Biggest Military Build-Up Since Reagan? One Well Coming Off Confidential List -- June 29, 2022

Re-posting: biggest build-up since Reagan! 

Geo-political: huge story; NATO getting huge boost

• Turkey: Sweden, Finland, fast-track into NATO; totally unexpected it would happen this fast
• more F-35s to UK -- I don't know full story yet, but this is fascinating; we can start here; much more to follow;
• Financial Times; expected paywall but able to access for some reason; look at this:
• US will establish PERMANENT HQ 5th Army Corps in Poland; huge deal for Poland.
  
• US will send 5,000 additional troops to Romania
• US will increase rotational deployments in the Baltic states
• two squadrons of US F-35 fighters will be sent to UK;
• both squadrons will likely go to same US air base; 
• probably RAF Lakenheath; possibly RAF Upper Heyford? RAF Mildenhall co-located with RAF Lakenheath? USAF bases in UK;
• a squadron? generally, about 20 a/c
  
• will increase number of US naval destroyers to Spain from four to six:
• overall, NATO will increase number of troops to high alert by seven-fold; from 40,000 to 300,000
• is this the biggest military announcement since the days of Reagan?

F-35: wiki. 

V Corps: wiki. 

OXY and Buffett:

• the other day I mentioned I lost the bubble on this subject.
• here's most recent update: Buffett keeps buying more OXY
• numbers to watch:
• $60 and $90
• some say Buffett won't buy entire company (OXY) because he won't pay $90 for it;
• pundits suggest Buffett feels share price won't go above $60
• Berkshire is Occidental's largest individual shareholder with ~153.5M shares worth more than $9B, based on OXY's Monday close at $58.90, with options to buy another 83.9M shares that would bring its stake to more than 25%.
• today, ticker OXY, to open at $61.71 and pre-market in the green

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Back to the Bakken

Far Side: link here.

WTI: holy mackerel! Up 1.59%; up $1.78; now trading at $113.50.

• please, please, please, Mr Biden -- don't change your travel plans
• travel to Saudi Arabia so you can hear from the horse's mouth, OPEC has very little spare capacity
• and, oh, by the way, aviation fuel demand is yet to take off

Active rigs: 44

Wednesday, June 29, 2022: 40 for the month, 178 for the quarter, 337 for the year 

• 38600, conf, Murex, Sheldon Mark 34-22H-A 2MB,

RBN Energy: E&Ps ride strong commodity price wave to record income and cash flow.

The oil and gas industry has historically been roiled by global economic and political crises, from the oil embargo in 1973 to the Great Recession of 2008 to the onset of the global pandemic in early 2020.  However, amid the economic and political turmoil from the war in the Ukraine, rampant inflation and supply chain disruptions, E&P companies in recent weeks reported strong results for the first quarter of 2022, riding the wave of rising commodity prices as record volumes of cash flowed into corporate coffers. Producers successfully absorbed service cost increases and resisted calls to abandon their profits-focused fiscal discipline to generate Q1 2022 pre-tax operating earnings and cash flows that were up 25% and 12%, respectively, from the two-decade-high results recorded in the last quarter of 2021. In today’s RBN blog, we detail the industry’s outstanding results and preview its performance for the rest of the year.