In the News 3-26-15
Bespoke plots the continued accumulation of crude oil inventories in Crude Oil Inventories – You Guessed It – Surge Again:
There’s still no letup in the massive gusher of oil flowing into US storage. In today’s weekly inventory report from the Department of Energy (DoE), crude oil inventories rose by 8.17 million barrels, which was once again significantly higher than expected. The top chart below compares weekly crude oil inventories so far in 2015 to average levels over the last ten years and since 1983. (Full article here.)
Bloomberg reports that wheat has been another casualty of the strong US Dollar in U.S. Wheat Sales at 25-Year Low Add to Dollar’s Victim List:
Sales of U.S. wheat fell to the lowest for this time in the season since data collection began in 1990, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. (More here.)
California Just Had a Stunning Increase in Solar. Bloomberg notes:
California is now the first U.S. state to get 5 percent of its annual utility-scale electricity from the sun. But that's really understating what just happened.
The chart above, released this week by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, shows that in just one year, big solar jumped from 1.9 percent to 5 percent of the state's total power generation. California isn't just producing the most utility-scale solar electricity of any state; it's producing more than all the other states combined. (Continue here.)
Also in the news:
Illinois Plugs Deficit as Next Year’s $6 Billion Hole Looms — Illinois’s legislature plugged a $1.6 billion hole in the state’s budget, leaving lawmakers to tackle a deficit three times that size for the year ahead.
Draghi Sees Case for Consolidation in Italy’s Banking Industry — European Central Bank president Mario Draghi said he favors mergers among Italy’s banks to overcome excessive fragmentation in the industry.
ECB Said to Query Banks About Austria Risks After Heta — The European Central Bank asked lenders in Europe to detail their exposure to Austrian debtors after a state-owned institution was told to halt payments on borrowings, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
