Yemen’s main oil pipeline bombed, crude flow stops | Peak Oil News and Message Boards
Yemen’s main oil pipeline bombed, crude flow stops | Peak Oil News and Message Boards.
Armed tribesmen bombed Yemen’s main oil pipeline on Saturday, halting crude flow to the country’s main export terminal less than a month after it was repaired, oil and local officials said.
The attack occurred in the Serwah district in the central oil-producing province of Maarib, they said, and caused a huge fire that prompted the closure of the pipeline and stopped oil flow from the Maarib fields to the Ras Isa oil terminal on the Red Sea.
Yemen, which relies on crude exports to finance up to 70 percent of its budget, has suffered frequent bombings of its main pipeline in recent years. The last one took place on Dec. 26 and the pipeline was repaired on Jan. 5.
Disgruntled tribesmen stage these attacks to pressure the government to provide jobs, settle land disputes or free relatives from prison.
Such lawlessness is a global concern, particularly for the United States and its Gulf Arab allies, because of Yemen’s strategic position next to oil exporter Saudi Arabia and to main shipping lanes.
Yemen is also home to one of al Qaeda’s most active wings.
Before a spate of attacks that began in 2011, the 270-mile Maarib pipeline carried around 110,000 barrels per day to Ras Isa.
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West Coast Is “On Track for Having the Worst Drought In 500 Years” Washington’s Blog
West Coast Is “On Track for Having the Worst Drought In 500 Years” Washington’s Blog.
Is the West Coast In the Middle of a “Mega Drought”?
The Los Angeles Times reports:
“We are on track for having the worst drought in 500 years,” said B. Lynn Ingram, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.
California droughts can last decades … or even centuries. As the San Jose Mercury News points out:
Through studies of tree rings, sediment and other natural evidence, researchers have documented multiple droughts in California that lasted 10 or 20 years in a row during the past 1,000 years — compared to the mere three-year duration of the current dry spell. The two most severe megadroughts make the Dust Bowl of the 1930s look tame: a240-year-long drought that started in 850 and, 50 years after the conclusion of that one, another that stretched at least 180 years.
“We continue to run California as if the longest drought we are ever going to encounter is about seven years,” said Scott Stine, a professor of geography and environmental studies at Cal State East Bay. “We’re living in a dream world.”
***
Some scientists believe we are already in a megadrought, although that view is not universally accepted.
Bill Patzert, a research scientist and oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, says that the West is in a 20-year drought that began in 2000. He cites the fact that a phenomenon known as a “negative Pacific decadal oscillation” [not linked to climate change] is underway — and that historically has been linked to extreme high-pressure ridges that block storms.
We are not forecasting gloom and doom. Hopefully, the West Coast will soon get enough rain to end the drought.
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Why The Keystone Pipeline Will Actually RAISE Gas Prices In the U.S. Washington’s Blog
Why The Keystone Pipeline Will Actually RAISE Gas Prices In the U.S. Washington’s Blog.
Big Oil Is Gaming the System to Raise Domestic U.S. Prices
Bloomberg notes:
Completion of the entire [Keystone] pipeline would raise prices at the pump in the Midwest and Rocky Mountains 10 to 20 cents a gallon, Verleger, the Colorado consultant, said in an e-mail message.The higher crude prices also would erase the discount enjoyed by cities including Chicago, Cheyenne and Denver, Verleger said.
CNN Money reports:
Gas prices might go up, not down: Right now, a lot of oil being produced in Canada and North Dakota has trouble reaching the refineries and terminals on the Gulf. Since that supply can’t be sold abroad, it reduces the competition for it to Midwest refineries that can pay lower prices to get it.
Giving the Canadian oil access to the Gulf means the glut in the Midwest goes away,making it more expensive for the region.
