Japan No Longer A Saving Nation -- December 25, 2014; Back To Chess

I remember reading about this some time ago, but I can't remember if I actually blogged about it. Now I see it is being tweeted tonight:

Japan's household savings rate goes negative for 1st time since government started compiling comparable data in 1955, authorities say - @MarketWatch.  

More from the source:

Japan, long held up as a model of thrift and a “nation of savers,” is no longer saving, according to data cited Friday in the Nikkei Asian Review. For the fiscal year that ended in March, Japan’s household savings rate dropped to negative 1.3%, according to Cabinet Office statistics released Thursday. The result represented “the first time the ratio entered negative territory since the government started compiling comparable data in fiscal 1955.

I'm not exactly sure what to make of this, but I'm sure it connects with this dot: an aging Japanese population.

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Slump In The Price Of Oil And Chess

This was a feature story today over at Yahoo!Finance. I understand the premise or the thesis, but I'm not sure I buy into that thesis .... yet. Time will tell. I do think that the current oil situation is a very interesting game of international chess. Like chess, the "game" will not end quickly; it will last for quite awhile and during that time the three major players will have ups and downs, gains and losses, and the outcome, like any game of chess, won't be known for quite some time.

The three major players: OPEC (mostly Saudi Arabia); the US oil industry (mostly unconventional); and, non-OPEC, non US (mostly Russia).  [Obviously, with more than two players, this is not a single chess game, but a number of chess games being played simultaneously.]

Yahoo!Finance is reporting:

Katusa believes that falling oil prices will eventually give Russia the upper hand and deeply injure the U.S. energy industry.

The falling ruble makes Russian oil less expensive and more desirable to other countries—Russia also produces oil quite cheaply while the American shale industry has a larger cost of operation. Russia is more than able to weather the current storm, Katusa says.

“They have a $200 billion a year trade surplus. They have over $400 billion in reserve currency. They’ve increased their gold reserve. They have much lower debt to their GDP than America. So yes there’s pain in the economy… [but] it's far from terminal.”

We'll see.

However, that part about "the falling ruble making Russian oil less expensive" is an interesting observation. Russia and Saudi Arabia are competing for the Asian market (the US is not involved because it cannot export oil). I believe Saudi oil is priced in dollars (very strong right now in relation to the ruble). Over the past couple of years there have been many stories about the growing Russian-Chinese hegemony, something I noted quite awhile ago and tracked as one of the "Big Stories."

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Ethanol More "Polluting" Than Gasoline -- U of Minnesota Peer-Reviewed Study

Coal-Powered Cars Not Much Better, Either

CBS Local is reporting: 

One of the most surprising findings is that ethanol might actually be worse for air quality than conventional gasoline fueled transportation.

Researchers looked not only at the end result at the tailpipes but also took into account the full cycle of energy production. For instance, the authors calculated the entire pollutant stream, meaning everything generated from the growing of the corn to the process used to turn it into ethanol.

In addition, they extrapolated the pollutants of electric vehicles when the electricity used to recharge the batteries is generated by the burning of coal.

“And we found that some options available to us, like corn ethanol or electricity from coal used in electric vehicles, actually make the air much worse,” assistant professor Jason Hill said.

But, regular readers already knew that. Warmists won't discuss the article; in their view, the subject is closed.