Infinite Unknown

PORT HARCOURT, Nigeria (Reuters) - Nigerian militants threatened on Wednesday to broaden their “oil war” to offshore oilfields and announced attacks on a crude oil pipeline in the Niger Delta and another Shell-operated facility.

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), responsible for attacks that have cut a fifth of OPEC member Nigeria’s oil output, said it would launch attacks outside Rivers state for the first time since clashes began on Saturday.

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Tags: Chevron, Economy, Military, Nigeria, Oil, Oil Prices, OPEC, Politics, Shell

Regulators had long classified a private Swiss energy conglomerate called Vitol as a trader that primarily helped industrial firms that needed oil to run their businesses.

But when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission examined Vitol’s books last month, it found that the firm was in fact more of a speculator, holding oil contracts as a profit-making investment rather than a means of lining up the actual delivery of fuel. Even more surprising to the commodities markets was the massive size of Vitol’s portfolio — at one point in July, the firm held 11 percent of all the oil contracts on the regulated New York Mercantile Exchange.

The discovery revealed how an individual financial player had gained enormous sway over the oil market without the knowledge of regulators. Other CFTC data showed that a significant amount of trading activity was concentrated in the hands of just a few speculators.

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Tags: CFTC, Commodities, Credit Crisis, Economy, Enron, Futures, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, NYMEX, Oil, Oil Futures, Oil Prices, Speculators, Trader, U.S., Wall Street

Oil demand in Western countries is set for its biggest fall in 25 years as the global economic slowdown intensifies and consumers respond to high prices.

Demand in the economies of the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries is set to average 48.6 million barrels per day this year, a decline of 1.3 per cent or 620,000 barrels from 49.2 million in 2007, the International Energy Agency says.

Gareth Lewis-Davies, director of commodities research at Dresdner Kleinwort, points out that this represents the largest fall since 1983, when OECD demand fell by 684,000 barrels per day in the years after the Iranian revolution. He cited growing evidence that high prices were forcing basic shifts in consumer behaviour in these countries as people used fuel more sparingly and reduced car use.

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Tags: China, Commodities, Economy, OECD, Oil, Oil Prices, U.S.

Hmmmhhh. Fending off Russia? No way!
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Jewish Georgian Minister Temur Yakobshvili on Sunday praised the Israel Defense Forces for its role in training Georgian troops and said Israel should be proud of its military might, in an interview with Army Radio.

“Israel should be proud of its military which trained Georgian soldiers,” Yakobashvili told Army Radio in Hebrew, referring to a private Israeli group Georgia had hired.

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Tags: EU, Georgia, Government, Israel, Military, NATO, Oil, Oil Prices, Politics, Russia, soldiers, U.S., War

“There may have been multiple ‘positions’ which were reclassified … but they all appear to have been held by just one trader, and this was a very special trader, with an enormous concentration of positions in crude oil amounting to perhaps 460 million barrels, and not much interest in anything else,” noted John Kemp of RBS Sempra Commodities.
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NEW YORK (Reuters) - A quiet data revision that has boosted by nearly 25 percent the number of oil futures contracts U.S. regulators think are held by speculators is raising eyebrows in the energy trading community.

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Tags: bankruptcy, Barclays, Commodities, Futures, Justice Department, NYMEX, Oil, Oil Futures, Oil Prices, RBS, SemGroup, Speculators, Trader, U.S.

July 22 (Bloomberg) — Merrill Lynch & Co. economists clipped their forecasts for U.S. growth, making revisions that they described as “adjusting to the new reality.”

“Just like consumers, who are insulating their windows and making fewer trips to the malls, we are adjusting our economic forecasts to the new high-oil-price reality, not to mention the latest round of trauma in the mortgage markets,” New York-based economists Sheryl King and Drew Matus wrote in a report.

The chart of the day shows the quarterly change in U.S. gross domestic product in green, with the annualized figure in red. Merrill now expects the economy to contract by 0.5 percent in 2009, after previously forecasting growth of 0.5 percent.

``We expect GDP to plummet 2.5 percent in the fourth quarter, and see a similar decline in the first quarter” of 2009, wrote King and Matus. “With the consumer likely to remain under duress into 2009 and inflation fears likely to abate, we continue to expect the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates early next year.”

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Tags: Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, GDP, Inflation, Merrill Lynch, Oil, Oil Prices, U.S.

