Tweeting now: Oilfield services company Schlumberger buys 46% of Russian Eurasia Drilling Company for approximately $1.7 billion.
Active rigs:
| 1/20/2015 | 01/20/2014 | 01/20/2013 | 01/20/2012 | 01/20/2011 |
|---|
| Active Rigs | 161 | 187 | 187 | 202 | 163 |
RBN Energy:
Pricing, Part 2.
There was no open outcry trading on the CME NYMEX yesterday because of
the MLK holiday but after rallying on Friday U.S. crude prices resumed
their descent here in electronic trading and the London ICE Brent
contract lost $1.40/Bbl to close at $48.77/Bbl. Unsurprisingly the Baker
Hughes oil drilling rig count is down by 209 (13%) since December 2014
as producers take a hard look at their production budgets. Yet
production is still expected to increase in the short term – in part
because the rigs that are left will focus on “sweet spots”. In today’s
blog “It Don’t Come Easy – Low Crude Prices, Producer Breakevens and
Drilling Economics – Part 2” Sandy Fielden looks at the assumptions
behind RBN’s IRR and breakeven scenario analysis.
These articles are eventually archived for subscribers only.
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Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas
The Los Angeles Times is reporting: In 2013, only 46 manufacturing operations started or expanded in California, compared with 253 in Texas.
"There's a fresh look at the whole country," said Rothrock, president
of the California Manufacturers & Technology Assn. "Unless you're
forced to be in California for some reason, increasingly it's hard to
find reasons that you have to be here."
California's high costs for land and energy are preventing the state
from grabbing its share of companies relocating production back to the
U.S. from overseas markets such as China.
Although California is
responsible for about 11% of the nation's manufacturing production, the
state has accounted for only 1.8% of investment in new or expanded
manufacturing across the country since 2001. That compares with 6% in
the 1980s, according to economic development data purchased by the
association.
I would assume the shale oil boom in Texas accounted for many of the 253 new or expanded manufacturing operations in Texas last year.
Much, much more at the linked article. See next post.
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Tax Incentives Bring Jobs To Nevada
RENO, Nev. -- The largest lithium battery factory in the world is getting a new neighbor at an industrial park east of Reno -- the world's biggest data center.
Las Vegas-based Switch plans to invest $1 billion in the 3 million square foot "supernap" center.
It will be built on 1,000 acres at the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, where Tesla Motors currently is building its $5 billion gigafactory to make batteries to power its electric cars.
Gov. Brian Sandoval announced the plan in his State of the State address Thursday night along with a $1 billion expansion of Switch data space in Las Vegas.
"This will make Nevada the most digitally connected state in the nation,"says CEO.
The company operates two data center facilities in Las Vegas, providing security, power and cooling for stacks of thousands of servers owned by more than 1,000 clients that include eBay, Xerox, Zappos, Amazon, DreamWorks, Shutterfly and the U.S. government.
Switch's "supernap" project includes the development of a 500-mile fiber optic network it calls a "superloop" that will connect Reno, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and San Francisco and dramatically increase the speed of information traveling between the cities.
This is really interesting. Private enterprise needs a "superloop" to carry information between Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and San Francisco. The obvious place to locate the data center would be somewhere in California, perhaps Fresno. So, where does it go -- a couple hundred miles to the east. Meanwhile, Jerry Brown is looking to the 19th century model to build a new trans-continental state railroad. LOL.
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Background Reading Before Tonight's SOTU
The Article Will Help Explain Why The President Wants To Raise Your Taxes (Again)
State-by-state analysis also shows that in every state over the
course of a decade, the cost of employer-provided health care still grew
faster than incomes.
That, in turn, had led to workers footing a bigger share of the costs of their health insurance.
In
fact, employee contributions to their insurance costs have risen by as
much as 175% since 2003 in some cases — with workers in the south having
the biggest cost burden.
The report comes after years of slow growth in overall health-care
costs on the heels of the 2008 financial meltdown, and as the effects of
President Obama's health-care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, are
being felt. The ACA contains several provisions designed to slow the
rate of health-care cost growth.
The report notes that from 2010
to 2013, on the heels of the ACA's passage, 31 states and the District
of Columbia saw a slowdown in the growth of premiums charged for health
insurance for workers. Twelve of those states saw at least a
three-percentage-point decrease in the rate of premium inflation.
But
from 2003 through 2013, in all states, the price of employer-provider
insurance premiums grew quicker than the pay for the workers there.
The president will propose higher taxes to help subsidize his "affordable care" premiums.
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Income Stagnation
Why President Obama Wants To Raise Your Taxes (Again)
Even as job growth has picked up in recent months, wages haven’t
grown much more quickly than inflation. As a result, the government’s
official statistics suggest that the typical American household makes no
more than the typical household did in the final years of the 20th
century.
That’s
remarkable. There is little modern precedent for a period of income
stagnation lasting as long as this one. Official records don’t exist
before World War II. But the best estimate is that the Great Depression may be the only other modern time in which incomes for most households in the United States have grown so slowly — or not at all — for so long.
The great wage slowdown has several main causes: globalization, which has forced Americans to compete with hundreds of millions of poorer workers from around the world; technological change, which allows machines to replace human labor in new ways; the slowdown in American educational attainment, even as the rest of the world has continued to become more educated and more highly skilled; and the shifting balance of economic power, away from workers and toward companies and their executives.
This comes after a gazillion dollars in stimulus, most of which went to Solyndra.
ObamaCare, new EPA rules, and thousands of new regulations across all sectors were inadvertently omitted by The New York Times as the main reasons for wage stagnation. We should see a small one-line correction to this story buried on page 7 of next Friday's weekend edition.
