Greenshoes, Facebook phantoms and ETF magic
Successful or not, Facebook’s IPO has taught us one very important thing over the last two days.The blogosphere/Twittersphere knows extremely little about greenshoe IPO mechanics....
Real estate won’t be supporting Chinese steel demand much longer
Something is up with China’s steel production. It reached record levels in March, driving up expectations of rising coking coal and iron ore prices. As the FT and Reuters have reported,...
Is the Lafite bubble about to pop?
Wine is not something FT Alphaville often writes about but we all need a break from the euro crisis, and this chart caught our attention. It’s the Liv-ex Fine Wine 50 index,...
A contrarian view of China’s power data
Is the slowdown in China’s electricity output growth a sign that the life is going out of the country’s economy?It’s not been the only poorly-performing economic...
What happens if the Chinese government cracks down on all copper ‘financing deals’?
Goldman Sachs’ latest commodity note considers the influence of China’s bonded warehouses, chock-full of copper, on the underlying market for the metal.First, they...
Knives Are Out, But Will BHP and Rio Cut?
BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto have signaled that harder times lie ahead for global miners but have given little indication of where the cuts, if any, will come to the billions of dollars worth of mining projects that both have in the pipeline in Australia...
An LNG headache, caused by an unconventional gas headache
Australia, we’ve heard a lot lately, is set to overtake Qatar as the world’s biggest LNG producer by about 2020. The first shipment from the big Western Australian...
The “other reportables” oil mystery
From John Kemp at Reuters on Monday (our emphasis):Hedge funds and other money managers reduced their long position in U.S. crude by the equivalent of nearly 54 million barrels of oil,...
This wasn’t Chesapeake’s week, really
As part of our asset monetization planning and capital expenditure budgeting process, we closely monitor the resulting effects on the amounts and timing of our sources and uses of funds,...
Chesapeake’s prepay deals
Some good information is starting to come out about the nature of the liabilities Chesapeake’s CEO Aubrey McClendon managed to saddle the company with.As the Wall Street...
Brent reigns supreme
Back in early 2011, a very intriguing thing happened in the oil markets.As if by magic — (well, over the period of about a couple of months) — the market collectively...
