Increased security fears force BP staff to quit Libya

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER

PUBLISHED: 16:23 EST, 12 May 2013 | UPDATED: 16:23 EST, 12 May 2013




Exit: BP is withdrawing staff from Libya

BP said it was withdrawing staff from Libya on Sunday night just weeks after warning it is reconsidering plans to drill for oil due to increased worries about safety.


The oil giant said some non-essential staff would leave Libya after the government voiced concerns about deteriorating security in Tripoli.


Libya had refused to give any ground over requests by international oil firms operating in the OPEC producer to bring in their own foreign security staff at its oil fields.


BP said: ‘We are taking some non-Libyan staff out of Tripoli following advice by the foreign office.’


The British embassy said on Friday it was also cutting staff due to growing unrest in the capital, where armed groups seized two government ministries last month to raise the profile of a number of causes.



Source: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-2323512/Increased-security-fears-force-BP-staff-quit-Libya.html#ixzz2T8CCzTmr 

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With fear back on magazine covers, stocks can rise

June 2, 2010, 4:35 p.m. EDT ·

With fear back on magazine covers, stocks can rise


By Nick Godt, MarketWatch


NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- The outlook for stocks for the rest of year is bleak, given so much uncertainty about how much the European crisis and slow growth in China might cost the global economy.

PM Report: BP Hits Another SnagBP hits another engineering snag and President Obama moves forcefully to take on Big Oil. WSJ's Joe White and Jeffrey Ball join the News Hub to discuss. Plus, why a couple would divorce after 40 years of marriage, and how it affects their family and friends.

But it doesn't mean that June won't provide some short-term respite for U.S. stocks after the heavy 14% correction experienced from late April through May.

One emerging good contrarian short-term indicator, it seems, is the cover of the conservative British weekly The Economist.

Back in early April, its cover read "Hope at Last," signaling that optimism about the global economy recovery was getting close to a top. Less than two weeks later, the correction in stocks began.

The latest cover of the magazine for the first week of June is "Fear Returns."

In April, The Economist summed up general optimism, as job growth returned to the U.S. The cover then featured a rainbow emanating from an American flag, suggesting an American recovery would lead global growth.

The early June cover features a threatening shark fin piercing through a dark green ocean.

Meanwhile, stocks did rise last week, even though that fact was hidden by the terrible tallies for the month of May and a big drop on Friday.

Last week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average /quotes/comstock/10w!i:dji/delayed (DJIA 10,250, +225.52, +2.25%) fell 0.6% but the broad S&P 500 index /quotes/comstock/21z!i1:in\x (SPX 1,098, +27.67, +2.58%) , the benchmark used by many investment professionals, rose 0.2%. The Nasdaq Composite /quotes/comstock/10y!i:comp (COMP 2,281, +58.74, +2.64%) gained 1.3%.

And after a big drop on Tuesday, the market was in rally mode on Wednesday, with the Dow industrials surging to close up 226 points.

Why has The Economist become such a good contrarian indicator, as opposed to say, the cover of Time? That's the magazine many smart-money investors relied upon back in the 1990s.

Back then, it mattered for stocks how U.S. retail investors were feeling: Stock performance, consumer sentiment and spending went hand in hand. Nowadays, retail investors, parked in bond funds, and the stock market live in different worlds.

Read First Take on consumers, stocks diverging.

The Economist, meanwhile, targets readers that include international investment professionals. It also nearly always includes the political angle of economic and market trends.

The use of the shark fin in the ocean, besides being a symbol of the fear over the European debt crisis, might as well also summarize the BP /quotes/comstock/13*!bp/quotes/nls/bp (BP 37.66, +1.14, +3.12%) Gulf Coast disaster and rising international tensions off America's shores.

Flashbacks to Camelot
Bob Doll, chief equity strategist at BlackRock, joined a number of analysts noting that the past month was the worst May for stocks since 1962, making for "interesting comparisons" between the two periods.

In both cases, a fairly young Democratic president faced increasing pressures in its second year. In 1962, market sentiment was hit by the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, which masked improving economic fundamentals in the U.S.

"To some extent, we believe the current environment is similar, given that stock prices are being driven much more by sentiment than by fundamentals," Doll wrote in a note.

After some of the big fear in May, some degree of stability now seems to have returned to markets - although volatile trading conditions seem to remain the norm.

The real impact of the European crisis on the global economy probably won't be known for a while.

But as The Economist notes, the short-term impact in the U.S. is that U.S. Treasurys have seen big safe-haven flows, lowering borrowing costs and reducing the cries to cut spending at all costs.

Nick Godt is MarketWatch's markets editor, based in New York.
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Source: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/with-fear-back-on-magazine-covers-stock-can-rise-2010-06-02
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U.S. Government Keeps 'Boot on Neck' of BP Over Spill

Monday, May 24, 2010
U.S. Government Keeps 'Boot on Neck' of BP Over Spill

Reuters

GALLIANO, La.--The U.S. government piled pressure on BP Plc Monday to clean up a "massive environmental mess" in the Gulf of Mexico amid growing anger at the oil giant's failure to contain a five-week-old oil spill.

