Never in my lifetime have I witnessed an America so filled with self-doubt. Doubt about our governing institutions, our schools, our health care, our industrial complex, our financial institutions, of who we are and who we have become. The spirit of fairness and shared destiny has descended into rancor and...

A key and fundamental question was not broached during the fierce interrogation of Treasury Secretary Geithner during Thursday's hearings before Congress's Joint Economic Committee. The contentious subject at hand was the Fed and Treasury's role on the issue of the American International Group's multi-billion dollar bailout. The key question neither...

Late last week the Energy Information Service-advised oil stocks surged by 1.762 million barrels, far more than expected, while the U.S. refinery processing rate sank to 79.7% -- the lowest level in more than two decades. Yet on Monday the price of oil jumped by $2.50 a barrel.

What is...

The oil patch mumbo jumbo continues unabated. Today, Rex Tillerson, the CEO of the nation's largest oil company, Exxon, took a minute or two to instruct us about the reasons for the current price of oil. This is the same personage who, a while back informed us, his customers,...

The relationship between the price of oil and the slaughter that took place at Fort Hood is hardly as far-fetched as it would appear. In an instructive article that was reprinted as an Op-ed in the NY Post on Saturday Nov 7, one Stephen Suleyman Schwartz, Executive Director of...

Steven Chu, our Secretary of Energy in his October 30 post on the Huffington Post "Weatherization: Saving Money by Saving Energy" focuses on the savings that can accrue to those conscious of how to reduce energy/electricity in their homes; insulation, programmable thermostats, efficient windows and the like. "I have...

Perhaps, just perhaps, the opprobrium heaped on Goldman Sachs these many weeks and months has begun to take hold on what had been to date the tone deaf leadership and bizarre rationalizations such as that of Lord Brian Griffiths, Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs Intl. who instructed us last week...

In late 2007 and the early days of 2008 Citigroup announced they were cutting 4200 jobs. This happened shortly after Vikram Pandit, while just six weeks on the job as Citigroup's CEO, was awarded a $26.7 million stock bonus and $3 million in stock options. It also happened as the...

Before the financial crisis, before Goldman was the recipient of billions of Tarp funds, before the financial collapse of September 2008 when even the viability of Goldman was put into question, before the rescue of AIG and their derivative contracts comprising $13 billions that we know about -- that were...

In what should become the template for the banking industry and Wall Street in all its manifestations, Citigroup this week disposed of its oil trading arm, Phibro, selling it lock, stock, and oil barrel to Occidental Petroleum. Along with the disposal goes the $100 mm owed its senior oil trader,...

Ominously, officers of London's Obscene Publications Unit of the Metropolitan Police forced the withdrawal of a naked image of actress Brooke Shields aged 10 (see truncated reproductions) from the newly opened "Pop Life" exhibition at the Tate Modern, one of the most respected museums in the world. This, after...

On June 21st a Huffington Post submission ("Boycott Iran's Oil Immediatley") called for the immediate boycott of Iran's oil. It was a seemingly draconian suggestion that was met with widespread skepticism. After all, what would happen to oil markets without Iranian oil?

Well, on today CNN's State of the...

In an article in Wednesday's Financial Times, "Banks Braced For Fed's Commodities Decision," an issue was raised that has been pointedly swept under the rug by the banking community and, I'm sad to say, our government.

A plethora of banks and bank holding companies such as Goldman Sachs,...

In his Sunday New York Times column, "Real Men Tax Gas," Thomas Friedman had admiring words commenting on the French. Drawing sharp contrast between Americans, designated as "wimps," while the French are lauded for generating some eighty percent of their electricity from "clean" nuclear power plants....

This weekend, there was Alexei Miller, Chairman of Russia's major energy company, Gazprom, predicting that the price of oil would jump to $100 a barrel because of "speculation." Now there is a man who should know what he is talking about, or certainly what he shouldn't be talking about. And...

Grotesque? Macabre? Unquestionably, but that is what we have come to. After leading the economy to the edge of the abyss, a new derivative has been concocted in a perverse quest for big and bigger bucks. The New York Times screamed the story with a three-column headline on Sunday's page...

In the months ahead the Department of Transportation will be begin awarding the $8 billion set aside under the federal stimulus program to those states presenting the most attractive plans for building high speed trains. Another $5 billion will be sought by the administration over the next five years. Not...

This is a day of deep gloom for the McPeaksters, those preaching the gospel of "Peak Oil". The New York Times, otherwise deeply empathetic to oil patch pseudo science, this day burst one of the most entrenched of the oil patches' nuggets of disinformation, the theory of "Peak Oil".

There...

Where British Tradition once mandated subjects to genuflect before their royals, Britain is now busy instructing itself on how to properly render homage by prostrating themselves nose to ground before their new potentates, the oil barons of Araby.

There he was, Libyan Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi who had been found...

There he was on CNBC's Fast Money segment today, on a day the price of oil moved over four percent by more than $3.00 a barrel to over $72/bbl. To paraphrase Mr. Gartman, "when I don't understand what is happening, I get out the market."

Yes, according to the...