Oil rises on Goldman forecast hike, but trade choppy

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Oil-rises-on-Goldman-forecast-rb-3076471449.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=1&asset=&ccode=

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil rose on Tuesday in choppy trading after Goldman Sachs raised its price forecasts for Brent crude, saying demand from economic growth will eat into stockpiles and OPEC spare capacity.

Goldman raised its Brent price forecast to $115, $120 and $130 a barrel on a three-, six-, and 12-month horizon and boosted its year-end target for Brent to $120 per barrel from $105 and its 2012 forecast to $140 from $120.

A weaker dollar also supported oil prices, which had declined 2 percent the previous session.

The euro edged up from a two-year low against the dollar on German data that was better than expected, though nagging fears about Europe's debt crisis were expected to check euro gains.

Brent crude for July delivery rose $1.01 to $111.11 a barrel by 12:33 p.m. EDT (1633 GMT), swinging between 109.50 and $112.65.

Oil pushes above $99 per barrel on weaker dollar, bullish forecast from investment banks

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Oil-rises-above-99-gas-pump-apf-2290513575.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=main&asset=&ccode=

NEW YORK (AP) -- Oil rose to around $100 per barrel Tuesday after the dollar weakened and major investment banks predicted that crude prices will rise later this year.
Benchmark West Texas Intermediate for July delivery added $1.74 at $99.44 per barrel Tuesday morning on the New York Mercantile Exchange. In London, Brent crude rose $2.30 to $112.40 on the ICE Futures exchange.
Prices climbed early in the day as the dollar fell against other currencies. Oil, which is priced in dollars, tends to increase when the dollar falls and makes crude cheaper for investors holding foreign money.

CSPAN - Jack Lew back at OMB

http://wwww.c-spanvideo.org/program/BudgetandDef

Jaccob Lew spoke about the federal budget, spending levels, and deficit reduction. Among the issues he addressed were his role in budget negotiations, the extent of the debt crisis, tax policy, entitlement programs, and the state of teh economy. He also responded to questions from the audience.

Reinventing Management Requires Systemic Change

http://blogs.forbes.com/stevedenning/2011/05/12/reinventing-management-requires-systemic-change/

Why is hierarchical bureaucracy still so pervasive? Thousands of business books and articles are published each year. Many of them are full of promising ideas for improving management. So why does hierarchical bureaucracy appear to be as strong as ever in Fortune 500 companies and in government?
One key comes from Albert Einstein:

“The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.”

In management, there is a need to move beyond single fixes and to think in terms of systemic change.

Would Oil Prices Really Fall If Speculation Was Reined In?

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Would-Oil-Prices-Really-Fall-cnbc-227169437.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=main&asset=&ccode=

On Wednesday May 4, 2011, 4:05 pm EDT

If raising the margin requirement-or downpayment-on silver contracts helped cool speculation in the metal this week, could it do the same thing for runaway oil prices?


Silver has plunged 20 percent in recent days, in part due to the sharp increase in the amount of money investors are required to put down to buy the metal.
The whole commodity sector, in fact, is going through a major pullback this week as worries about a slowdown in the global economy are prompting investors to scale back on risky trades.
But while the selloff in silver, at least, is being linked partly to higher margins, oil prices move on more fundamental reasons such as supply and demand. Oil was lower on Wednesday, for instance, because of a bigger-than-expected increase in US crude supplies.

Charter Cities

http://www.chartercities.org/

“There‘s no impediment, other than a failure of imagination, that will keep us from delivering on a truly global win-win solution.” —Paul Romer

Charter cities are special reform zones. They let governments quickly adopt innovative new systems of rules. A charter city’s formal rules, and the norms that they encourage, can differ markedly from a country’s prevailing system of rules. The concept is very flexible, but three elements are common to all charter cities:

1. An uninhabited piece of city-sized land, provided voluntarily by a host government.
2. A charter that specifies the rules that will govern the new city.
3. The freedom for would-be charter city residents to move in or out of the reform zone.

Charter cities are based entirely on voluntary actions—no person, employer, investor, or country can be coerced into participating. Only countries that want to charter new cities will free up the land to do so. The use of unoccupied land ensures that only the people who want to live and work under the new rules will move to the reform zone.

Pakistan did its part

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/pakistan-did-its-part/2011/05/02/AFHxmybF_story.html

By Asif Ali Zardari, Monday, May , 7:53 PM

Pakistan, perhaps the world’s greatest victim of terrorism, joins the other targets of al-Qaeda — the people of the United States, Britain, Spain, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Turkey, Yemen, Kenya, Tanzania, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Algeria — in our satisfaction that the source of the greatest evil of the new millennium has been silenced, and his victims given justice. He was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be, but now he is gone.
Although the events of Sunday were not a joint operation, a decade of cooperation and partnership between the United States and Pakistan led up to the elimination of Osama bin Laden as a continuing threat to the civilized world. And we in Pakistan take some satisfaction that our early assistance in identifying an al-Qaeda courier ultimately led to this day.
Let us be frank. Pakistan has paid an enormous price for its stand against terrorism. More of our soldiers have died than all of NATO’s casualties combined. Two thousand police officers, as many as 30,000 innocent civilians and a generation of social progress for our people have been lost. And for me, justice against bin Laden was not just political; it was also personal, as the terrorists murdered our greatest leader, the mother of my children. Twice he tried to assassinate my wife. In 1989 he poured $50 million into a no-confidence vote to topple her first government. She said that she was bin Laden’s worst nightmare — a democratically elected, progressive, moderate, pluralistic female leader. She was right, and she paid for it with her life.

Farewell to bin Laden

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/04/opinion/04friedman.html?ref=opinion
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: May 3, 2011

There is only one good thing about the fact that Osama bin Laden survived for nearly 10 years after the mass murder at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that he organized. And that is that he lived long enough to see so many young Arabs repudiate his ideology. He lived long enough to see Arabs from Tunisia to Egypt to Yemen to Syria rise up peacefully to gain the dignity, justice and self-rule that Bin Laden claimed could be obtained only by murderous violence and a return to puritanical Islam.

We did our part. We killed Bin Laden with a bullet. Now the Arab and Muslim people have a chance to do their part — kill Bin Ladenism with a ballot — that is, with real elections, with real constitutions, real political parties and real progressive politics.

Yes, the bad guys have been dealt a blow across the Arab world in the last few months — not only Al Qaeda, but the whole rogues’ gallery of dictators, whose soft bigotry of low expectations for their people had kept the Arab world behind. The question now, though, is: Can the forces of decency get organized, elected and start building a different Arab future? That is the most important question. Everything else is noise.