Thursday, March 03, 2016

Eli Hates to Tell You About This

Many of the oil exporting states have built up yugeeee sovereign wealth funds that they use for such things as building infrastructure, supporting retirement payouts and whatever else.  These funds are being hammered on both ends, by the price of oil and low (now negative in some places like Japan) interest rates on bonds.

One of the largest, Norway's showed a loss last year, and things do not look very promising this.  Given how large these funds are, a sell off would threaten everything and everybody

Few sovereign wealth funds report their stock holdings across sectors and regions, but based on information from those that do, J.P. Morgan's global market strategist Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou estimates that oil producers' funds hold around $2 trillion of publicly listed equities worldwide. 
Extrapolating further, he estimates that up to $700 billion of that total could be invested in western European equities, with between a quarter and one-third in banking stock
2008 redeaux, except worse.

25 comments:

david lewis said...

and I thought the 2007 crisis came about because banks created a load of worthless financial assets, such as AAA rated securities made up of huge mortgage loans to people who could never pay them back, in such quantities the only way the system could be sustained was to create even more worthless assets such a AAA rated securities made up of even bigger mortgage loans to people with even less likelihood of paying them back, etc, until people started defaulting on the mortgages without making one payment and no one could believe in it anymore.

Can you explain how the investments Norway has made compare to that?

Jim Eager said...

Two words for you, David: stranded assets.

The capital in those worthless mortgages was stranded with no hope of full extraction, much less a return on it.

Likewise, in a decarbonising world the capital invested in exploration and development costs and leases, and in production, refining and distribution infrastructure, not to mention the political "investment," will become stranded. It's an enormous sum that will make the write-offs of 2008 look like a picnic, which is why a good many people are fighting tooth and nail against even acknowledging the reality of AGW let alone doing something about it.

But the smart money is already on the move, and ultimately someone is going to be left holding the bag, just like in 2008. This time no government bailout could possibly be big enough. Better to spend the money now to develop and build the replacement infrastructure before the collapse, because we simply won't be able to after it.

david lewis said...

Norway's strategy is to take some of their oil profits and invest them for future generations of Norwegians.

They aren't investing in stranded assets.

If they suddenly couldn't sell one more barrel of oil, they would then turn to that fund to maintain their living standards for several generations, as I understand it.

EliRabett said...

that assumes a rate of return which with low or even negative interest rates they are not getting. the fund will possibly have a loss this year

david lewis said...

I've been wondering when civilization would face the fact it has to get off fossil fuels for more than 25 years. I'm still wondering.

Demand for oil was going up before the oil price fell and projections are that demand will continue to increase. People who argue that demand has peaked, is falling now, and will fall leaving oil as a stranded asset sound like the Earth is cooling types. Where is the evidence?

We're going to worry the present blip in the oil price might upset global markets and cause the next Great Recession, while we agitate for eliminating the use of all fossil fuels as quickly as possible?


Howard said...

The flipside of denier conspiracy ideation is, apparently, warmunista apocalypse ideation. Maybe Dr. Lewandowsky can proscribe you a pill for that.

Hank Roberts said...

A dollar is simply a claim on a share of Earth's resources.

Bankers invent paper claims (debt, various risk gambles) that can be sold for bookkeeper dollars faster than Earth can produce resources.

Problem?

Bernard J. said...

What Hank said.

The reality of thermodynamics will pop the fantasies of bankers and economists: the only difference is that the thermodynamic bang has a very long wavelength compared to that of a bubble or balloon.

Mal Adapted said...

Howard: "The flipside of denier conspiracy ideation is, apparently, warmunista apocalypse ideation. Maybe Dr. Lewandowsky can proscribe[sic(k)] you a pill for that."

That's the sort of poorly thought out comment we've come to expect from you, Howard. While you're clinging to denial, mental health care professionals are calling attention to the psychological impacts of AGW:

> "The physical toll has been studied, but the psychological impacts of
> climate change have not been addressed," said Lise Van Susteren, a
> forensic psychiatrist and one of the report's authors. "We must not
> forget that people who are physically affected by climate change will
> also be suffering from the emotional fallout of what has happened to
> them. Others suffer emotionally from a distance, especially those who
> are most keenly aware of the perils we face, or as in the case of
> children, those who feel especially vulnerable. And the psychological
> damage is not only over what is happening now, but what is likely
> going to happen in the future.
>
> "This kind of anticipatory anxiety is especially crippling and is
> increasingly being seen among climate activists — in some cases
> rising to the level of a kind of 'pre-traumatic' stress disorder,"
> she added.
>
> Moreover, society can expect to experience a collective sense of
> sadness, anger and defeat as it confronts the inevitable, and
> possibly irreversible, long-term environmental effects of global
> warming, and the failure to prevent them, according to Van Susteren.

