Finance

The Legacy of Dodd-Frank

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Once upon a time it was believed that an excess of regulatory oversight would prove itself to be justified. Such a belief was short lived. In the case of the Dodd-Frank Act, it’s not only the regulation that’s complex; it is the uncertainty of if, how and when it applies.

The Dodd-Frank Act was signed into federal law in 2010, and it brought about game-changing modifications to financial legislation in over fifty years. Some of the biggest challenges are based on the requisite interpretation of over 1,000 new pages of law. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 24, 2013 at 8:30 AM

Algeria at Davos: Refocusing on Energy, Security, Globalization’s Impacts

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The World Economic Forum is widely known for the glittering array of its high-profile attendees and more recently for its role in annually highlighting the response of global elites to the economic crisis that accelerated in 2008 and has played out in the euro crisis and grinding developed-economy recessions since.

Issues of national security, of globalization and of the role of business in increasingly transparent societies have been raised but have attracted less attention; this year, attendees say, that is likely to change. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 23, 2013 at 1:00 PM

Deutsche to Be Fined for Energy-Trading Scheme

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Federal officials are expected to slap a Deutsche Bank AG (DB) subsidiary with a $1.5 million penalty in coming days after concluding that its energy-trading arm extracted illicit profits from the California electricity marketplace in 2010. The action, which people with knowledge of the case said could come as soon as Tuesday, is part of a larger crackdown by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission targeting electricity-trading schemes that it says resemble the market manipulations that caused California’s energy crisis more than a decade ago. Other banks being investigated for alleged electricity market-manipulation tactics include Barclays PLC (BCS) and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (JPM). They are contesting the allegations.

 /  Published January 22, 2013 at 2:00 PM

Breaking the Oil Monopoly With Renewable Fuel

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The oil industry has taken aim at the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) in a self-interested bid to retain dominance over America’s transportation fuel sector. Our dependence on oil is stifling consumer choice and jeopardizing our national security. Fixing those issues means diversifying our fuel supply; that means breaking the oil monopoly.

We are a nation addicted to oil and until the RFS was created in 2005, we had no infrastructure to break that addiction. The RFS increases consumer choice and energy security, while simultaneously decreasing the overall negative impacts that oil dependence has on our economy and environment. That benefit –consumer choice – is exactly why the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, which spent over $1.6 million lobbying in the fourth quarter of 2012 alone, is funding efforts attacking the policy. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 15, 2013 at 4:00 PM

2013 Oil and Gas Market Outlook

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The New York Energy Forum held its annual kickoff meeting last Thursday night, where leading market analysts presented their views about where oil and natural gas markets are headed this year. Sanctions-bitten Iranian crude output, the interplay of fundamentals and financial factors in oil markets and the US petroleum output boom were all topics of discussion.

Global benchmark crudes West Texas Intermediate and Brent have been range bound for the past two years and the speakers expected little change in 2013, despite an uptick in global oil demand. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 14, 2013 at 8:00 AM

Trends for Equities in the Oil and Gas Sector

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Investors are always looking for broad trends within industries that can provide clues to which equities might unlock the most value. The growth in US oil and gas production over the past few years has been all over the headlines, but with thousands of producers, contractors and suppliers contributing to the boom, where can investors focus their attention within the equity markets?

In this video, Breaking Energy speaks with experts David Rewcastle, Senior Energy Analyst with Source Capital Group and Michael Lynch, President and Director of Global Petroleum Service with Strategic Energy Economic Research about which types of companies they expect to benefit from surging US petroleum output. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 11, 2013 at 2:00 PM

Energy sector dealmaking forecasts for 2013

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 /  Published January 9, 2013 at 2:20 PM

Energy Traders Brace for February ‘Swaps’ Report Deadline

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Banks, trading houses and corporations trading energy and related commodities are bracing for one of the most visible financial reform efforts of the last century to finally take effect next month, and are observing the initial impacts on the first sector to be impacted: credit and interest rates.

Rules written by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission since the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation require all registered “swap dealers” to register their trades with centralized swap data repositories. The first stage of required reporting kicked in on the final day of 2012 for the notionally huge but comparatively tidy credit and interest rate markets, and is scheduled to start for the equally enormous but potentially more varied and heterogeneous commodity and energy trading markets in February (alongside foreign exchange and equity swaps). Keep reading →

 /  Published January 7, 2013 at 11:00 AM

Natural Gas Trading Strategy

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One thing all commodity price forecasts have in common is they tend to be very poor at predicting what prices will be in the future, despite this being ostensibly their sole purpose. Many forecasts are based on past market activity, but this has not proven to be terribly effective at divining future price movements.

In this video from the US Association for Energy Economics conference recently held in Austin, Texas, Roger Stibolt, Managing Director at investment banking house Galway Group discusses some of the ways he approaches natural gas trading and price forecasting. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 2, 2013 at 9:00 AM

Cleantech Investing: 2013 Predictions

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Both venture dollars and deal counts were down in the first three quarters of 2012 (note: link opens pdf) and Q4 doesn’t feel poised to surprise on the upside. Even follow-on funding has been down, but mostly it’s the initial investments (Series A, etc) that have fallen by the wayside. This is driven by the significant withdrawal of generalists from the sector, and the reality that specialist VC firms are low on capital reserves. More on this below, but it doesn’t seem like LPs will suddenly start demanding VCs invest in cleantech or start making big commitments to the sector, at least in the next few months, and there’s a lag time between such shifts at the LP level and how deal volumes flow down through the GP level anyway.

 /  Published December 31, 2012 at 10:45 AM
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