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Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Sunday oil prices could hit $300 per barrel if U.S. oil company Exxon Mobil again freezes Venezuelan assets in a dispute over a nationalized oil project. Exxon won court orders freezing $12 billion in assets held by Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA after the OPEC nation took over a multi-billion dollar oil project, heightening tensions with the United States and helping to raise oil prices. A London court later overturned Exxon's temporary asset freeze, but Chavez said the company could seek further action against Venezuela. "If they freeze us there will be no more...

ALTHOUGH the price of oil continues to hit new records, it has in one respect been a quiet week on the oil markets. America’s lawmakers are celebrating Independence Day by taking a few days off. That has led to a brief interruption in the torrent of proposals aimed at curbing speculation. Ten different bills on the subject are in the works in Congress. Before the House of Representatives shut up shop, it approved one by a vote of 402-19. America’s politicians are not the only ones to have fingered speculators for the feverish rise in the price of oil and...

I’ve long been a bear on oil and energy as an investment thesis — Simply put, the end product of all energy is totally commoditized and every player in the business is totally beholden to the vagaries of the market to set the price of that end product. Intel gets to choose how much to price their processors for. And they’ve kept gross margins far above 50, 60% regardless of the cycles playing out in the broader economy. I like to invest in businesses that have lots of defend-able proprietary technologies and/or strategies in their business model. Google’s another great...

SHEPARD SMITH JUST ANNOUNCED: HOUSE APPROVES ANWR DRILLING!!

IT IS FINALLY HAPPENING--the much-predicted bursting of the bubble. Surprise: It is the gasoline price bubble that has burst, not the house price bubble. Prices of regular unleaded last week averaged about $2.34 per gallon, below the levels prevailing immediately before Katrina struck, and well below the $3.04 peak reached in early September. Crude prices also headed down from the $70 per barrel level to $57, a six-month low.That did not stop indignant senators from hauling the CEOs of the major oil companies to public hearings, at which they were excoriated for "price gouging" and for failing to reinvest their...

LONDON (Reuters) - Oil prices slipped lower on Friday, handing back the previous day's short-covering gains as traders focused on less encouraging economic growth figures from the United States. U.S. light crude (CLc1: Quote ,Profile ,Research ) fell 57 cents $51.20 a barrel, while London Brent fell 39 cents to $52.09 (LCOc1: Quote ,Profile ,Research ) . Prices have dropped more than 12 percent since April 4's $58.28 record high on U.S. crude, as near full-tilt OPEC production during the second quarter seasonal demand lull has built U.S. oil inventories to their highest since mid-2002. Fears that high oil prices,...

Decline rates in Iran are said to be rising, with onshore declines up from seven to 8% a year and offshore rates at 13% a year, the report said.