Category: Highlights

After months of negotiations, the EU finally agreed on Monday to set a price cap on natural gas to protect consumers from excessive price spikes and limit inflationary pressure and industrial damage to European economies. The price cap, however, could limit Europe’s capacity to continue to draw most of the global spot LNG supply, analysts say.  Some EU member states such as Germany and the Netherlands had reservations about a price cap, concerned that a market intervention and a ceiling on prices would take away Europe’s key advantage in attracting LNG…

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Eric Nuttall, partner and senior portfolio manager at Ninepoint Partners LP, has told the Financial Post that oil prices will return to $100 per barrel in 2023. According to the analysts, many of the headwinds that have cut short the oil price rally this year including China’s zero-Covid policy and the coordinated SPR releases by several governments, will no longer be there in 2023. Coupled with sanctions on Russia’s oil and gas, this should elevate oil prices. He has also predicted that the energy sector will continue to outperform other…

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Investors sold petroleum for a fifth consecutive week but the pace of selling slowed as the balance of risks began to shift to the upside and beaten down prices provided a more attractive re-entry point. Hedge funds and other money managers sold the equivalent of 15 million barrels in the six most important petroleum-related futures and options contracts over the seven days ending on December 13. Fund managers sold a total of 236 million barrels over five weeks starting on November 8, according to position records published by ICE Futures…

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We know that historically, many economies around the world have collapsed. We also know that there is a physics reason why this happens. Growing economies require a growing supply of energy to keep up with a growing population. At some point, the energy supply and other resource needs cannot grow rapidly enough to keep up with population growth. When this happens, economies tend to collapse. In their book Secular Cycles, researchers Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov found that economies tend go through four distinct phases in each cycle, with each stage lasting for…

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Bold and unpredictable maneuvers are supposed to be the trademark political style of Russian President Vladimir Putin; last week, however, he surprised observers of various persuasions not with a proactive move but with an unusual act of avoidance. Putin’s annual marathon end-of-the-year press conference has been canceled, as has the traditional “direct line” with carefully trained audiences, and his constitutionally prescribed annual address to the Federal Assembly has been postponed indefinitely (RTVi.com, December 15). Speculation about Putin’s allegedly deteriorating health, always a dime a dozen, are rather subdued as the…

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