Branson warns that oil crunch: Energy crisis threatens to be more serious than credit crunch
Sir Richard Branson and fellow leading businessmen will warn ministers this week that the world is running out of oil and faces an oil crunch within five years.
…Other British executives who will support the warning include Ian Marchant, chief executive of Scottish and Southern Energy group, and Brian Souter, chief executive of transport operator Stagecoach.
Their call for urgent government action comes amid a wider debate on the issue and follows allegations by insiders at the International Energy Agency that the organization had deliberately underplayed the threat of so-called "peak oil" to avoid panic on the stock markets.
…The issue came up at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos where Thierry Desmarest, chief executive of the Total oil company in France, also broke ranks. The world could struggle to produce more than 95m barrels of oil a day in future, he said – 10% above present levels. "The problem of peak oil remains."
Chris Skrebowski, an independent oil consultant who prepared parts of the peak oil report for Branson and others, said that only recession is holding back a crisis…Skrebowski believes that Britain is particularly vulnerable because it has gone from being a net exporter of oil, gas and coal to being an importer, and is becoming increasingly exposed to competition for supplies.
The question of peak oil came to centre stage last November when a whistleblower told the Guardian the figures provided by the IEA – and used by the UK and US governments for much of their planning scenarios – were inaccurate.
"The IEA in 2005 was predicting that oil supplies could rise as high as 120m barrels a day by 2030, although it was forced to reduce this gradually to 116m and then 105m last year," said the IEA source. "The 120m figure always was nonsense but even today's number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this."
Terry Macalister
guardian.co.uk
Showing posts with label Peak Credit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peak Credit. Show all posts
7/4/11
On Peak Oil: Could long term economic recovery be limited to available and/or affordable energy supplies?
6/30/11
If credit peaksdoes employment, globalization and peace?
We have lent a huge amount of money to the US
so of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets
Frankly speaking, I do have some worries
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao
US Insists China Fears Over Debt Unfounded
If Executive Order 6102, signed on April 5, 1933
let the Federal Reserve confiscate gold for $20.67 per troy ounce
and the government raised the price to $35 not long after
did the US government devalue the dollar by 41%?
The Gold Reserve Act of 1934…
changed the value of the dollar in gold
from $20.67 to $35 per ounce
This price remained until August 15, 1971
when President Richard Nixon
announced that the United States
would no longer convert dollars to gold at a fixed value
thus abandoning the gold standard for foreign exchange
Have the leaders of most emerging economies
essentially been stealing their citizens’ savings
by lending money to developed economies
to keep currency exchange rates relatively low
to encourage more sales of manufactured goods?
If global central bank foreign exchange reserves more than tripled
as the US dollar fell by ~50% since 2000
did Americans buy manufactured goods from foreign nations
with IOUs that are now worth about half as much?
Who is the largest holder of US Treasury debt?
What could happen
if a generation of underemployed, underpaid
educated and indebted young adults
become disillusioned by their elders’ financial mismanagement
and seek to identify and punish those responsible?
10/20/10
World Trade War 2010
"China to Halt Some Exports to U.S.
China, which has been blocking shipments of crucial minerals to Japan for the last month, has now quietly halted shipments of those materials to the United States and Europe, three industry officials said on Tuesday.
The Chinese action, involving rare earth minerals that are crucial to manufacturing many advanced products, seems certain to further intensify already rising trade and currency tensions with the West.
...“The embargo is expanding” beyond Japan, said one of the three rare earth industry officials, all of whom insisted on anonymity for fear of business retaliation by Chinese authorities.
They said Chinese customs officials imposed the broader restrictions on Monday morning, hours after a top Chinese official summoned international news media Sunday night to denounce United States trade actions.
China mines 95 percent of the world’s rare earth elements, which have broad commercial and military applications, and are vital to the manufacture of products as diverse as cellphones, large wind turbines and guided missiles. Any curtailment of Chinese supplies of rare earths is likely to be greeted with alarm in Western capitals, particularly because Western companies are believed to keep much smaller stockpiles of rare earths than Japanese companies.
China experts said on Tuesday that Beijing’s assertive stance on rare earths might also signal the ascendance of economic nationalists, noting that the Central Committee of the Communist Party convened over the weekend.