“As I write this column, Congress has run this country into a $9,498,511,404,143.63 debt. That’s just under $9.5 TRILLION “dollars.”"

I really hope that you will find time to read this article.
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Arthur Henning of the Chicago Tribune said back in 1935, “The New Deal will bring the Communist Party within striking distance of overthrow of the American form of government…” Mark Sullivan of the Buffalo Evening News also expressed alarm in 1935: “The New Deal is to America what the early phase of Nazism was to Germany…”

The nation is awash in fear because they are coming to realize that while they’ve been buying all the hype from the cabal of gangsters in Washington for decades, reality is now setting in as poverty is slamming millions who used to belong to the middle class. From dangerous lending practices to the derivatives time bomb waiting to go off and inflation getting ready to launch into hyper inflation, the situation is more grim by the week. A financial catastrophe so many have been warning about for decades, it’s all coming home to roost. The “perfect storm” as it’s being called. The beast is now devouring itself and we the people are caught in their cross fire.

Unfortunately, most Americans haven’t been listening. They’re either addicted to sports, shopping, porn, drugs or yaking on their cell phones while the world has been heading for financial Armageddon.

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Tags: Barack Obama, Ben Bernanke, Bill Clinton, Bloomberg, Chrysler, Congress, Constitution, debt, Economy, Facism, Fannie Mae, Fed, Federal Reserve, financial crisis, Freddie Mac, General Motors, George Bush, Gold, Henry Paulson, John McCain, Meltdown, mortgage crisis, Mortgages, NAFTA, Oil, Oil Prices, Ron Paul, Silver, Treasury, U.S.

So Inflation is really the greatest export of the US.
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LONDON (Reuters) - Three days before the last bout of coordinated central bank intervention to calm world currency markets, the International Monetary Fund’s top economist opined: “If not now, when?” Many experts are now asking the same.

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Tags: bailout, debt, Dollar, ECB, Economy, euro, Fannie Mae, Fed, Federal Reserve, Freddie Mac, Goldman Sachs, Government, Inflation, Morgan Stanley, Oil, Oil Prices, rating, U.S.

Beef prices are likely to increase as rising food and fuel prices threaten many cattle ranches

The American beef industry is in trouble. Though the financial strain of rising fuel and food prices is being widely felt across the U.S. economy, the livestock industry, which consumes about 5 billion bushels of corn annually, is suffering more than most.

Feedlot operators, who fatten their animals on corn before sending them to a slaughterhouse, are losing $150 a head with corn prices near record levels because of demand for corn-based ethanol. In Texas, the country’s largest beef-producing state, a quarter of the once-packed feedlot space is unoccupied. Some operations are shutting their doors, and “liquidation”-the culling of herds-has become a frequent escape hatch for the seriously struggling.

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Tags: Congress, corn, Economy, Food, Food Prices, livestock, Meat, Meat Prices, Oil, Oil Prices, U.S.

At virtually every link in the nation’s food chain, the cost of oil is pushing expenses ever higher.

Retail bills for some food staples have risen at least 20 percent since 2006, and they probably will continue their upward march. A gallon of gasoline could cost $7 within the next two years, some analysts say.

“If you double the price of oil, I would assume that food would at least double, and it might be more because the cost of oil gets magnified in the food chain,” said Milt McGiffen, a vegetable specialist for the University of California cooperative extension in Riverside County.

SCOTT LINNETT / Union-Tribune Nancy Owens Renner of Ocean Beach expanded her backyard garden last winter in an effort to offset rising food and fuel prices. “I am thinking about how to maximize production in my yard,” Renner said.

By the numbers:
Price increases between May 2006 and May of this year:
53% – Eggs
25% – Bread
25% – Rice
19% – Milk
14% – Coffee
11% – Chicken
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Farmers are paying more money to fill their tractors with diesel for planting and harvesting. They also spend more for fertilizer, pesticides and plastic packaging, most of which are petroleum-based.

When the food is stored and processed, it takes a huge amount of energy, which is linked to the price of fossil fuels as well.

Then, products are shipped using diesel trucks and rail cars that are far costlier to run now than in years past.

The result is bigger and bigger food bills that are causing financial hardship for millions of Americans.

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Tags: Economy, farmers, Food, Food Prices, Food shortages, Oil, Oil Prices