Cutting it up: Oil companies have scrapped $380 billion in new projects since the oil-market downturn began a year and a half ago, Wood Mackenzie says. As FuelFix.com reports, the energy research firm’s dollar-figure estimate has nearly doubled since its first report on the matter last July, as oil prices crashed from around $60 a barrel in the summer to about $30 a barrel this week. About $170 billion of the scrubbed projects had been scheduled to come into production from 2016 to 2020. That means 2.9 million barrels a day that the industry had planned to bring up won’t hit the market until after 2025. The industry since last summer has canceled 22 major projects tied to 7 billion barrels of oil equivalent in reserves, bringing the number of scrapped projects since the start of the downturn to 68. All told, that’s 27 billion barrels of oil equivalent that will have to wait until prices recover. Read the full story.
Guesstimations: The Federal Reserve will raise interest rates only three times this year as it faces a more subdued outlook for both the U.S. and world economies, a Reuters poll of economists has found. The world’s largest economy is a bulwark for an increasingly shaky global one, and has the most immediate positive prospects for generating inflation with a very low unemployment rate and a solid pace of private hiring. But a storm has blown through global markets since the start of this year, hitting stock markets, commodities and oil prices based on renewed worries that China, the world’s second largest economy, is struggling. The Reuters poll of over 90 economists found the U.S. economy will grow 2.5% in 2016, the same as predicted for 2015 and down from the 2.8% they were expecting a year ago—a decent pace but not enough to generate a strong rebound in inflation. Read the full story.
Coming to light: Concerned about illicit money flowing into luxury real estate, the Treasury Department has announced that it will begin identifying and tracking secret buyers of high-end properties. The New York Times reports the initiative will start in two of the nation’s major destinations for global wealth: Manhattan and Miami-Dade County. It will shine a light on the darkest corner of the real estate market: all-cash purchases made by shell companies that often shield purchasers’ identities. It is the first time the federal government has required real estate companies to disclose names behind cash transactions, and it is likely to send shudders through the real estate industry, which has benefited enormously in recent years from a building boom increasingly dependent on wealthy, secretive buyers. The initiative is part of a broader federal effort to increase the focus on money laundering in real estate. Read the full story.
