The two big stories today:
- Covid spurs biggest rise in life-insurance payouts in a century; link to WSJ;
- death-benefits payments jumped 15% last year; biggest increase since 1918 flu epidemic
- Apple granted delay in monopoly case with Epic;
- reminder: there were nine rulings in that "landmark" case
- eight of those nine rulings favored Apple
- ninth ruling, good, bad, indifferent, has now been delayed pending appeal
- and look at this: could literally be years before appeal process runs its course
- did anyone ever read Charles Dickens' Bleak House? Does "Jarndyce and Jarndyce" ring a bell?
International:
- Malaysia is top feedstock supplier to China's independent refiners
- January - November, 2021:
- Malaysian imports surge 86% on year;
- refiners' November imports surge 140% on month; link here.
Midland WTI: futures contract to go live in late January, 2022; link here.
Gasoline demand, link here. Negative trend.
Crescent Point Energy: Zacks.
KMI: we'll come back to this later.
Devon: how it all got started. Link here.
EQT: response to Elizabeth Warren; no one will read it; Pocohontas will ignore it; the response will be lost in the ethernet. Will download as a pdf.
EU/UK energy crisis: Iceland cuts electricity to crypto miners amid power crunch. Link to Charles Kennedy. This would have been "just another" story but when I saw who wrote it, it was "must-read."
Big headline, small story. Link here.
- Toyota suspends production for three days at one of many plants;
- will affect, maybe, 3,500 vehicles
- Toyota targets 9 million deliveries this year
- and, that 3-day suspension gets a huge Reuters headline; must have been a slow news day
- three-day holiday weekends? Not so much, I guess.
Austria: 14-day lock down even worked in neighboring countries without a lock down. Link here.
Euro / dollar conversion: useful when looking at electricity rates in Europe and electricity rates in New England.
- it takes one dollar and change to buy a Euro
- so, EUR 160 = $180
- this morning, ISO NE spiked to $180-MWH and appears to be high throughout the day
- puts things into perspective
- the big story coming out of the EU/UK energy crisis:
- Sweden -- aka Gretaland -- restarts coal plants to provide electricity to Poland to prevent blackouts
- electricity going out in the winter in Poland would be a humanitarian crisis
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