Tyson Slocum – Director of Public Citizens’ Energy Program – explains:
How does bringing in more oil supply result in higher gas prices, you ask? Let me walk you through the facts. A combination of record domestic oil production and anemic domestic demand has resulted in large stockpiles of crude oil in the U.S. In particular, supplies of crude in the critical area of Cushing, OK increased more than 150% from 2004 to early 2011 (compared to a 40% rise for the country as a whole). Segments of the oil industry want to import additional supplies of crude from Canada, bypass the surplus crude stockpiles in Oklahoma in an effort to refine this Canadian imported oil into gasoline in the Gulf Coast with the goal of increasing gasoline exports to Latin America and other foreign markets.
***
Cushing typically is a busy place – I noted in my recent Senate testimony how Wall Street speculators were snapping up oil storage capacity at Cushing. And all of that surplus capacity is pushing WTI prices down – and for many in the oil business, downward pressure on prices is a terrible thing. As MarketWatch reports, “[B]y running south across six U.S. states from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico, [the Keystone pipeline] would skirt the pipeline hub at landlocked Cushing, Okla., a bottleneck that has forced Canadian producers to sell their oil at a steep discount to other crude grades facing fewer obstacles to the market.
***
There are several global crude oil benchmarks, and the price differential between Brent and WTI now is around $10/barrel, which is a fairly significant spread, historically speaking. Moving more Canadian crude to bypass the WTI-benchmarked Cushing stocks, the industry hopes, will align WTI’s current price discount to be higher, and more in line with Brent.
***
The Keystone pipeline isn’t just about expanding the unsustainable mining of … Canadian crude, but also to raise gasoline prices for American consumers whose gasoline is currently priced under WTI crude benchmark prices.
Slocum notes that oil is America’s number 1 import at time same that fuel is America’s number 1 export.
Specifically, more oil is being produced now under Obama than under Bush. But gas consumption is flat.
So producers are exporting refined products. By exporting, producers keep refined products off the U.S. market, creating artificial scarcity and keeping U.S. fuel prices high.
Slocum said that the main goal of the Keystone Pipeline is to import Canadian crude so the big American oil companies can export more refined fuel, driving up prices for U.S. consumers.
Tom Steyer points out:
Statements from pipeline developers reveal that the intent of the Keystone XL is not to help Americans, but to use America as an export line to markets in Asia and Europe. As Alberta’s energy minister Ken Hughes acknowledged, “[I]t is a strategic imperative, it is in Alberta’s interest, in Canada’s interest, that we get access to tidewater… to diversify away from the single continental market and be part of the global market.”
And see this NBC News report.
As Fortune explains, the U.S. is now an exporter of refined petroleum products, but Americans aren’t getting reduced prices because the oil companies are now pricing the fuel according to Europeanmetrics:
The U.S. is now selling more petroleum products than it is buying for the first time in more than six decades. Yet Americans are paying around $4 or more for a gallon of gas, even as demand slumps to historic lows. What gives?
***
Americans have been told for years that if only we drilled more oil, we would see a drop in gasoline prices.
***
But more drilling is happening now, and prices are still going up. That’s because Wall Street has changed the formula for pricing gasoline.
***
Until this time last year, gas prices hinged on the price of U.S. crude oil, set daily in a small town in Cushing, Oklahoma – the largest oil-storage hub in the country. Today, gasoline prices instead track the price of a type of oil found in the North Sea called Brent crude. And Brent crude, it so happens, trades at a premium to U.S. oil by around $20 a barrel.
***
So, even as we drill for more oil in the U.S., the price benchmark has dodged the markdown bullet by taking cues from the more expensive oil. As always, we must compete with the rest of the world for petroleum – including our own.
This is an unprecedented shift. Since the dawn of the modern-day oil markets in downtown Manhattan in the 1980s, U.S. gasoline prices have followed the domestic oil price ….
In the past year, U.S. oil prices have repeatedly traded in the double-digits below the Brent price. That is money Wall Street cannot afford to walk away from.
To put it more literally, if a Wall Street trader or a major oil company can get a higher price for oil from an overseas buyer, rather than an American one, the overseas buyer wins. Just because an oil company drills inside U.S. borders doesn’t mean it has to sell to a U.S. buyer. There is patriotism and then there is profit motive. This is why Americans should carefully consider the sacrifice of wildlife preservation areas before designating them for oil drilling. The harsh reality is that we may never see a drop of oil that comes from some of our most precious lands.