...Industry executives said there had been no signal from Beijing of how long rare earth shipments intended for the West would be held by Chinese customs officials.
...Word of the blocked shipments emerged from industry executives on Tuesday after an official China newspaper reported earlier in the day that Beijing planned next year to further reduce its annual export quota for rare earths.
The signals of a tougher Chinese trade stance come after American trade officials announced on Friday that they would investigate whether China was violating World Trade Organization rules by subsidizing its clean energy exports and limiting clean energy imports. The inquiry includes whether China’s steady reductions in rare earth export quotas since 2005, along with steep export taxes on rare earths, are illegal attempts to force multinational companies to produce more of their high-technology goods in China.
Despite a widely confirmed suspension of rare earth shipments from China to Japan, now nearly a month old, Beijing has continued to deny that any embargo exists.
Industry executives and analysts have interpreted that official denial as a way to wield an undeclared trade weapon without creating a policy trail that could make it easier for other countries to bring a case against China at the World Trade Organization.
So far, China seems to be taking a similar approach in expanding the embargo to the West.
Wang Baodong, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said on Tuesday that the Chinese government was putting new restrictions on the mining, processing and export of rare earths to protect the environment. But he said that China was not violating any W.T.O. rules in doing so and that it was not imposing an embargo or trying to use rare earths as a bargaining chip.
“With stricter export mechanism gradually in place, outbound shipments to other countries might understandably begin to feel the effect,” Mr. Wang said in an e-mail. “But I don’t see any link between China’s reasonable rare earth export control policy and the irrational U.S. decision of protectionist nature to investigate China’s clean energy industries.”
...The Chinese government office that oversees rare earth policy...has emerged as a bastion of economic nationalism.
...China reduced in July its export quota for rare earths for the second half of the year by 72 percent. Exporters had only six weeks’ of quotas left when China imposed its unannounced embargo on shipments to Japan.
China is preparing further reductions of up to 30 percent in its 2011 quotas compared with quotas issued in 2010..."
Keith Bradsher
New York Times
China, which has been blocking shipments of crucial minerals to Japan for the last month, has now quietly halted shipments of those materials to the United States and Europe, three industry officials said on Tuesday.
The Chinese action, involving rare earth minerals that are crucial to manufacturing many advanced products, seems certain to further intensify already rising trade and currency tensions with the West.
...“The embargo is expanding” beyond Japan, said one of the three rare earth industry officials, all of whom insisted on anonymity for fear of business retaliation by Chinese authorities.
They said Chinese customs officials imposed the broader restrictions on Monday morning, hours after a top Chinese official summoned international news media Sunday night to denounce United States trade actions.
China mines 95 percent of the world’s rare earth elements, which have broad commercial and military applications, and are vital to the manufacture of products as diverse as cellphones, large wind turbines and guided missiles. Any curtailment of Chinese supplies of rare earths is likely to be greeted with alarm in Western capitals, particularly because Western companies are believed to keep much smaller stockpiles of rare earths than Japanese companies.
China experts said on Tuesday that Beijing’s assertive stance on rare earths might also signal the ascendance of economic nationalists, noting that the Central Committee of the Communist Party convened over the weekend.
...Industry executives said there had been no signal from Beijing of how long rare earth shipments intended for the West would be held by Chinese customs officials.
...Word of the blocked shipments emerged from industry executives on Tuesday after an official China newspaper reported earlier in the day that Beijing planned next year to further reduce its annual export quota for rare earths.
The signals of a tougher Chinese trade stance come after American trade officials announced on Friday that they would investigate whether China was violating World Trade Organization rules by subsidizing its clean energy exports and limiting clean energy imports. The inquiry includes whether China’s steady reductions in rare earth export quotas since 2005, along with steep export taxes on rare earths, are illegal attempts to force multinational companies to produce more of their high-technology goods in China.
Despite a widely confirmed suspension of rare earth shipments from China to Japan, now nearly a month old, Beijing has continued to deny that any embargo exists.
Industry executives and analysts have interpreted that official denial as a way to wield an undeclared trade weapon without creating a policy trail that could make it easier for other countries to bring a case against China at the World Trade Organization.
So far, China seems to be taking a similar approach in expanding the embargo to the West.
