Dividends of the shale oil revolution

Washington Post:
Adversaries of U.S. feel pain of cheaper oil

Two years of falling prices for crude oil have fueled economic discontent in Venezuela, changed Russia’s economic and political calculations and dampened Iranian leaders’ hopes of a financial windfall.
The lifting of the export ban will also have an effect on their competitive positions.  Obama actually has not been very strategic in his handling of the issue.  For example, the US could have completely eliminated imports from Venezuela and used the heavy crude from Canda instead delivered through the Keystone XL pipeline.  Instead, he pandered to the anti-energy left let those jobs go elsewhere.  His Iran deal was also a strategic disaster what will finance that countries terrorist infrastructure even if they will not get much boost from oil sales.  LNG exports have the potential of lifting Russian dominance of the European market making it easier to increase sanctions for Russian aggression in Ukraine.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more