***
With the planned construction of more pipelines from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, oil will be able to leave the U.S. in greater volumes.
This isn’t old news … or just a hypothetical worry.
As Bloomberg reported in December 2013:
West Texas Intermediate crude gained the most since September after TransCanada Corp. (TRP) said it will begin operating the southern leg of its Keystone XL pipeline to the Gulf Coast in January.
[West Texas Intermediate oil] prices jumped to a one-month high, narrowing WTI’s discount to Brent. TransCanada plans to start deliveries Jan. 3 to Port Arthur, Texas, via the segment of the Keystone expansion project from Cushing, Oklahoma, according to a government filing yesterday. Cushing is the delivery point for WTI futures. Crude [oil pries] also rose as U.S. total inventories probably slid for the first time since September last week.
“With the pipeline up and running, you are going to see drops in Cushing inventories,” said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research in Winchester, Massachusetts. “It drives up WTI prices far more than Brent. You are going to see a narrowing of the Brent-WTI differential.”
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Great Depression Deja Vu – “A Chicken In Every Pot And A Maserati In Every Garage” | Zero Hedge
Great Depression Deja Vu – “A Chicken In Every Pot And A Maserati In Every Garage” | Zero Hedge.
In 1928, just as income inequality was surging, stocks were soaring and monetary distortions were rearing their ugly head, the now infamous words “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage” were integral to Herbert Hoover’s 1928 presidential run and a “vote for prosperity,” all before the market’s epic collapse. Fast forward 86 years and income inequality is at those same heady levels, stocks are at recorderer highs, the President is promising to hike the minimum wage to a “living wage” capable of filling every house with McChicken sandwiches and now… to top it all off – Maserati unveils their (apparent) “everyone should own a Maserati” commercial. It would seem that chart analogs are not the only reminder of the pre-crash era exuberance and its recovery mirage and massive monetary distortions.
The last time the top 10% of the US income distribution had such a large proportion of the entire nation’s income was the 1920s – a period that culminated in the Great Depression and a collapse in that exuberance.
“Wealth effect” – check
“Today there is a tremendous amount of monetary distortion, on par with the 1929 stock market and certainly the peak of 2007, and many others,” warns Universa’s Mark Spitznagel.
and “a Maserati in every garage”
It’s a great looking car and emotionally imploring but… did they really just suggest (subliminally of course) that such luxury is to be had by all?
Perhaps a gentle reminder of the reality for 99.99% of Americans…compared to the Maserati buyer…
As Mark Spitznagel warned:
The reality is, when distortion is created, the only way out is to let the natural homeostasis take over. The purge that occurs after massive distortion is painful, but ultimately, it’s far better and healthier for the system.
While that may sound rather heartless, it’s actually the best and least destructive in the long run.
Look what happened in the 1930s, when the actions of the government prolonged what should have been a quick purge. Instead, the government prevented the natural rebuilding process from working, which made matters so much worse.
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Paul Singer’s “Vision” Of The Coming “Riot Point” And The Fed’s “Formula For Destruction” | Zero Hedge
We sympathize with traditional stock and bond investors, who are faced with extremely poor choices today. QE has distorted the prices of all traditional asset classes to such an extent that none currently promises a fair return with modest risk…. Because the dominant force in securities-price movements today is government policy, particularly the governmental buying of bonds and stocks, there is a vulnerability to all trading and investing prospects that cannot be assessed or measured with confidence… Since there is no history of Americans losing confidence in the basic soundness of their currency and their government, and since monetary policy today is so manipulative and large, it will be hard to parse the reasons for any particular market moves in 2014.
– Paul Singer, Elliott Management
As always, perhaps the best periodic commentary on the state of the “markets” (even if such a thing has not existed for the past 5 years) and global economy comes from the person whose opinion has not been swayed by fly-by-night screechers and book-peddling pundits who fit in CNBC’s octobox and who come fast and are forgotten even faster, and whose 37 year track record at Elliott Management, whose assets he has grown from $1.3 million to $23 billion, speaks for itself: Paul Singer.
