Politics: "the GOP" needs to decide now whether it's better to have Trump back in office or start working for another outcome. For Trump to get back in office there's a lot of work that needs to be done.
The Pause: Qatar is taking advantage of Biden's US LNG export facility permitting pause. Folks ignoring the pause have no idea how fast global commerce is moving. Link here.
Chord Energy: The combined company is expected to be a premier operator in the Williston basin in North Dakota, with about 1.3 million net acres and 287,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day in production.
after merger, a premier operator in the Williston basin in North Dakota, with about
1.3 million net acres and 287,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day in
production.
At Daytona last week, they at least waited to lap six.
The biggest crash in Atlanta's NASCAR history.
This is not good for either NASCAR or the individual drivers. Maybe NASCAR drivers need a bit more training on strategy and the virtue of patience.
Sponsored by "Toyota -- let's go places."
The only place thirteen cars / racers are going today is to the garage.
************************** Cash Back On Credit Cards
I'm still "bothered" by Nicole's WSJ article with regard to Amazon some weeks ago.
Even without cash back with the Amazon credit card, Amazon's annual fee is still a great deal. As it is, my cash back will more than cover the annual fee -- several times over. I order books from Amazon on a regular basis and generally I don't pay anything for them, using cash back.
And, younger readers won't recall / know that years ago "all" credit cards carried annual fees. Now, almost all credit cards come with no fee and even have huge cash perks. Only the elite pay fees for their credit cards. The Amazon credit card I use has no fee.
Form the linked article -- it's been two years since the Fed starting raising rates. Holy mackerel. Two years and the economy seems stronger than ever.
Not so fast, Goldilocks.
The past few months have seen the soft-landing hypothesis surge from behind and overtake recession as the consensus economic outlook.
Inflation has receded in the face of the Federal Reserve’s massive assault on interest rates.
Yet, paradoxically, employment has remained robust, with lots of new jobs created and layoffs near cyclical lows. Corporate earnings have been reasonably strong.
I know what the Goldilocks deniers are saying right now: Rate hikes don’t work overnight. They take time to stifle the economy. But it has been 700 nights and counting since the first increase, in March 2022. So, maybe Goldilocks deserves to take a bow (a victory porridge?) as the soft landing seems to be all around us, with recession in the rearview mirror.
That said, there’s another alternative, one that is definitely not consensus but seems to be accumulating more and more evidence in its favor. What if the economy—already defying economic theory by surviving in the face of sharply higher rates—is actually getting stronger?
That’s admittedly an odd thing to posit after two years of interest rate hikes. But as crazy as it sounds, evidence is starting to pile up for the acceleration hypothesis.
First, there are the “big” data points, like unemployment and the stock market. The change in nonfarm payrolls
in December’s report was the strongest since September. January’s was even stronger.
The stock market, widely seen as a mechanism that discounts future growth, is up over 20% from late October to mid-February.
And much more at the link.
I call this the "touch and go" scenario and have called it that for at least a year.
I agree with Harold Hamm. No time for negative talk. It's "damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead." LOL. Speaking of which, I think Harold Hamm has passed the baton to Chord (Oasis,Whiting, and now Enerplus).
I better put in the disclaimer.
Disclaimer: this is not an
investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, job, career,
travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think
you may have read here.
All my posts are done quickly:
there will be content and typographical errors. If anything on any of
my posts is important to you, go to the source. If/when I find
typographical / content errors, I will correct them.
Again, all my posts are done quickly. There will be typographical and content errors in all my posts. If any of my posts are important to you, go to the source.
Reminder: I am inappropriately exuberant about the US economy and the US market.
Goldman Sachs is upbeat about the economy this year. Its economists see healthy growth of 2.3%, unemployment staying below 4%, and the probability of recession at just 15%—all more optimistic than the consensus. And they see inflation, excluding food and energy, continuing to fall, to a little over 2% (using the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure) by year-end.
Forecasts are a dime a dozen. Why care about Goldman’s? First, because its economists have been firmly in the soft-landing camp, which now looks prescient.
Second, Jan Hatzius, the firm’s chief economist, made an equally out-of-consensus, and prescient, call in the opposite direction in 2008. Back then, he correctly warned that mortgage defaults could cause a severe recession.
Nailing one big call might be luck; nailing two gets you a following. Hatzius is one of the most closely followed economists on Wall Street and in Washington.
Chapter Seven: Imperial Overstretch? King Æthelstan and the Conquest of the North
King of Anglo-Saxons, 924 - 927;
King of all English, 927 - 939
the influence of the Scandinavians, Danelaw, language, etc, critical p. 253.
the
question of how many Scandinavians had settled in these areas cannot be
answered decisively, but ....
Across large areas of northern and eastern
England, we find many place names that end with either -by or -thorpe, both of which are elements imported form Old Norse
It
was at this point, for example, that the monastery founded by St Hild
at Streaneshalch became known as Whitby, and the settlement that had
been Northworthig was renamed Derby.
Almost half the place names in Yorkshire recorded in the Domesday Survey of 1086 had such Scandinavian origins.
In
addition, thousands of Norse loan-words appear in English sources
written after the late ninth century. One notable grammatically
borrowing was the words they, their, and them.
The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Taylor Swift -- and so many more -- titans, but even a single song by a single artist can make my day. I'm thinking of Vern Gosdin.
If you have a well in your backyard and don't know how to find its API number, you can still find the well at FracFocus using other methods at the site.
Example:
39900, drl, Liberty Resources, Elroy E 158-95-7-6-2MBH, Temple
The scout ticket shows this well in "DRL" status but no indication if it's been fracked or not.
So, we go to FrackFocus and type in 3310506058 (the API number without the dashes and terminal four zeroes) and discover that indeed, this well has been fracked:
