There has been a lot of discussion about derivatives over the past few months, and for good reason. Derivatives--a broad class of complex financial instruments--include collateralized debt obligations (securitized-mortgages) and credit default swaps, which are right at the core of our current financial crisis. It's easy to get down on derivatives because when things go wrong, they can go terribly
This post, the second in a series on Geopolitical Feedback Loops (see part 1 here), will outline the various geopolitical feedback loops that operate to disrupt oil and resource production. I've tried to link most of these feedback loops around a common theme of ownership dispute, illustrated below. There are several examples for each feedback loop, but in the interest of time I've just listed the
The peak and gradual decline in world oil production is beginning to spawn a set of geopolitical positive-feedback-loops that seem likely to exacerbate depletion and accelerate the effective rate of decline of world oil production. Rather than isolated incidents, these geopolitical feedback loops are the direct result of geological peaking in oil production. Unlike geologically driven peaking, how
Why CIA and Mossad work jointly to sabotage by terror to force change on Pakistan in geopolitical stratagem Re: The Power of Nightmares - CIA admits they made up "Al-Qaeda" Strange happening on 9-11 (25 sec) Anderson Cooper (former C.I.A. man) & CNN propaganda (5 min) The late Benazir Bhutto says the cause of Osama bin Laden's death (3 min) First, I extend my condolences
The Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea combined are a western bulge of the Atlantic Ocean. The fact that this ocean extension is island-studded and partially separates two continents has contributed to its past and present significance. The area of the combined seas is large, with a total water expanse of roughly 1.35 million square miles. The addition of 92,000 square miles of islands produces for the region a total area nearly half that of the conterminous United States. From Corpus Christi, Texas, to Barbados the distance is over 2,600 miles, whereas about 1,600 miles separate Colombia, at the southern margin of the Gulf of Darien, from Alabama (see Map 2). Location, distance, and area are unvarying geographic realities that affect human activities in a number of ways. The Gulf/Caribbean
Energy Intelligence Note: 12 May, 2007A recent trend at Energy Intelligence has been assessing the geopolitical impacts of Peak Oil. While it is easy to discern these impacts today in places like Nigeria and Iraq, it may not be long before we must add a new term to our collective geopolitical vocabulary: Cabinda.Cabinda is a small ethnic exclave of Angola. It is where most of Angola's oil is produced, and where most of Angola's future production increases will come from. It is also the only Angolan province with an active insurgency and independence movement. In my opinion, Cabinda--and Angola's oil production along with it--may be the next geopolitical casualty of Peak Oil. There haven't been any attacks on the oil infrastructure yet (unless Thursday's "suspicious fire" at a Total
High oil prices are being caused by geopolitical tensions and not by a lack of supply, OPEC ministers said on Thursday.
"This price is not related to demand and supply at all. It is only related to geopolitics," Qatari Energy Minister Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiyah said on the sidelines of an oil industry conference here.
His comments were echoed by OPEC President Mohammed al-Hamili, who is