Below are the key excerpts from his January letter.
VISION
Imagine how mainstream experts would have reacted to the following set of predictions in 2006: “In two years Lehman will be bankrupt; Merrill and Bear will be acquired in distressed takeunders; Citicorp, AIG, Chrysler, GM, Delphi, Fannie and Freddie will be taken over by the government facing possibly hundreds of billions of dollars of losses; and only 13 global megabanks will survive.”
The 2008 crisis had a lasting and profound impact on virtually the entire developed world. The financial system was brought to the brink of collapse; conditions were created for the radical monetary policy of the past five years and a severely distorted recovery; the plans and dreams of hundreds of millions of people were disrupted, in some cases catastrophically; and societal values were significantly twisted away from individual responsibility toward dependency. In fact, the consequences of the bubble, the bust and the policy aftermath are not yet in full historical view. Despite all the pain, policymakers
refuse to take responsibility for the bubble, the distortions of the bubble years, the ensuing failure to lay the groundwork for strong post-bust growth, the continued riskiness and fragility of the major financial institutions, the lack of appropriate policies to deal with the bust, or their total inability to deal with competitive and technological challenges in the labor market.
It is not that the path toward destruction was impossible to see. On the contrary, a number of people saw the disaster coming, even if they did not all see the timing or the shape of it. The strangest part of the whole series of events is that only a few large professional investors noticed the smoke and shouted “fire.” Policymakers, particularly at the Fed and including (importantly) Janet Yellen, paid some small lip service to the building risks, but they were wedded to their primitive “models” and had a completely inadequate grasp of modern financial instruments, leverage and the interconnectivity of financial institutions. Not only did policymakers fail to understand what was happening and how to deal with the crisis and its aftermath, but also many of those same policymakers, and ALL of the structures and assumptions that prevailed pre-crash, are still in place today. No apologies have been issued. There has been a great deal of partisan back-and-forth and successful lobbying, but sadly the financial system is still not sound. This may be impossible to prove until the next crisis, but you could have said the same about conditions leading up to the last one.
Policymakers were and remain asleep at the wheel. The lack of introspection at the Treasury, the Fed, Congress, the White House and other regulatory bodies is astounding. Instead of taking reasonable and conservative steps to strengthen the financial system and to reach consensus on what is necessary to generate growth, there has been a series of cronyist, ideological, punitive steps that have neither catalyzed the growth that this country needs nor made financial institutions safe. At the same time, the Administration has allowed (and encouraged) the Fed to carry the ball all by itself, heaping praise on it for saving the world at the very time that the White House is shirking its own responsibilities. The Fed’s “dual mandate” (to promote “maximum employment” as well as “price stability”) is bunk in today’s context. It seems as if the entire world is acting as if the Fed actually has a “total mandate” and the rest of the federal government gets to stand around and applaud its heroic efforts. In fact, what we have now is a lopsided recovery, gigantic price risk in financial markets because of QE, and unknown but potentially massive risks of inflation and the ultimate loss of confidence in the major paper currencies, all because the federal government is more interested in ideology than in getting the country back on track, and the Europeans are more interested in preserving the euro than promoting the prosperity of the sovereign nations of Europe.
* * *
For private investment firms like hedge funds, leverage in the modern world is a matter of semi-volition. True, it is much more readily available than in the past, but there are credit departments and initial margins limiting the size of positions. The big financial institutions, on the other hand, found themselves in an environment starting a couple of dozen years ago in which leverage was entirely voluntary, subject to no real constraint because they were not required to post initial margins with each other. Since many of their positions were “hedges” in similar securities, they risk-underwrote those trades using models that projected very little possibility of generating losses. As a result, the entire system has become super-leveraged, super-interconnected and very brittle. Given the benefits of hindsight, we do not have to prove the proposition that the limits of leverage were exceeded in the recent past and that the system was improperly risk-managed by governments and by the managements of financial institutions. It is frustrating, therefore, that no meaningful de-risking of the financial system has occurred since the crisis. You will see a system primed for a rerun of 2008, perhaps even faster and more intense this time.
