The main problem is that the country is excessively indebted. We have got too much debt – public and private – relative to GDP, and an increasing portion of this debt is unproductive or even counterproductive, which means that we are not going to be able to generate income in the future to service the debt.
The first session of this 112th Congress was spent with Democrats and Republicans at loggerheads over the debt ceiling, taxes, spending cuts, the deficit super committee, appropriations bills and finally the extension of unemployment compensation and a two-month extension of the payroll tax cut.
Worldwide, an incredible tower of debt has been under construction since President Nixon's 1971 default on the gold obligations of the US government. His decree severed the redeemability of the dollar for gold and thus eliminated the extinguisher of debt. Debt has been growing exponentially everywhere since then.
Discussions around the US and EU embargoes on Iranian oil generally focus on one thing: the price of oil. Iran produces 3.6 million barrels of oil a day and exports 2.5 million of those barrels, representing 3% of world supply. If the embargoes were to succeed in preventing half that oil from getting to market, oil prices would immediately jump 20 to 30%, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Yesterday - just two days after our modern-day Evita got re-elected president of Argentina - Christina Fernandez Kirchner's government announced a change in rules for mineral exporters; they will be required to repatriate all sales revenue to Argentina. Apparently certain unpatriotic exporters didn't want to bring cash from abroad back home and convert them to rapidly inflating Argentinean pesos - how strange.
A new assessment by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) has slashed the estimated volumes of recoverable natural gas resources in the now-famous Marcellus Shale Basin, putting yet another damper on the concept that America can fuel its future with domestic gas.
Global markets dragged themselves through July, slogging through one potential catastrophe after another. Greece's financial troubles, worries about Italy, Ireland, and Portugal, slowing manufacturing and persistently high unemployment in the United States, inflation in China.
Nuclear energy has taken a beating since the Fukushima crisis began in March, but we believe the arguments are strong that it’s not down for the count.
Recently, debate in Congress over the legalization of online poker has been heating up. The clamor is a direct result of April 15, 2011, dubbed "Black Friday" in the poker community.
In an attempt to stabilize global oil supplies and reduce energy prices in the face of Libya's missing production, the United States is leading an international effort to release 60 million barrels of crude reserves to world markets.
Russia loves being in control of other countries' energy needs. The nation supplies a quarter of the natural gas consumed in Europe, owns 40% of the world's uranium enrichment capacity, and rivals Saudi Arabia for the top spot on the list of global oil exporters.
Coal. It's the energy source we all love to hate for its acid rain, smog, and greenhouse-gas generation, and yet it provides 45% of the electricity that powers the United States.
Coal prices are surging ahead even as most other commodities pull back, spurred on by expectations that metallurgical and thermal coal production will again fail to meet rising global demand this year. The result? Record profits for major coal producers like Xstrata, a surge in acquisitions from coal-hungry India, Chinese electricity shortages, and a raging carbon tax debate in Australia amid record investments in that country's coal-heavy mining sector.
Iran - the second largest OPEC producer after Saudi Arabia - produces 3.7 million barrels of oil a day. After years of insufficient investment in infrastructure, however, that output is threatened. Iran's deputy oil minister, Mohsen Khojasteh-Mehr, says the country has to invest at least $32 billion to maintain its production capacity. If it does not do so, output will fall to 2.7 million barrels per day by 2015.
What a year it has been for oil. After climbing almost steadily for 11 months, the start of May brought about a significant correction that pulled prices down some 15%, including a single-day $10 loss on May 5. What happened? The froth came out of the market.
As workers continue to battle with the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant, more impacts from the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl are starting to arise. The latest impact will hit car manufacturers, with plants in central Japan hit the hardest: power firm Chubu Electric has agreed to shut its Hamaoka Nuclear Plant until it can build better defenses against the kind of massive earthquake and tsunami that hit on March 11, and Hamaoka provides power to at least 15 auto plants.
It has been a year since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded and sank, sparking a 3.5-month-long battle to cap a gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. And gushing is the word - the well spewed 50,000 barrels of oil each day at its peak.
In a debate with $4 billion worth of consequences for the oil industry, U.S. lawmakers are again fighting about whether to scrap oil company subsidies in the face of skyrocketing gas prices.
Fracking is a drilling technique that involves pumping large volumes of water, sand and chemicals into deep shale deposits to fracture the rock and free the oil or gas. Drillers seeking to pull more oil and gas from hard rock deposits have been fracking since the 1950s, but in the last decade advancements in horizontal drilling techniques have taken fracking to a new level.
With the civil war in Libya now entering its third week, Egypt moving haltingly towards free elections, and hundreds dead in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain after a month of anti-government protests in each country, the Middle East is rife with instability.
