicting its precise timing is not easy.
Oil depletion is not a future event that we can ignore. It is real. It is upon us. The economic and cultural destiny of mankind is inexorably tied to the availability of oil.
A fiscal train wreck is one thing but when it is combined with the following elements it makes the recipe for a perfect storm as American as apple pie.
“As the odds of a full-blown oil shock rise, the prospects of outright global recession in 2005 loom more and more likely,” said Morgan Stanley’s chief economist Stephen Roach in a note to clients. Roach also warned that “there are more cuts to come”.
Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said Monday his government will look into ways to lessen the country’s dependence on crude oil.
On December 31, 1999 when the clocks ticked for the last time in the old year and then proceeded to quite happily keep ticking their chronological way into the new, hundreds of millions of people around the world rejoiced as they welcomed the 21st millennium. At the same time, thousands of people looked at their television sets and the still-glowing lights of their homes and cities, and immediately realized that they now looked like idiots.
High oil prices haven’t damped demand or spurred extra production, forcing the world to rely more on OPEC’s oil, the producer group said Monday.
Crude oil prices, which rose to a record US$55 a barrel in New York on Friday, may increase further and peak at US$75 a barrel, said Bernard Dan, president of the Chicago Board of Trade, the second-biggest US futures market.
Shell is reconsidering decades old technology to attempt to produce liquids from shale oil in the US.
A recurring question has taken on new urgency in recent weeks – how far can oil prices climb before the world’s economies, Australia included, begin to buckle under the stress?