***
MONETARY POLICY GOING FORWARD
QE has created asset price booms, but historically high excess bank reserves are still generally not being lent, and monetary velocity remains relatively low. But last spring, we witnessed the first tangible sign that the Fed may be trapped in its current posture. The Fed cannot retreat due to excessive debt in the system, the fragility of major financial institutions (still opaque and overleveraged) and the prospect that a collapse of bond prices could lead to a quick, deep recession. This situation may be the early stages of a phase in which the Fed is afraid to act because it has the “tiger by the tail,” and perhaps is beginning to realize that the current situation carries significant risks. QE has not generated a sharp upsurge of sustaining and self-reinforcing growth thus far. What it has done is lift stock and asset prices and exacerbate inequality. If investors lose confidence in paper money, as evidenced by either a hard sell-off in one of the major currencies or a sharp fall in bond prices, the Fed and other major central bankers will be in a pickle. If they stop QE and/or raise short-term rates to deal with the loss of confidence, it could throw global markets into a tailspin and the worldwide economy into a severe new recession. However, if they try to deal with the loss of confidence by stepping up QE or keeping interest rates at zero, there could be an explosion in commodity and other asset prices and a sharp acceleration in inflation. What would be the “exit” from extraordinary Fed policy at that point? The current, benign-looking environment (low inflation and
stable economies) is by no means ordained to be the permanent state of things. At the moment, “tapering” is expected to get underway, but that prospect represents a tentative, slight diminution of bond-buying. It contains no real promise of normalizing monetary conditions. If the economy does not light up, the impact of another year of full-bore QE is impossible to predict. Five years and $4 trillion have created economic and moral distortions but very little sustainable value. Maybe the sixth year will produce the “riot point.” Nobody knows, including the Fed.
As we and others have said, the Fed is overly reliant upon models that do not account for real-world elements of instruments, markets and traders in the derivatives age. Models cannot possibly take into account unpredictable interactions among huge positions and traders in new and very complicated instruments. Thus, the Fed should be careful, humble and conservative. Instead, it is just blithely plowing ahead as if it knows exactly what is going on. Intelligent captains sail uncharted waters with extra caution and high alert; only fools think that each mile they sail without sinking the vessel further demonstrates that they are wise and the naysayers were fools. This is a formula for destruction. The crash of 2008 should have been smoking-gun evidence of the folly of this approach, but every mistake leading up to the crash, especially excessive and “invisible” leverage and interest rates that were too low, has been doubled down upon in the years since.
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How Cronyism And Corruption Brought Down Detroit | Zero Hedge
How Cronyism And Corruption Brought Down Detroit | Zero Hedge.
Detroit U.S.A.: Once the most prosperous city in America. With a booming manufacturing sector and cultural magnetism, the city had bright horizons after World War II. But as the 1960?s rolled in, the marriage of Big Business and Big Government overtook Detroit. The central planners in government needed the powerful corporations, and the powerful corporations came to depend on the bureaucracy, too. The marriage worked well for the politicians and for their corporate cronies, but Detroit itself entered a decades-long decline. America watched as Detroit slowly bled people, jobs and revenue. Politicians tried spending money. They tried raising taxes. The more they taxed and spent, the faster the city declined.
Detroit still had its “Big Three” auto manufacturers, until two of its crown jewels, General Motors and Chrysler, imploded in 2008 under the weight of reckless and subsidized mismanagement.
Instead of allowing market forces to rebuild Detroit and the auto industry, the United States handed billions of dollars to General Motors and Chrysler.
Five years later, the city of Detroit is bankrupt and almost $20 billion dollars in debt. Meanwhile, General Motors has a cash balance of over $20 billion, still owes the taxpayers over $10 billion dollars that outgoing CEO Dan Akerson said will not be paid, and the company continues to benefit from an unprecedented $18 billion tax gift from the bankruptcy.
Why is General Motors walking away with billions while Detroit dies?
How did so much money change hands between the world’s most powerful corporate leaders and government officials while delivering on so little of the promise sold to America by central planners? Bankrupt: How Cronyism & Corruption Took Down Detroit answers this question, and many others.
