Featured Article

Mike on the Coastal Gaslink Protests

Posted by Michael Campbell

on Saturday, 15 February 2020 11:34

Disingenuousness, failed leadership and insensitivity characterize the Coastal Gaslink protests – and you can add predictable.

Natural Gas Hits Lowest February Price In Two Decades

Posted by Tsvetana Paraskova

on Friday, 14 February 2020 14:22

Warmer winter weather this year has reduced U.S. natural gas demand for heating, and as production growth continues to exceed demand growth, U.S. natural gas prices slumped this month to their lowest February levels in two decades, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said on Friday.

Natural gas prices at the Henry Hub benchmark closed at $1.77 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) on Monday, February 10. This was the lowest closing price for a day in February since at least 2001, according to Bloomberg and FRED data compiled by the EIA. The $1.77 per MMBtu price was also the lowest price in any month in nearly four years—since early March 2016.

Natural gas prices dipped to below US$2 per MMBtu this January for the first time in almost four years. This winter season, the glut is further aggravated by higher gas production in the Permian, higher than normal inventories, and warmer weather so far this winter.

As natural gas production outpaces demand growth, less gas has been withdrawn from underground storage this winter, the EIA said….CLICK for complete article

OK, it Gets Sticky: Job Openings Plunge the Most Since the Great Recession

Posted by Wolf Richter

on Wednesday, 12 February 2020 13:05

Let’s make this clear: these are job openings in December and prior months, before the novel coronavirus had shown up on the business-staffing horizon. Let’s also make clear that the two-month drop was so bad that a statistical flaw might have skewed the data, such as some seasonal adjustments gone berserk. But as we will see, the not-seasonally adjusted data looks even worse. And it’s not just one month. With hindsight we see that the trend started in early 2019 in small uneven drips, and it didn’t really matter until it suddenly did.

The number of job openings in December dropped by 364,000 from November (seasonally adjusted), after having already plunged by 574,000 in November, according to the Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS). This two-month plunge of 938,000 job openings came after a series of ups and downs with downward trend starting after the peak in January 2019. It brought the number of job openings in December to 6.42 million (seasonally adjusted), same level as in October 2017. Since the peak in January 2019, over 1.2 million job openings have dissolved into ambient air (November and December in red)….CLICK for complete article

Can You Hear It Now? Everything To Know About The Sprint, T-Mobile Merger

Posted by Dave Royse

on Tuesday, 11 February 2020 11:32

A judge has approved the long-sought merger of T-Mobile US Inc. and Sprint Corporation Here’s what to know about the deal marrying the third- and fourth-largest cell carriers in the United States.

The Deal

T-Mobile, the larger carrier, paid Sprint shareholders $26.5 billion in an all-stock deal for the smaller company. The deal was approved by federal officials last year, but a group of state attorneys general sued to block it on antitrust grounds. On Tuesday, a judge ruled the merger can proceed….CLICK for complete article

Visualizing the 700-Year Decline of Interest Rates

Posted by Dorothy Neufeld, The Visual Capitalist

on Sunday, 9 February 2020 16:27

How far can interest rates fall?

Currently, many sovereign rates sit in negative territory, and there is an unprecedented $10 trillion in negative-yielding debt. This new interest rate climate has many observers wondering where the bottom truly lies.

Today’s graphic from Paul Schmelzing, visiting scholar at the Bank of England (BOE), shows how global real interest rates have experienced an average annual decline of…Click for full article.