BTW, Stephan Lewandowsky isn't an MD, so he can neither prescribe nor proscribe medication. When you're no longer able to sustain your denial, though, your primary care physician should be able to help.

Anonymous said...

It seems to me that Mal Adapted isn't adverse to the 'take your meds' argument in scientific and technical discussions either. Pot. Kettle.

Anonymous said...

Sorry, for the grammar NAZI's 'averse'. I had to look it up.

MartinM said...

That's 'grammar Nazis'. No apostrophe.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for that. Tips like that will come in handy while standing in the soup lines or while hunting zombies in the woods.

Hank Roberts said...

“Conservatives Without Conscience”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/books/review/30gillespie.html

-----note the date: 2006------

The ghost of Barry Goldwater hovers over “Conservatives Without Conscience,” the new study of “authoritarian” Republicans by the Watergate-era White House counsel John W. Dean....

The project was cut short by Goldwater’s death in 1998, but Dean remained dedicated to unmasking what he sees as the new and dangerous breed of “tough, coldblooded, ruthless authoritarians” who have “co-opted” conservatism.... not simply misguided or repugnant ideologues ....; they are also rainmakers uniquely deranged by their lust for power, their limited ability “to see the world from any point of view other than their own” and their willingness to submit to authority.

The book draws heavily on the work of the social psychologist Bob Altemeyer, the creator of a scale for measuring “right-wing authoritarian” (R.W.A.) tendencies. Dean writes that Altemeyer is “not given to hyperbole in his scholarly work,” yet quotes him as saying that many “High R.W.A.’s” would “attack France, Massachusetts or the moon if the president said it was necessary ‘for freedom.’ ” Altemeyer says it’s “a scientifically established fact” that political, religious and economic conservatives are High R.W.A.’s, and Dean concludes that our government “is run by an array of authoritarian personalities” who are “dominating, opposed to equality, desirous of personal power, amoral, intimidating . . . vengeful, pitiless, exploitive, manipulative, dishonest, cheaters, prejudiced, meanspirited, militant, nationalistic and two-faced.” The estimated 20 to 25 percent of High R.W.A.’s among us, he warns, “will take American democracy where no freedom-loving person would want it to go.”
-----end excerpt----

So, another Cassandra data point from a decade back, eh?

Everett F Sargent said...

Eli,

Way off topic once more ...

As you know RSS came out with a new TMT/TTT time series (with, perhaps, the TTT time series now topping all metrics of (including HadCRUT, HOAA, NASA, BEST and maybe even Cowtan & Way)) SAT. I'm waiting on all the February 2016 indices to report out sometime in the middle of this month.

OK, so Long story short?

I'm looking to contact Richard Eric Swanson via email with regards to UAH v6.0bx, specifically with regards to his post in another RR thread ...
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2016/01/hmm-thats-suspicious.html?showComment=1454089484758#c4161798897733622345

"I've been toying with the latest UAH v6 files. I calculated a TLT time series using Spencer's equation as applied directly to the TMT, TP and TLS monthly time series. That equation is:

TLTv6 = (1.538xMSU2 - 0.548xMSU3 + 0.01xMSU4)

The resulting time series were virtually identical to those from UAH, as may be seen in THIS EXCEL SPREADSHEET (warning, 632k). I suggest that the basic question remains unanswered, "How did S & C create this equation?". Of course, there's no way to validate the calculations used to produce TMT, TP OR TLS, except to re-calculate the entire UAH processing chain...

29/1/16 12:44 PM"

Specifically with regards to the TLT equation that UAH uses and his Excel spreadsheet (which is no longer available for download) ...
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/Version-61.pdf
(see p. 10 and Figure 7 (p. 11) of the above UAH PDF file)

I'm not sure if I've reinvented the wheel so to speak (Swanson's own Excel spreadsheet) but there appears to be some issues particularly wrt the "TTP" time series (the UAH PDF refers to this as either “tropopause level” or "TP (at the very end of p. 9 or Figure 7 (p. 11)).

My POC is my screen name (one word) atgmaildotcom.

TIA

PS: I would also like to comment on your post here ...
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2016/01/ups-and-downs.html

As I have had (for a while now) the cross correlation (R^2) half-matrix (matrix diagonal is the zero-lagged autocorrelation of X on X so omitted as this is always one) all surface temperature and satellite indices (e. g. UAH v5.6 TLT vs RSS v3.3 TLT or BEST1 vs UAH v6.0b4) (after "proper preconditioning of the original time series, half-point set to 148-months) low pass IIR low pass filtering (e. g. removal of the low frequency signature). R^2's are quite high within (almost always at or above R^2 = 0.9) each group (all surface or all satellite regardless of version number).

