Brazil's $60 billion trade is bailout by another name

Real trouble

Business Standard

Fed could do with "Luddite" like India's Rajan

India envy

Reuters

Shale trailblazer leaves a world awash with crude

Patient pioneer

US oil price rise should fuel export ban's fall

Oil over?

Hands-off approach wins governments more oil

Crude capitalism

Murdoch may get three divorces for price of one

Unlucky in love billionaires

Shale offers China exit from US dependency curse

Drill, comrade, drill

Efficiency revolution would put shale to shame

Barrels of savings

Buffett needs luck for Las Vegas gamble to pay off

Lacking energy

Solar subsidies don't merit costly trade war

Scorched earth tactics

Exxon Mobil running hard just to stand still

Buyback gusher

New oil dynamics may challenge crude growth logic

Bargain Brent

Is Exxon building Big Oil's skyscraper equivalent?

Colossus of Exxon

A tough sell

Apple and Exxon may not be so different, after all

Unlikely bedfellows

2012 may be as good as it gets for Exxon Mobil. America&rsquo;s largest oil company pumped out a near-record profit and its best earnings per share ever. But Exxon, like Chevron, is spending huge sums &ndash; almost $40 billion last year &mdash; to find and extract reserves. Holding output steady is tough enough. Unless oil prices jump, Exxon may have peaked.

Big spenders

The International Monetary Fund has a new long-term worry: decades of higher interest rates. Don&rsquo;t get too comfortable with low borrowing costs, is the downbeat message from the normally overoptimistic fund&rsquo;s flagship World Economic Outlook. Slightly feebler growth of 3.3 per cent for 2012 is the short-term concern. But past fiscal excesses and an ageing population could push up interest rates for a generation.

Rate clouds ahead

For ConocoPhillips, the $5-billion sale of its stake in a Kazakhstan oil field probably will be the easy part. The US oil giant&rsquo;s investors should be happy to see the costly project in central Asia go. The cash also will help it fund lavish capital expenditure plans and a generous dividend. But Conoco&rsquo;s real chore is to prove it can boost sluggish output while retreating from promising, if risky, regions.

Playing it safe

People like Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper may be worrying too much about foreign state-controlled companies buying homegrown companies. Harper, who is mulling CNOOC&rsquo;s $15.1 billion bid for oil company Nexen, is sceptical. The fear is the motives of such companies are more than commercial. But evidence from a recent study suggests that if state buyers have a hidden agenda, they aren&rsquo;t paying for it.

Doesn't quack

Coal&rsquo;s ascendancy looks set to leave already ailing US miners stuck in a pit. Within five years, the black rock is likely to replace oil as the world&rsquo;s top energy source, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). That should be good news for America&rsquo;s miners, which are sitting on 28 per cent of the planet&rsquo;s coal. But they&rsquo;re ill-placed to do well from the boom.

Lump of coal

Autocrats and strongmen have long held the whip hand in global energy. Now, democracies are starting to outclass countries like Iran, Venezuela and Russia in oil and gas production. That should reduce the economic and political influence of authoritarian states. And, the West&rsquo;s booming output ought to steady fuel prices, a rare boon for the global economy.

Christopher Swann