May 2019 / The Arab world is facing its own version of an Iron Curtain, imposed not by external actors but through domestic forces vying for power. — Jamal Khashoggi While America has been a superpower for almost a century, its emergence as a global energy superpower is relatively new. As an illustration, as recently as 2015 it was illegal to export oil. This all changed with the shale boom which...
March 2019 / The year was 1978 and I was a newly-minted bank lending officer at Irving Trust Company in Manhattan. Fresh out of high school and desperate for any type of recognition, I volunteered to join a small group of adventurers involved in introducing a futures contract on the New York Mercantile Exchange (the Exchange) to local heating oil dealers. For the uninitiated, the Exchange opened...
JUNE-JULY 2018 / A pity they both can’t lose. — comment on the Iran-Iraq War attributed to Henry Kissinger Despite Henry Kissinger’s almost poetic musings on the geopolitics of oil, the harsh reality remains that crude oil has risen around 10 percent in price since the beginning of 2018, far surpassing estimates of most oil experts in and out of Wall Street. Meanwhile, the business...
May 2018 / Safety and certainty in oil lie in variety, and variety alone. — Winston Churchill, after switching the Royal Navy from coal to oil in 1914 Energy continues to loom large in any discussion of the impact of energy flows on the influence and power of nations. We all know and have been told repeatedly that supplies of oil and gas are not infinite. Since the Arab oil embargo of 1973 each...
November-December 2015 / In this essay we begin with a critique of Mr. Jack Ma, China’s answer to our Steve Jobs. Mr. Ma founded e-commerce behemoth, Alibaba, which was taken public in the largest IPO ever on the New York Stock Exchange. Mr. Ma has continually asserted that he created Alibaba for the public good, which translates to about 600 million Chinese Internet users. Economists point...
Best-selling financial author, Wall Street investment banker, social commentator, award-winning poet, energy consultant, off-Broadway producer, and community organizer in Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign, Ron Spurga is the ultimate Renaissance Man.
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