The company insisted it was doing all it could to try to shut off a blown-out oil well spewing hundreds of thousands of gallons (liters) of oil into the Gulf every day. It threatens to become the worst U.S. oil spill in history.

London-based BP, which has now lost about 25 percent of its market value -- almost $50 billion -- since the spill began, said it would make another attempt to plug the leak on Wednesday, but gave it only a 60-70 percent chance of success.

With heavy oil already washing into fragile marshlands and wildlife refuges in Louisiana, the U.S. government is pushing BP to try to contain or seal the leak as soon as possible.

"We will keep our boot on their neck until the job gets done," U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told reporters after touring affected areas of the Gulf coast with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and a group of U.S. senators.

President Barack Obama has called it an unprecedented environmental disaster for the United States.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said some 70 miles of his state's coastline had been affected by the oil spill. He renewed a plea for federal authorities to send more equipment, especially booms, to help stop the oil from making landfall.

More than 1,100 vessels, 24,000 personnel and 2 million feet of boom have been deployed to deal with the spill, the largest such effort in history, U.S. officials said.

"This is a BP mess, it is a horrible mess and it is a massive environmental mess," Salazar said. He added BP was legally responsible for halting the spreading spill, cleaning up its effects and paying for resulting economic damages.

Salazar said an ongoing investigation by U.S. authorities would hold the company accountable "both civilly and in whatever way is necessary," appearing to leave open the possibility of a criminal inquiry.

The oil spill is a political hot potato for the Obama administration ahead of a November election that is widely expected to erode Democrats' control of the U.S. Congress. Analysts warn that voters may punish Democrats regardless of who is ultimately deemed responsible for the mess.
The White House has repeatedly said it is the energy giant's responsibility to clean up the spill, but with public anger over BP's handling of the crisis intensifying, there have been calls for the Obama administration to take charge.

"TOP KILL" PLANNED FOR WEDNESDAY

The administration warned BP Sunday it would be removed from efforts to seal the well if it was not seen as doing enough. But it acknowledged only the company and the oil industry have the know-how to stop the spill.

BP plans to inject heavy fluids and then cement into the seabed well to block oil flow in a so-called "top kill" operation Wednesday.

"We need it to work," BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles told CNN.

BP shares fell nearly 3 percent in London on Monday as investors reacted to the Obama administration's renewed pressure and waited to see whether BP's latest attempt to stop the leak would work.

BP executives have warned there is "no certainty" that the containment efforts will be successful because they have not been attempted ever before at the depths -- a mile (1.6 km) down -- where the Macondo well is located.

They involve remote-controlled undersea robots working in the dark with lights and under intense depth pressure.

A previous control measure attempted by BP -- a long tube deployed down to the larger of two leaks from the well -- appeared to have had relatively little impact on the flow.

BP said the oil collected by the siphon tube was at times as low as 1,360 barrels of oil (57,120 gallons/) per day in the six days before May 23. On average, BP said, the oil captured during that period was 2,010 barrels per day. Last week the company said it had been siphoning as much as 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons / per day.

The company had estimated that about 5,000 barrels have been leaking every day, although some scientists have given much higher numbers for the size of the leak -- up to 70,000 and even 100,000 barrels per day.

BP said the spill, triggered by an April 20 explosion that sank the Deepwater Horizon rig and killed 11 workers, had cost it $760 million so far. It also pledged up to $500 million Monday toward studying the impact of the spill.

Suttles said if the "top kill" operation did not work, the company would attempt to put a "top hat" containment device over the larger leak to try to capture most of the oil and pipe it up to a tanker on the surface.

Another option was a "junk shot" -- the injection of golf balls, pieces of rubber tire and other debris into the well's failed blowout preventer to try to shut it.

MARRED MARSHLANDS

Oil has been sloshing into Louisiana's fragile marshlands, and over 65 miles of shoreline have been tarred.

The marshes are nurseries for shrimp, oysters, crabs and fish that make Louisiana the top commercial seafood producer in the continental United States. Fishing is now banned in a large swath of the Gulf because of the spill.

The spill has raised questions about Obama's earlier proposal to expand offshore drilling as part of a strategy to win Republican support for climate change legislation.

Many scientists have warned the spreading oil could increasingly be caught in a powerful ocean current that could take it to the Florida Keys, Cuba and the U.S. East Coast.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a fierce critic of Washington, said on Sunday he had sent a team of oil experts to socialist ally Cuba to help it prepare for the possibility of oil from the spill coming ashore there.

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Source: http://www.foxbusiness.com/story/markets/market-overview/wrapup--pressure-piles-bp-gulf-spill-widens-478270687/

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