Wang Baodong, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said on Tuesday that the Chinese government was putting new restrictions on the mining, processing and export of rare earths to protect the environment. But he said that China was not violating any W.T.O. rules in doing so and that it was not imposing an embargo or trying to use rare earths as a bargaining chip.
“With stricter export mechanism gradually in place, outbound shipments to other countries might understandably begin to feel the effect,” Mr. Wang said in an e-mail. “But I don’t see any link between China’s reasonable rare earth export control policy and the irrational U.S. decision of protectionist nature to investigate China’s clean energy industries.”
...The Chinese government office that oversees rare earth policy...has emerged as a bastion of economic nationalism.
...China reduced in July its export quota for rare earths for the second half of the year by 72 percent. Exporters had only six weeks’ of quotas left when China imposed its unannounced embargo on shipments to Japan.
China is preparing further reductions of up to 30 percent in its 2011 quotas compared with quotas issued in 2010..."
Keith Bradsher
New York Times
8/11/10
Are we collectively bankrupt?
U.S. Is Bankrupt and We Don't Even Know: Laurence Kotlikoff
Let’s get real. The U.S. is bankrupt.
Neither spending more nor taxing less will help the country pay its bills.
...Last month, the International Monetary Fund released its annual review of U.S. economic policy.
...the IMF has effectively pronounced the U.S. bankrupt. Section 6 of the July 2010 Selected Issues Paper says: “The U.S. fiscal gap associated with today’s federal fiscal policy is huge for plausible discount rates.” It adds that “closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 percent of U.S. GDP.”
The fiscal gap is the value today (the present value) of the difference between projected spending (including servicing official debt) and projected revenue in all future years.
Double Our Taxes
To put 14 percent of gross domestic product in perspective, current federal revenue totals 14.9 percent of GDP. So the IMF is saying that closing the U.S. fiscal gap, from the revenue side, requires, roughly speaking, an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal-income, corporate and federal taxes as well as the payroll levy set down in the Federal Insurance Contribution Act.
Such a tax hike would leave the U.S. running a surplus equal to 5 percent of GDP this year, rather than a 9 percent deficit. So the IMF is really saying the U.S. needs to run a huge surplus now and for many years to come to pay for the spending that is scheduled. It’s also saying the longer the country waits to make tough fiscal adjustments, the more painful they will be.
Is the IMF bonkers?
No. It has done its homework. So has the Congressional Budget Office whose Long-Term Budget Outlook, released in June, shows an even larger problem.
‘Unofficial’ Liabilities
Based on the CBO’s data, I calculate a fiscal gap of $202 trillion, which is more than 15 times the official debt.
...It reflects what economists call the labeling problem. Congress has been very careful over the years to label most of its liabilities “unofficial” to keep them off the books and far in the future.
For example, our Social Security FICA contributions are called taxes and our future Social Security benefits are called transfer payments. The government could equally well have labeled our contributions “loans” and called our future benefits “repayment of these loans less an old age tax”...
The fiscal gap isn’t affected by fiscal labeling. It’s the only theoretically correct measure of our long-run fiscal condition because it considers all spending, no matter how labeled, and incorporates long-term and short-term policy.
...How can the fiscal gap be so enormous?
Simple. We have 78 million baby boomers who, when fully retired, will collect benefits from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid that, on average, exceed per-capita GDP. The annual costs of these entitlements will total about $4 trillion in today’s dollars...
...This is what happens when you run a massive Ponzi scheme for six decades straight, taking ever larger resources from the young and giving them to the old while promising the young their eventual turn at passing the generational buck.
...Uncle Sam’s Ponzi scheme will stop. But it will stop too late.
And it will stop in a very nasty manner. The first possibility is massive benefit cuts visited on the baby boomers in retirement. The second is astronomical tax increases that leave the young with little incentive to work and save. And the third is the government simply printing vast quantities of money to cover its bills.
...Most likely we will see a combination of all three responses with dramatic increases in poverty, tax, interest rates and consumer prices. This is an awful, downhill road to follow, but it’s the one we are on.
...Our country is broke and can no longer afford no- pain, all-gain “solutions.”