Everett F Sargent said...

Small addeum to "PS" portion of my last comment/

The "matrix" are all just for zero-lagged comparisons. Including +/-nN-lagged would require a matrix for each comparison and would no longer be symmetric about the diagonal.

Sorry about that one.

Jeffrey Davis said...


How can anxiety about the future compare to denial of a present day phenomenon? That seems like False Equivalence on steroids.

Bernard J. said...

"...an array of authoritarian personalities” who are “dominating, opposed to equality, desirous of personal power, amoral, intimidating ... vengeful, pitiless, exploitive, manipulative, dishonest, cheaters, prejudiced, meanspirited, militant, nationalistic and two-faced.” The estimated 20 to 25 percent of High R.W.A.’s among us, he warns, “will take American democracy where no freedom-loving person would want it to go.”

Sounds exactly like conservative politics in Australia over the last twenty years...

Howard said...

Mal: It might have been poorly thought out, but your well considered, referenced supercilious response was the exact verification of the collective psychosis you suffer from.

Geoffrey: quite, quite. Concern over weather is much more justifiable than that of climate.

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

This should make Mal feel better.

E. Swanson said...

EFS offered a reply to my earlier post, which included a spreadsheet. I've gone a bit farther with that effort and decided to submit a paper to present what I found. Since there were some similarities, I decided to dump those files from my BOX cloud account to quell any hint that I had previously "published" the newer work. Sorry about that. I did leave the graph of RSS weighting functions on Photobucket.

You are probably correct that validating the UAH results would require starting from scratch, with considerable effort. That's what happened with the earlier UAH results and is the reason RSS produced their work independent of UAH. RSS produces a version of the TTP, which they cal "TTS", but that series doesn't begin until January 1987, so UAH has the field to themselves, so to speak, from Dec 1978 thru 1986...

Everett F Sargent said...

E. Swanson,

I always sleep on these things (your post and time of my post means I have slept on --it).

Good luck on your paper.

"RSS produces a version of the TTP, which they call "TTS", but that series doesn't begin until January 1987, so UAH has the field to themselves, so to speak, from Dec 1978 thru 1986."

Yes, I may be slow and methodical, but I eventually get there.

I was in reverse engineering mode and backed up into that one after several Excel OLS regressions. I had no idea what TTP even was until I read Spencer's writeup. D'oh!

After looking at the UAH TTP vertical profile and then looking at the RSS TTS vertical profile I went zOMG WTF! Time to regress global TTP against global TTS ... (I've redacted a whole lot of technical stuff here, you might say I'm taking notes, and waiting for a certain UAH v6.0 publication to see the light of day).

Suffice it to say, that if I were to publish something, which, you know, I won't, there is a rather serious punch line to all this UAH/RSS TLT turd, err ... hmm, gold polishing.

UAH v5.6 -> v6.0 causes global TLT to go way, Way, WAY DOWN!

RSS v3.3 -> v4.0 causes global TTT (and via proxy a v4.0 TLT product) to go way, Way, WAY UP!

Anyways, if I were to publish something about this whole "gold standard" TLT affair over these past ~three decades, it would be titled ... wait for it ...

A BRIDGE TOO POOP ON

Signed,
Triumph, the Insult Climate Dog

Hank Roberts said...

also for Mal, after you read Russell's link:
The Federal Government Did Not Spend $412K to Study Gender and Glaciers

Hank Roberts said...

> The flipside of denier conspiracy ideation is,
> apparently, warmunista apocalypse ideation

Yeah, that's the demographic (mostly poor white working class men) that may tip the next US election. Mistrust big business_and_ big government _and_ big media? There's a point where the folks out at the extremes find the political sphere has wrapped around and they share some common concerns.

Yeah, they're easily led and misled and fall for the most astonishing crap.
That's not entirely their fault, you know. Our economy relies on stripmining the credulous and the aged as well as the poor.

Would you rather have them voting for Trump?

Remember the woman said to have called out to Adlai Stevenson:

"Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!"
Stevenson called back "That's not enough, madam, we need a majority!"

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Hank notes that :

"The Federal Government Did Not Spend $412K to Study Gender and Glaciers"

Why waste a taxpayer dime subsidizing articles indistinguishable from the effusions of runaway PoMo Jargon Generators when


http://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2015/06/reviews-of-postmodern-physics.html"> you can get them for free on the web ?