Alexi Barrionuevo has written an insightful and informative profile of Venezuela’s national oil company in Monday’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required). He goes through the history of the company, PdVSA, and how Chavez’s opposition to it influenced his initial coup and run for presidential office. An excerpt: For 30 years, Rogelio Lozada was the sort …
According to this Reuters story from 1 February, the Iraqi opposition is thinking about how to encourage investment in Iraq’s oil industry if Saddam Hussein is deposed. An excerpt: While Iraq has huge oil reserves, they remain under-developed because U.N.-imposed sanctions have blocked the foreign investment needed to exploit them at full capacity. The group …
Here are some recent articles on oil and gasoline price increases due to the cold weather and anticipated military action in Iraq, from Forbes, Oil and Gas Journal, CNN, and the Houston Chronicle.
This Rigzone article from Friday does a nice job of summarizing what in economics is known as the substitution and income effects of price increases. In plain English instead of econ-geek-speak, when the price of a (normal) good goes up, all other things equal, the change in its price relative to substitutes for it induces …
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As long as I’m feeling ranty this weekend … on 28 January, in the Personal Journal section of the Wall Street Journal, the Cranky Consumer (Elizabeth Schatz) explored different ways to learn to knit: book, group class at a yarn store, cd-rom, and video. Picking up on the increasing trendiness of knitting (which is good …
Picking up on a theme from Eugene Volokh, I too am a language pedant in many ways. My biggest pet peeve is those who fail to recognize the distinction between restrictive and unrestrictive clauses, and therefore use “which” when they should use “that”. The British usage of “which” particularly gets under my skin. Again yesterday …
Many thanks to Glenn Reynolds for linking to Betsy’s Page, which in addition to being full of insightful commentary has a fantastic color scheme! Including my favorite shades of green.
Yesterday the crawl on Fox News said that new intelligence indicates that if military action occurs against Iraq, Saddam Hussein would ignite Iraqi oil fields. Some take this as evidence of Saddam?s irrationality or spitefulness. Perhaps it is. But it could also be another example of the tradeoffs among bad alternatives that we have seen …
My husband and I have an 8-year old tabby cat named Coco, after the pioneering French fashion designer Coco Chanel. At the time we adopted her from the shelter, she was one year old, lean, lithe, elegant, and beautiful. Thus the name. Of course, she was lean because she had kennel cold, and as soon …
Not surprisingly, oil prices cracked $34/barrel this morning. Also not surprisingly, Marathon Oil has announced that it will increase its exploration efforts in the upcoming year. This increase in capital investment in exploration is the logical outcome of a period of sustained high oil prices; high prices encourage either existing firms to increase their capacity …
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