oil

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) in the U.S. increased 2.9 percent in February before seasonal adjustment. These BLS charts and table illustrate what is driving the increase.

Whatever happened to fuel switching between natural gas and diesel? The switch from diesel to natural gas is one of the biggest types of fuel switching in transport. You see this with all the buses now running natural gas instead of diesel.…

Here’s a cool graphic from the EIA on what drives the price of a gallon of gasoline in January 2012. We paid $4.20 last night in California!

The brief study presented here shows that over the past 60 days, the Canadian dollar has been more correlated with the S&P 500 than most currencies we looked at, and is also highly correlated with the euro, though in line with most of…

A chart of gasoline consumption and oil prices for the years 2000-2011.

Quick, what country is the economic engine that will power world growth? If you answered "China," you're far from alone. But there's another country that deserves as much attention and better yet, is much friendlier to investment: India,…

Happy Wednesday. I know the news is 'less good' today than it was when I last wrote you but writing these weeklies always puts me in a more positive frame of mind. Nevertheless, today's topic is about downside risk. My hope is to frame the…

As always, I present you Byron Wien’s Ten Surprises for 2011. He is bullish yet again - on both the US and emerging markets.

With big oil's bank accounts full to the brim with cash, the stage is set for some significant acquisition activity... or, to put it another way, for a battle to buy producing assets. There are quite a number of contestants in the battle -…

Another awesome piece of work from our friends over at The Chart Store. The chart below is a times series of the numbers of hours of work — based on the average hourly wage — needed to buy a barrel of crude oil. Given the current wage of…