Free Republic

The U.S. and its allies will impose severe new economic sanctions on Russia Thursday after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine — but a major sector of Russia's economy will be exempt from the punishing measures. Politico first reported that the major government-owned Russian energy corporation Rosneft is not expected to be targeted in the new sanctions package. The Biden administration is reportedly concerned about global energy markets, as the price of crude oil reached its highest level since 2014 on Thursday because of Russia's war in Ukraine. One senior administration official told Politico "no option...

A month ago we asked if, perchance, the BLS had simply forgotten to add any of the job losses in the energy sector in January, when it reported a drop of just 1900 jobs in the entire Oil and Gas Extraction space, compared to 18K actual announcements, and 21,300 job cuts in the sector as reported by Challenger. Moments ago, the latest Challenger data is out, and we really hope the BLS finally reads it because things in the energy sector are getting worse by the day, if only for its well-paid workers. According to Challenger, the February total...

Lawmakers are now going public with their concerns that we could see a similar terror attack to what we saw in Paris last week. Some have even said publicly there could be sleeper cells here in the United States. And experts believe Houston remains a prime target for the bad guys. Patrick Poole is a terrorism and national security analyst for PJ Media, and told KTRH our oil and energy industry is what appeals to the terrorists. “Houston is a big sea trade center. You have the oil industry here. And you have a Jamaat ul-Fuqra compound near Houston,” Poole...

----snip---- The reason oil prices are skyrocketing is not because there isn’t enough oil to satisfy demand right now but because the market expects that significantly more supply is going to be needed in the future to make up for new demand coming online from the developing world. These new oil supplies cannot be economically produced without significantly higher oil prices to make production economical and higher oil prices are also needed for consumers to cut back on their own consumption of oil. Another important factor is that the production in many oil-exporting nations has been in decline due to...