For Investors Only

This is probably the reason for recent rise in price of oil:

TransCanada’s Gulf Coast Pipeline continues to drain the inventory at the Cushing, Okla., hub, pushing levels to the lowest amount since early 2012, according to the Energy Information Administration.

The inventory was less than 29 million barrels on March 21, some 20 million barrels lower than a year ago.

Cushing is the delivery location for the West Texas Intermediate crude oil futures contracts. The 485-mile, 36-inch diameter pipeline started delivering 700,000 barrels per day of crude oil from the hub to refineries on the Texas coast in January.

The next story to follow: refinery utilization, new refineries along the coast. Gasoline and diesel exports are already soaring.

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I posted this story in a short blurb yesterday. There are a lot of story lines in this article. The biggest story line: US utilities have learned from the utility debacle in Germany.

NRG Energy Inc. is continuing to expand its grasp on the household energy market by acquiring one of the top rooftop solar installation companies.

NRG, which has co-headquarters in Houston and New Jersey, is buying New Jersey-based Roof Diagnostics Solar to grow its foothold in energy renewables as well as to, according to NRG, empower "customers to control their own energy destiny through clean self-generation."

This has nothing to do with "helping the customer." This has everything to do with survival.

NRG Energy's solar portfolio surpasses 1,200 megawatts : Through its subsidiaries including NRG Yield (NYLD) and NRG Solar, one of the nation's largest solar developers, now owns and operates more than 1,200 megawatts (MW) of solar capacity. Through these facilities, NRG helps power nearly one million homes at full output with clean, renewable solar energy, which is helping reinvent the US energy ecosystem.

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Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment decisions based on anything you read here or think you might have read here. 

Futures (6:49 a.m. central time): Dow up 29, trending lower. WTI oil up 41 cents. 

Libyan protesters block pipeline to port.

Canadian Pacific expresses extreme disappointment with Canadian Government legislation: Co expresses its extreme disappointment with the legislation tabled yesterday afternoon in Ottawa by the Government of Canada.
Co states:

"CP believes that the government has unfortunately chosen to introduce legislation which will do nothing to increase supply chain capacity in the grain handling system, will not move more grain to markets more quickly, and has the potential to cause great damage to the Canadian rail transportation system...Targeting the railways when our dedicated men and women are working 24/7 to recover from some of the harshest winter operating conditions ever seen, is not only ineffective but grossly unfair...CP also believes that the expansion of regulated interswitching could seriously impact Canada's competitiveness as it effectively transfers traffic that normally would move over Canadian railways and ports, to U.S. railroads and ports, potentially resulting in job losses, reduced investment and the dampening of the Canadian economy.  Interswitching will also lead to double handling of grain shipments which will slow down the grain supply chain negatively impacting transit times...

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Sylvia Nasar's Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius

I continue to read the book. I will probably finish it in the next few days. 

I am up to the US economy immediately following WWII. Fascinating. It is so interesting to see how difficult it is to predict what the economy will do. The big concern for the US  after the war was rampant unemployment with the demobilization of millions of troops.

But what Samuelson had failed to foresee was the magnitude of pent-up demand by consumers, starved for houses, cars, appliances, and other appurtenances of middle-class life and with plenty of savings in the bank. His embarrassingly wrong prediction slowed the spread of Keynesianism in academe, he always believed. Being disastrously wrong early in one's career was in some ways a salutary experience for someone who hated making mistakes and rarely did. It left Samuelson more skeptical of economic forecasts and more circumspect in the claims he made for policies he favored or opposed. 

Demobilization became a bonanza for American colleges, MIT and its embryo economics department included. The only economic bill of rights that congress passed in the wake of FDR's 1944 exhortation was the GI Bill. But that measure had a large and lasting effect on the postwar economy.

For someone who knows absolutely nothing about economic theory, this is a great book to read. Very easy to read, and well written.

What I particularly enjoy are all the literary references Ms Nasar makes, for example:

As soon as the conference disbanded, Hayek set out for Vienna. The condition of the city and its inhabitants was far worse than anything he had been able to imagine. Under occupation by the four allies for three long years, Vienna was as seedy, demoralized, and dark as it would appear to audiences who saw The Third Man, the film noir written by the English novelist Graham Greene, with its immortal line, added by the director and star, Orson Welles: "In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed -- they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy, and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock."

I've only read a few Graham Greene novels, but I've read the three-volume biography of Graham Greene.