Blizzard Warning For 2/3rds Of North Dakota; Mostly East Of The Bakken; CA Co Looking To Move To Lower-Cost State -- December 6, 2016

DAPL weather: blizzard warning central and eastern North Dakota with brunt of storm to hit central region, Minot south to Standing Rock. Gusts to 55 mph will blow over most teepees set up by white men and women. Dangerous wind chills to 25 degrees below zero are expected. Snowfall won't be all that great -- 1 - 4 inches. 

Active rigs:

	12/6/2016	12/06/2015	12/06/2014	12/06/2013	12/06/2012
Active Rigs	38	64	188	193	182

RBN Energy: assessing the OPEC/Russia deal and its impact.

John Kemp: after two years, why an OPEC deal now?

US productivity: 3Q16 productivity rose at fastest pace in two years while labor costs slowed after a big jump in the spring. President Obama leaving Trump an incredibly strong economy.

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The Market

Wow, this is truly insane. It's been almost a month since the election and the Trump rally continues. After setting another all-time high yesterday, the market holds onto those gains today. Dow 30:

• new highs: 181, including Citigroup, GS, JPM, MDR, RIG,
• new lows: 19 

Tesla: burning through its remaining cash. Forbes.

A $9 million hedge fund concluded that Tesla Motors will burn through its cash. The key assumption underlying that conclusion is that if the company charges $35,000 for its Model 3, Tesla will lose so much money that its cash will go up in flames.

Yes, a luxury automobile for the price of a Ford Focus seems to be a recipe for disaster.

By the way, Forbes won't download on older iPads, and clicking on Forbes.com  slows down the MacBook Air to a crawl (in fact this time, the computer froze, a rare phenomenon for the MacBook Air, and I had to re-boot the computer). This suggests that Forbes is loading a lot of advertisements on its web pages, and each of them is collecting a lot of data from your keystrokes.

Oil investors. From Kiplinger, three crude oil stocks "to load up on for 2017: EOG, Anadarko, and WPX. With regard to WPX:

Like previously mentioned with EOG, these are premium spots. And while the smaller WPX doesn’t have the same sort of cost efficiency, it can hit 11 stacked zones from one well pad across its acreage. That’s pretty good for any energy company, let alone a small one. And that doesn’t include WPX’s prime acreage in the Bakken either.

BRK-B: on a fairly flat day for the market, perhaps slightly negative, BRK is green. Warren Buttett needs to tweet a "thank you" to PEOTUS-Trump.

Election recount: speaking of Buffett and Trump, how is the Wisconsin recount going? At days 4 and 5 of the recount, Trump has widened his lead by about two dozen votes over Hillary, and observers suggest that the recount is "nowhere near finished' suggesting it will be a race to the finish to beat the December 13th deadline.

To some extent, the vote was so close in Wisconsin the original results were delayed because the state did a recount before certifying the results. So the current Jill Stein effort is a recount of a recount.

If Wisconsin had a week's head start, it's hard to see how PA and MI will beat the deadline, unless the recount in those states is simply electronic, which is likely the case in PA since 90% of the voting is cone on machines that have no paper trail.

California business climate: American Apparel warns warns 3,500 southern California workers they may lose their jobs.

The maker of colorful basics, which in November filed for bankruptcy for the second time, has notified workers at three American Apparel production facilities that they could be laid off January 6, 2017,, according to the California Employment Development Department.

The message went to 332 workers in Garden Grove, 959 workers in South Gate and 2,166 workers at the company’s sprawling headquarters in downtown Los Angeles.
If all of these workers lost their jobs next year, it would be a huge blow to Southern California apparel manufacturing, which has steadily declined over the years, analysts said. This year, American Apparel laid off at least 500 workers as it cut production.

Production could also move to a lower-cost state such as South Carolina or Georgia

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Nuclear Follies

Merkel madness: German government must compensate utilities for 2011 nuclear law that phased out nuclear reactors. E.ON and RWE shares rise sharply after the ruling.

Tuesday’s ruling from the constitutional court didn’t open the door for a damages suit based on “expropriation without compensation,” which would have brought the biggest windfall for the operators.

But the government will have to reimburse the companies for foregone profits from the sale of power at some plants and for investments the companies had made based on the original outlook for nuclear power, which in E. ON’s case alone amounted to “several hundred million euros.”

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A Day In The Life

A Day in the Life, The Beatles