With global attention focused on BREXIT calamity, potentially more important questions are being overlooked, and especially in the South China Sea where storms are currently brewing between China and a range of littoral states for strategic control of territorial waters. To be clear, our long term geostrategic position remains unchanged; China will gradually secure control…
The political stakes are rising fast for West African production, and especially in the two major states, Angola and Nigeria. One story is essentially succession based around President dos Santos in Luanda, where he’s making sure his own daughter, Isabel dos Santos cover his political / corruption tracks in Angola. The other, is whether…
It took a while to play through, but our assessment that China would increasingly become the petro-state lender of last resort is starting to come good. The primary reason for that is producer states are rapidly running out of time to present full scale political implosion on the back of chronic economic pressures. For all the…
We have seen several explanations for the financial crisis and its lingering effects depressing our global economy in its aftermath. Some are plain stupid, such as greed for some reason suddenly overwhelmed people working within finance, as if people in finance were not greedy before 2007. Others try to explain it through “liberalisation” which is…
During the reign of the mighty petro-dollar standard, it was necessary for major oil exporters to recycle their dollar holdings back into the dollar-based financial system to maintain their self-imposed exchange rate pegs. US government bonds are the very centrepiece of this elaborate system and it is thus no surprise to see the dollar price…