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.
Market:
Breaking, literally: trouble at Calpers -- abrupt exit hits $400 billion fund. From Bloomberg:
The news landed just after 9 p.m. U.S. Pacific time: the investment chief at California’s massive state pension fund was abruptly stepping down. Before dawn the next day, Sacramento was abuzz -- and a sense of crisis was descending over the mighty California Public Employees’ Retirement System.
Wednesday night’s shock departure of Ben Meng reverberated through the state capital and then across Wall Street on Thursday, where the $400 billion Calpers is a powerful player in everything from the stock market to private equity. Meng, in an interview, said he’d left to focus on his health and family. But a statement from the state controller pointed to something else: an unspecified lapse in judgment that breached conflict-of-interest rules and, even more, hinted at wider oversight problems inside the organization.
The controller, Betty Yee, has called for an emergency board meeting to review the funds’ policies....
A veteran of Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, and Barclays Global Investors, Meng first joined Calpers in 2008. Born in China in 1970, he became a U.S. citizen in 2010 and returned to the country of his birth in 2015 to work as deputy CIO at the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE). He began his job running Calpers’s assets in January 2019 “to serve those who serve California,” he said in an interview shortly after he started.
What may have been a dream job soon turned sour for Meng. He faced not only the immense pressure ....
Earlier this year, he was accused by Republican Congressman Jim Banks of being a tool for the Chinese government, funneling American money into Chinese hands due to his role at SAFE. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton and Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, both Republicans, expressed support for Banks’s inquiry into Calpers’s and Meng’s ties to the Chinese government.
Harder to dismiss was Calpers’s failure to hit its annual 7% target during his tenure. The fund reported a return of 4.7% for the latest fiscal year, after gaining about 6.7% in fiscal 2019.
US unemployment rate: falls to 10.2%. Link here.
Market news.
BRK, link here:
Uber: posts $1.8 billion loss in 2Q20; deliveries skyrocket. Link here.
First things first: Grenora High School football, which co-ops with Westby District 3 in Montana as the MonDak Thunder, will be switching to 8-man football after competing in 6-man for nearly a decade. -- The Williston Herald.
NOG earnings report, 2Q20, link here:
Oil: weekly gain, Bloomberg via Rigzone;
Oil in New York is poised for the biggest weekly advance since early July after U.S. stockpiles plunged further, but the market is facing more OPEC+ supply and still contending with virus-driven demand weakness.
Futures rose above $42 a barrel this week to the highest level in five months with support from a weaker dollar and as U.S. crude inventories posted the biggest back-to-back weekly decline in a year. OPEC and its allies are set to test the appetite for demand as they start returning some supply this month after historic cuts, although Iraq has pledged to trim its output further in August to compensate for missing its target in previous months.
Meanwhile, crude imports into China dropped in July from a record the previous month, with vessels delayed in unloading cargoes as ports became congested with tankers carrying cheaper oil purchased earlier in the year.
NASA nonsense, link here:
Trump, earlier this week: big numbers Friday, for July, link here:
Market: stock futures cut losses after stronger-than-expected US jobs report:
OPEC basket, link here: $45.17
******************************
Back to the Bakken
NOG: reports 2Q20 earnings, link here.
Active rigs:
| $41.45 | 8/7/2020 | 08/07/2019 | 08/07/2018 | 08/07/2017 | 08/07/2016 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Active Rigs | 12 | 60 | 66 | 59 | 34 |
Wells coming off confidential list -- Friday, August 7, 2020: 16 for the month; 87 for the quarter, 533 for the year:
RBN Energy: a saga of NGL storage -- RBN's greatest hits.
Over the past five years, the production of natural gas liquids from gas processing plants has soared by almost 2 million barrels per day (2 MMb/d), or about 60%. That has been great news for natural gas producers, processors, and end-use markets. But there is a catch: the rate of production does not match up with demand. While production is a steady, “ratable” volume, demand is anything but ratable. Demand swings with the gasoline blending season, cold weather (or lack thereof) in the propane market, export demand, petchem feedstock economics, the impact of COVID-19 on transportation fuels, and a myriad of other factors. The flywheel that balances supply and demand on any given day is storage. Not just any storage, though. For NGLs, storage of large volumes means salt caverns. Huge caverns thousands of feet below the surface.
Today, we update one of RBN’s Greatest Hits blogs and take a deep dive into the history of NGL storage — all the way back to Smoky Billue.
The pandemic caused a major slow down for home construction and sales, but more recently, that’s not the case anymore.
The Commerce Department reported the construction of new homes across the US jumped by 17.3% in June. That increase is definitely showing right here in North Dakota– even though the start of his year didn’t look so good for those in the housing industry.
| $41.95 | 8/6/2020 | 08/06/2019 | 08/06/2018 | 08/06/2017 | 08/06/2016 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Active Rigs | 12 | 60 | 64 | 58 | 34 |