Laurence J. Kotlikoff
Professor of economics at Boston University
Bloomberg Opinion
8/10/10
Sobering Thoughts on the Demographics of the Baby Boom, Savings, Entitlement Benefits and Monetary Policy
If workers earn, pay taxes, spend, save and invest,
while retirees divest, downsize, budget
and draw income and healthcare benefits,
what’s going to happen when more retirees want
what fewer workers may not be able to deliver?
while retirees divest, downsize, budget
and draw income and healthcare benefits,
what’s going to happen when more retirees want
what fewer workers may not be able to deliver?
It is incumbent on government to convey to future retirees
that the real resources currently promised to be available on retirement,
will not be fully forthcoming.
Alan Greenspan
…the models are suggesting that the shrinkage in the high savings population cohorts and an expansion in the retired population will alter supply demand dynamics…in a profoundly negative manner.
The unfavorable shift in dependency ratios, combined with sharply increased spending on pensions and healthcare is likely to cause a sustained deterioration in primary fiscal balances and a continuous increase in government debt to GDP ratios.
The common assumption that future savings flows from the large developing economies will be a ready source of finance for the ageing advanced economies is most probably flawed
…It is highly implausible to believe that Africa, the Middle East and India will be capable of funding the rest of the world’s growing population of retirees.
Because the rise in old age dependency ratios is common to virtually all significant economies, the idea that a redistribution of global savings flows from surplus to deficit nations might mitigate the impact of ageing on bond markets is a false comfort.
…Over the next two decades, the boomer generation will age into retirement and run down their accumulated savings. An era of capital abundance will gradually turn into an era of capital scarcity. Government debt burdens will rise sharply…
Given the broad international context for these trends, with similar developments afflicting almost all the world’s major economies, the means by which the government debt burdens are eventually curtailed is unclear.
…yields are likely to require a significant rise in risk premia to cover the eventuality of default, either outright or through inflation.
Tim Bond
Via Alphaville
2/22/10
If credit peaks does employment, globalization and peace?
To avoid the shortcomings of sovereign credit currencies
acting as reserve currencies,
we need to create an ... international reserve currency
that can maintain the long-term stability of its value.
People's Bank of China
If US dollars became redeemable only for themselves in 1971,
why are most international financial transactions
still denominated in American currency?
What would happen if international financial transactions
become denominated in assets other than US dollars
and Federal Reserve Note supplies exceed demand?
If one day the world's largest oil producers
demanded euros for their barrels,
it would be the financial equivalent of a nuclear strike.
Bill O'Grady
2/9/10
How could fiscal 2009’s reported Federal Deficit be only $1.42 trillion if Total Debt increased by more than $1.88 trillion?
Date 9/30/2008 9/30/2009
Value $10,024,725,000,000 $11,909,828,000,000
How could the national debt have increased
by considerably more than...the "deficit"?
Simple.
Just call the money borrowed from the Social Security trust fund
an "intragovernmental transfer,"
and exclude it from the calculation of the deficit.
Corporate managers have gone to jail for less book cooking than that.
A Short History of the National Debt
2/2/10
If North Carolina bumps up against borrowing capacity, should Greensboro and Guilford County budgetary expectations fall?
Sometimes I wonder
whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on,
or by imbeciles who really mean it.Mark Twain
Study: N.C. has little room to borrow
North Carolina has essentially exhausted its ability to borrow money for state buildings and roads if it wants to protect its top credit rating.
The annual Debt Affordability Study released today…says the state can only borrow an additional $9 million backed by tax revenues for each of the next five years and remain within self-imposed guidelines.
Officials base the recommendation on the assumption that annual debt service should be no more than 4 percent of state revenues.
The report also found there's no extra debt capacity for transportation projects until at least 2013.
Gary D. Robertson
Associated Press, February 2, 2010
1/1/10
If credit peaks does employment, globalization and peace?
To avoid the shortcomings of sovereign credit currencies
acting as reserve currencies,
we need to create an ... international reserve currency
that can maintain the long-term stability of its value.
If US dollars became redeemable only for themselves in 1971,
why are most international financial transactions
still denominated in American currency?
What would happen if international financial transactions
become denominated in assets other than US dollars
and Federal Reserve Note supplies exceed demand?
If one day the world's largest oil producers
demanded euros for their barrels,
it would be the financial equivalent of a nuclear strike.
Bill O'Grady
12/15/09
If water was money and grass was credit, and Cheetahs and Gazelles were people, who would be who?
Current world population 6.8 billion
Net growth per day 218,030
2040 Forecast 9 billion
Census Bureau
There are probably already too many people on the planet.
We need to continue to decrease the growth rate
of the global population.
The planet can't support many more people.
Dr Nina Fedoroff
National Medal of Science Laureate
Professor of Molecular Biology
Science and Technology Advisor
to the US Secretary of State since 2007
If Gazelles need water and grass
and Cheetahs need water and Gazelles
and an abundance of sustenance leads to more Gazelles,
should more Gazelles and water lead to more Cheetahs?
If too many Gazelles relative to water and grass lead to fewer Gazelles,
do fewer Gazelles = fewer Cheetahs?
Population, when unchecked,
increases in a geometrical ratio.
Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio.
Thomas Robert Malthus
Suggested populations could increase faster than food supplies
11/11/09
Cuba freezes assets of foreign businesses
Cuba orders extreme measures to cut energy use
Cuba has ordered all state enterprises to adopt "extreme measures" to cut energy usage through the end of the year…
In documents seen by Reuters, government officials have been warned that the island is facing a "critical" energy shortage that requires the closing of non-essential factories and workshops and the shutting down of air conditioners and refrigerators not needed to preserve food and medicine.
Cuba has cut government spending and slashed imports after being hit hard by the global financial crisis and the cost of recovering from three hurricanes that struck last year.
All provincial governments and most state-run offices and factories, which encompasses 90 percent of Cuba's economic activity, were ordered in June to reduce energy use by a minimum of 12 percent or face mandatory electricity cuts.
…Cuba was consuming more fuel than the government had money to pay for.
…Cuba has been grappling with the global economic downturn, which has slashed revenues from key exports, dried up credit and reduced foreign investment.
…the government has cut spending, slashed imports, suspended many debt payments and frozen bank accounts of foreign businesses. It reported last week that trade was down 36 percent so far this year due mainly to a more than 30 percent reduction in imports.
Marc Frank
Reuters 11 Nov 2009 21:58:49 GMT
6/11/09
Did the world’s wealthiest generationforfeit their children’s financial futurefor present prosperity?
The median household
with a person between the ages of 55 and 64
saw its wealth fall by almost 50 percent
from $315,400 in 2004 to $159,800 in 2009
Center for Economic and Policy Research
Did the largest generation of parents in American history
promise themselves social benefits
their children won’t be able to pay for?
If we don’t change directions
we’ll end up where we’re going
Bumper Sticker on My Car
Could more than a few Baby Boomers
end up competing with their children and grandchildren
for low wage jobs?
6/4/09
If the US was a net creditor nation after WWIIwhy does America owe the rest of the worldmuch more than any foreign entities ever owed us?
Foreigners' net ownership of our national wealth...
will leave us paying ever-increasing dividends and interest to the world
rather than being a net receiver of them as in the past
We have entered the world of negative compounding
goodbye pleasure, hello pain
Warren Buffett
6/2/09
Has Globalization Peaked?
…If historians look back on today's severe downturn
with its crumbling markets, rising unemployment
and massive government interventions
they could well be busy analyzing how globalization
the spread of trade, finance, technology
and the movement of people around the world
went into reverse…
…For generations, the deficits that we have run this past decade
and the trillions of dollars we are spending
now mean we will be highly dependent on foreign loans
from China, Japan and other parts of the world…
…In the last quarter of 2008, U.S. GDP dropped by 6.2%...