Complete with the candid analysis of pundits, journalists, analysts and government officials, sourcing of historical news and government archives, and on-scene interviews with everyday Detroiters, Bankrupt sheds light on what happened to Detroit, and who is to blame.
And most importantly, it asks “What is next for the Motor City?”
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Thousands of Anti-Putin Protesters March in Moscow » The Epoch Times
Thousands of Anti-Putin Protesters March in Moscow » The Epoch Times.
Opposition demonstrators carry posters of imprisoned protesters during a protest rally in Moscow, Russia, Sunday, Feb. 2, 2014. Several thousand Russian opposition supporters gathered for a protest on Sunday, venting anger against the Kremlin and demanding the release of political prisoners. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)
MOSCOW— Several thousand protesters have marched through central Moscow to call for the release of 20 people who were arrested after clashes between police and demonstrators in May 2012.
Some of them face up to 10 years in prison if convicted for the protest, held on Bolotnaya Square on the eve of President Vladimir Putin’s inauguration to a third term as Russia’s president.
The protesters marched Sunday with a banner stretching across the street reading: “Freedom to the Bolotnaya heroes, the hostages of Putin.” Others held portraits of the jailed protesters.
Of the 28 people who were rounded up in the case, eight were recently freed on amnesty. Several defendants are under house arrest, but most of the others have been in jail for more than a year and a half.
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Transport Safety Board Releases Safety Recommendations for Oil By Rail Shipment | DeSmog Canada
Transport Safety Board Releases Safety Recommendations for Oil By Rail Shipment | DeSmog Canada.
The federal agency investigating the Lac-Megantic oil train derailment and explosion that killed forty-seven people released recommendations last week to improve the safety of shipping crude oil by rail. If the recommendations are implemented by the federal government they will serve as a strong step forward in protecting communities living along railway lines.
“The federal transport minister has a clear choice: protect public safety or secure profits of oil companies,” says Keith Stewart, a climate and energy campaigner with Greenpeace Canada.
One of the country’s most active lobby groups – the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) – responded to the recommendations earlier this week. CAPP asked the federal government “to ensure their implementation does not interrupt service and respects the competitiveness of transporting our products by rail.” In other words, new regulations should not interfere with business as usual for the oil industry.
“Companies have to pay the price for safety. Their profits cannot come before communities, the environment and general safety,” John Bennett, director of the Sierra Club Canada told DeSmog Canada.
The Transport Safety Board (TSB) made three recommendations to Transport Canada improve safety of oil-by-rail shipments: tougher standards for the susceptible-to-rupturing DOT 111 tank cars, strategic routing of oil trains that considers the environment and communities, and emergency response plans for rail lines transporting large volumes of oil.
Greenpeace and the Sierra Club welcome the recommendations. Both organizations have been pushing for stricter oil by rail transport rules since before disaster struck Lac-Megantic, Quebec on July 6th of last year. Rail company CN also supports the TSB’s recommendations. Rail tank cars are owned either by shipping companies or oil producers. Rail companies on the other hand own the rails, and are liable for derailments.
The recommendations focus on tank cars, not the rails themselves, which is one of the shortcomings of the recommendations. Improvements on both are needed.
Recommendations cannot protect the public if they are not implemented. Bennett is not very optimistic the recommendations will be applied by the federal government. Many TSB recommendations in the past, he says, have “just sat there” and were not adopted, like rail line improvement recommendations made after the Lake Wabamun derailment in Alberta in 2005.
Stewart speculates the federal government will wait to see what the U.S. does, something he thinks is very problematic.
“Lives are at risk. Canada should be taking a leadership role,” Stewart told DeSmog from Toronto.
The TSB and the U.S. National Transport Safety Board announced their safety recommendations for oil-by-rail intentionally at the same time. Transport Canada has ninety days to reply to the TSB’s findings. Upon release of the recommendations in Ottawa on January 23rd, TSB chair Wendy Tadros insisted “change must come and it must come now.”
