Notes From All Over -- Thursday, December 9, 2021

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