the U.K. by 5.9%, Germany by 8.2%, Japan by 12.7%
and South Korea by 20.8%. Mexico
Thailand and Singapore and most of Eastern Europe
are also in deep trouble
In every case, employment has been plummeting
…So far popular demonstrations
against government policies have taken place
in the UK, France, Greece, Russia
and throughout Eastern Europe
and the governments of Iceland and Latvia
have fallen over the crisis
The Japanese government is offering to help
a broad array of its corporations
but certainly not subsidiaries of foreign companies in Japan…
…Western European banks that were heavily invested
in countries such as Hungary, the Czech Republic and the Baltics
have pulled back their credits
causing a devastating deflation throughout Eastern Europe
…In the 1930s
when capital flows and trade among countries collapsed
and every country went its own way
world growth went into a ditch
political ties among nations deteriorated
nationalism and populism
combined to create fascist governments in Europe and Asia
and a world war took place
It took at least a generation
for globalization to get back on track
Jeffrey E Garten
Yale School of Management
Held economic and foreign-policy posts
in the Nixon, Ford, Carter and Clinton administrations
If financial markets are mirrors of mass psychology
and many simultaneously experience anxiety, depression, stress
emotional instability, unresolved grief, unemployment, homelessness academic problems, career burnout, sleep disorders
loss of confidence and self-esteem along with feeling deceived
what does the recovery process of a nervous breakdown involve?
3/16/09
Why would fixed income managers and lenderswant to base investment decisions on debt quality assessmentsof ratings firms remunerated from sales?
Why, more than a year into the crisis
do regulators and investors continue to rely on ratings?
No one has been more wrong than [two ratings agencies]
Less than a year ago both gave high ratings
to 11 of the largest distressed financial institutions…
…They rated Lehman Brothers an A just a month before it collapsed
Until recently, the agencies maintained AAA ratings
on thousands of nearly worthless subprime-related securities
Jerome Fons and Frank Partnoy
Rated F for Failure
New York Times, March 16, 2009
Via The Big Picture
Why did so many who shouldn’t have
believe sub-prime mortgages could be repackaged into bonds
with similar credit risk characteristics as AAA US Treasuries?
These errors make us look either incompetent at credit analysis
or like we sold our soul to the devil for revenue or a little bit of both
A rating agency managing director
responding anonymously to an internal management survey
September 2007
Why would a ratings agency change relatively negative views to positive
on some mortgage backed securities
even though no new and significant information emerged?
Employee #1 By the way, that deal is ridiculous
Employee #2 I know, that model definitely does not capture half the risk
#1 We should not be rating it
#2 We rate every deal
It could be structured by cows and we would rate it
Instant Message conversation between two rating agency employees
Why would the Securities and Exchange Commission
let banks base capital requirements on ratings derived by companies
dependent on the same firms for future revenue?
Why would fixed income managers and lenderswant to base investment decisions on debt quality assessmentsof ratings firms remunerated from sales?
Why, more than a year into the crisis
do regulators and investors continue to rely on ratings?
No one has been more wrong than [two ratings agencies]
Less than a year ago both gave high ratings
to 11 of the largest distressed financial institutions…
…They rated Lehman Brothers an A just a month before it collapsed
Until recently, the agencies maintained AAA ratings
on thousands of nearly worthless subprime-related securities
Jerome Fons and Frank Partnoy
Rated F for Failure
New York Times, March 16, 2009
Via The Big Picture
Why did so many who shouldn’t have
believe sub-prime mortgages could be repackaged into bonds
with similar credit risk characteristics as AAA US Treasuries?
These errors make us look either incompetent at credit analysis
or like we sold our soul to the devil for revenue or a little bit of both
A rating agency managing director
responding anonymously to an internal management survey
September 2007
Why would a ratings agency change relatively negative views to positive
on some mortgage backed securities
even though no new and significant information emerged?
Employee #1 By the way, that deal is ridiculous
Employee #2 I know, that model definitely does not capture half the risk
#1 We should not be rating it
#2 We rate every deal
It could be structured by cows and we would rate it
Instant Message conversation between two rating agency employees
Why would the Securities and Exchange Commission
let banks base capital requirements on ratings derived by companies
dependent on the same firms for future revenue?
3/2/09
dshort and Henry Blodget
Given that we just had the highest peak in history by a mile
it doesn't seem absurd
to think that we might be headed for the lowest trough in history by a mile
If the stock market stops falling
and earnings eventually begin to grow again
we would be close to the bottom
The market could simply move sideways for five to 10 years
while earnings growth gradually reduced the price-to-earnings ratio
to the 5 to 8-times range
This is what happened in the 1970s
If some equity markets overshot on the way down
after financial bubbles in burst 1873, 1901, 1929, 1966 and 2000
and rose when abhorred
could some trends tend to last longer and/or end sooner than many think?
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