Just ran across this interesting report on possible new oil reserves in… Albania.
Gustavson assigns 2.987 billion barrels with 3.014 trillion cubic feet of associated gas as the P50 prospective oil resources in its oil with associated gas case. Gustavson notes that because of the depth it is possible that the prospects will hold natural gas. [...]

Adam Tooze, who (it says here) is a senior lecturer at Jesus College, Cambridge, has a book out; The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. It is getting some very good reviews, and this one will be no different. Tooze’s thesis is that the Nazi German economy was a more [...]

If you want to lecture the French on “economic reform”, it pays to have some knowledge of French economic history. If you insist on doing so despite knowing nothing, “Big Mouth Strikes Again” is not a good headline. Of course, it could be some downtrodden sub-editor’s revenge.
Anyway, Chris Walker writes in today’s Independent that Nicolas [...]

PwC was auditor for what was then one of Russia’s largest oil companies, Yukos. The Russian government took a serious disliking to Yukos and its then-president Mikhail Khodorkovsky, eventually putting the company effectively out of business (with key bits sold off to state-owned or state-controlled companies) and Khodorkovsky in jail. Now the Russian government is [...]

Gideon Rachman of the FT gives a sound thrashing to Mark Steyn and the other participants in a conference on “The Collapse of Europe” somewhere in Florida California. It’s always good to see the racist buffoon Steyn getting fisked, but there’s a deeper point here. What if it was the United States that was threatened [...]

In comments to the post on Kosovo, Alex Harrowell asked the following reasonable question:
“How can you have something that’s both a “mineral resource grab” and an “economic black hole”?”
The short answer: you can, because it’s Kosovo.
Here’s why. There has been no serious investment in those mines since the Yugoslav economy hit the skids in [...]

No, this is not a Litvinenko post…or at least not primarily. Recently, the Georgian ex-KGB said it had caught a Russian smuggling highly-enriched uranium into Georgia, who was nailed in a sting operation where Georgian agents posed as representatives of an Islamist terrorist group that wanted to buy fissile material. He handed over a sample, [...]

An unacknowledged fact of world economics is the role of command or planning mechanisms in what is held to be a global market economy. J.K. Galbraith raised the point that large companies are in a sense planned economies within their walls, with technical and commercial decisions made by management, wage and pricing structures determined either [...]

Sargasso, Dutch weblog and co-nominee in the recent BOB’s has a very interesting post on European energy policy, which prompted me to address the issue here as well. The point of my own post here on AFOE is not to elaborate extensively on European energy policy, I simply do not have the time right [...]