The ever-cheerful blogger Lou Minatti, by way of warning everyone about Houston's coming fiscal apocalypse, has unearthed a 1986 Time article largely comparing booming Massachusetts and oil-bust Texas.Houston plays a part: Houston is the big city hardest hit. The town once giddily expansive on oil money has an unemployment rate of 9.2%. Brilliant new skyscrapers stand nearly empty. Loans in real estate and energy portfolios are going bad; hotels are all but deserted. That temple of Texas giantis
After reading about ExxonMobil's record $45.2 billion annual profit, Hair Balls was scratching our head over why Exxon had a profitable fourth quarter, when Conoco lost $31.8 billion. Does Exxon jack up the cost of Little Debbies at its stores or something?Fortunately, we caught Hoover's Oil & Gas Industry editor Stuart Hampton just as he was going out the door today, and he gave us the short and sweet: "In short, ExxonMobil is a bigger, well-managed operation that has made wiser choices in
Thousands of inmates rely annually on a capricious parole board for their freedom. Most, like George Dismukes, return to their cells without ever knowing why they were denied.
A couple of researchers at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy have released a study that gets close to proving that speculators caused oil prices to shoot up in 2008. This theory is nothing new, but the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the agency that regulates U.S. futures markets, is expected to release a report that details how speculators played a part in the price spike, the first time that the agency has admitted as much. According to the Baker Institute's Kenn