If adopted, applying the recommendations may prove to be difficult. Rerouting oil tank cars away from densely populated or environmentally sensitive areas is difficult due to Canada’s limited rail options.
Emergency response plans also require greater communication between shippers in the public, especially regarding large oil shipments. Shippers have been reluctant to do this in the past.
“Canadians need to ask themselves why are we doing this? Transporting oil more – whether by rail or pipeline – is a risk with little to no benefits for communities because it is going for export,” says Bennett, who is based in Ottawa.
“We already have enough infrastructure to meet our own oil consumption needs,” Bennett told DeSmog Canada.
Oil tank car shipments in Canada have dramatically jumped from five hundred carloads in 2009 to 160,000 last year, but Canada’s consumption of oil has declined during the same period. All of the recent pipeline proposals in Canada are destined to export oil out of the country with the exception of the Line 9 pipeline in Ontario and Quebec.
“The federal government would be more than happy for this debate to be rail versus pipeline oil shipments,” says Stewart.
“The debate should really be between dirty energy and clean energy and why we continue to invest billions in infrastructure for the fossil fuel industry when that money should be used to fight climate change and reduce our dependence on oil,” Stewart told DeSmog Canada.
The oilsands boom in Alberta and the Bakken shale oil boom in North Dakota coupled with stiff opposition to new pipeline approvals have been blamed for the massive increase in oil-by-rail transport in North America. In the US, oil tank carloads went from 10,800 in 2009 to 400,000 in 2013.
Image Credit: Transportation Safety Board
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Market Cornered: JPMorgan Owns Over 60% Notional Of All Gold Derivatives | Zero Hedge
Market Cornered: JPMorgan Owns Over 60% Notional Of All Gold Derivatives | Zero Hedge.
Perhaps the only question we have after seeing the attached table, which shows that as of Q3, 2013 JPMorgan owned $65.4 billion, or just over 60% of the total notional ($108.2 billion) of all gold derivatives in the US, is whether the CFTC will pull the “our budget was too small” excuse to justify why it allowed Jamie Dimon to ignore any and all position limits and corner the gold market?
And purely as a reference point, the chart below compares the total value of gold held in JPM’s vault (registered and eligible) as of Friday’s closing price with its reported gold derivative notional holdings.
Finally, for the purists out there, we realize that gross is not net… until there is a breach in the derivative counterparty collateral chain, and gross becomes net.
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Managing the growing conversation at CBCNews.ca – Editor’s Blog
Managing the growing conversation at CBCNews.ca – Editor’s Blog.
(iStock)
Something amazing has been happening in the CBC News commenting community over the last 6 months. The number of people commenting and the number of comments being posted has been growing exponentially. More and more Canadians are choosing CBCNews.ca as their destination to discuss the news that affects them on a daily basis. This is incredible engagement with audiences. In fact, in the last six months, the volume of comments has doubled. CBC News reporting and story-telling is increasingly becoming the starting point for national conversation.
With this good news, comes a challenge. The financial cost of moderating our comments increases as the volume of comments goes up. It’s a good challenge to have, but something we can’t ignore. That’s why we’ve been experimenting with strategies for managing the number of comments moderated on discussion threads on CBCNews.ca stories.
You may have noticed fewer stories with comments open. We are also only opening comments on any given story for one day. And if a new story is filed on a story that already has open comments, we are closing off the old discussion and starting again on the latest news. We have also been experimenting with reactive moderation on some stories. Reactive moderation means all comments get published but when the community flags a comment they’re looked at by a moderator.
We recognize it’s a work in progress. As a public broadcaster, we must be mindful that we are managing our bottom line responsibly. We also need to manage our legal risk, and we want to ensure our comment boards are a welcoming and respectful space for all Canadians.
As we move forward we will do our best to be transparent and keep you informed about the changes in our commenting community. We are proud to say that CBC News has the largest and most thoughtful commenting community in Canada and we value its members — you — highly. We want CBC News to remain the go-to place for Canadians who want to have a meaningful discussion about the stories and issues that are important to them and make a difference in their lives.
We welcome your feedback on these and any changes we make.
Olduvaiblog: Musings on the coming collapse 