LONDON (Reuters) – Bipartisan bills introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate aim to avert the imminent shutdown of the Federal Helium Reserve, which provides a third of all the gas consumed worldwide, and develop a proper market to avoid a long-term crunch in supplies of one of the world’s most critical raw materials.

Helium is best known for filling party balloons and making people talk with a squeaky voice.

LONDON, March 27 (Reuters) – Bipartisan bills introduced
into the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate aim to avert
the imminent shutdown of the Federal Helium Reserve, which
provides a third of all the gas consumed worldwide, and develop
a proper market to avoid a long-term crunch in supplies of one
of the world’s most critical raw materials.

Helium is best known for filling party balloons and making
people talk with a squeaky voice.

LONDON (Reuters) – A thoughtful new paper from researchers at the University of Illinois marks a significant step forward in research on how commodity futures prices are formed.

Until recently, the academic and policy debate about futures price formation has been locked in an acrimonious and polarized standoff between market fundamentalists, who insist all price moves reflect supply and demand fundamentals, and those writers who blame speculators for every rise in food and fuel prices.

LONDON (Reuters) – A thoughtful new paper from researchers at the University of Illinois marks a significant step forward in research on how commodity futures prices are formed.

Until recently, the academic and policy debate about futures price formation has been locked in an acrimonious and polarized standoff between market fundamentalists, who insist all price moves reflect supply and demand fundamentals, and those writers who blame speculators for every rise in food and fuel prices.

LONDON, March 25 (Reuters) – A thoughtful new paper from
researchers at the University of Illinois marks a significant
step forward in research on how commodity futures prices are
formed.

Until recently, the academic and policy debate about futures
price formation has been locked in an acrimonious and polarised
standoff between market fundamentalists, who insist all price
moves reflect supply and demand fundamentals, and those writers
who blame speculators for every rise in food and fuel prices.

LONDON, March 25 (Reuters) – U.S. distributors and freight
hauliers have held down diesel consumption even as their
business recovers from recession by making thousands of small
changes to their operations.

Improved driver training, restrictions on idling and careful
route planning to reduce deadheads (where vehicles travel empty)
are all reducing consumption of expensive diesel while helping
companies promote their green credentials.

LONDON, March 19 (Reuters) – High oil and gas prices have
unleashed the biggest drilling boom in 30 years.

OPEC members must prepare for a big increase in oil supplies
in the second half of the decade, as well as heightened
competition from natural gas in some of their core markets, and
a further erosion in demand as conservation and efficiency
measures bite harder.

LONDON, March 18 (Reuters) – China’s Huadian Corporation,
one of the country’s top power producers, which won four
licences in the second shale gas licensing round last year, will
tender for engineering and drilling services to meet its
commitment to prospect for gas in blocks across Hubei, Hunan and
Guizhou provinces.

“We will be looking for professional services from seismic
survey to drilling via a tender towards late this year,” a
company official told an industry seminar on Monday
.

LONDON (Reuters) – Bailing-in depositors with banks in Cyprus is a serious policy error that will destabilize the European banking system and threatens to accelerate bank runs in future.

There is a good reason deposits have been the most protected form of bank liabilities. It has nothing to do with fairness.