Minimal Blogging Today --

Wells coming off confidential list have been posted. Scroll down a few posts, but hardly worth it. All three wells were placed on DRL status. No production data. 

MailOnLine reports: Global warming brings snow to the UK in May.  Meanwhile Yahoo!News is reporting record lows for Omaha, Nebraska. Woohoo -- natural gas. 

Active rigs: 191 (steady)

RBN Energy: this is a nice update of EPD's expansion plans at the ECHO terminal near Houston.

WSJ Links (abbreviated)

Section C (Money & Investing):

Section B (Marketplace):

• Train Wreck: health-law costs slow some fast-food chains. franchises try to stay below insurance threshold; White Castle slows its expansion. MDW predicted this quite some time ago. "Job Watch" will take on new life in late 2013/early 2013. Cue up Connie Francis.

Section A:

• North America to drive oil supply; I think this story has been printed and reprinted several times in the past few days. 

"Supply growth is even steeper than previously expected and at the same time the opposite is true of OPEC production-capacity growth, which now looks to be stalled in some areas," said Maria van der Hoeven, executive director at the IEA.

The latest forecast marks a shift in the IEA's thinking, which previously saw supply growth split fairly evenly between OPEC and non-OPEC countries in the medium term. The fast U.S. supply growth has diminished U.S. demand for oil from OPEC members like Nigeria, and in the long term, growing U.S. exports of oil and natural gas could further weaken OPEC, says Amy Myers Jaffe, who studies energy and the oil industry at the University of California at Davis. She didn't know the contents of the IEA report.

Op-Ed: Bring on the 'Helicopter Money':  Quantitative easing has not been much of a success. Perhaps the Fed can try a more overt monetary policy.

There is another possible solution. A decade ago in a widely noted speech, Ben Bernanke, then a Federal Reserve governor, encouraged Japan to finance tax cuts with money printed by the central bank and credited directly to the budgetary arm of the government without issuing any more interest-bearing debt. This idea was first proposed by Milton Friedman in 1948, who likened it to a "helicopter drop" of money for combating deflation. Today "helicopter money" is more politely called "overt monetary finance."

The Fed has already printed about $2.5 trillion of new money. Overt monetary finance might offer a more direct way to channel that money into the economy than trying to push debt through banks to the private sector. Such an approach would bypass the credit channel and send cash straight to the Treasury, where it would be deployed as directed by Congress.