The first charity supermarket in Chongqing has opened on the city's Shimahe Street, in Jiangbei district. Designed for people living on or below the poverty level, the supermarket sells daily staple necessities such as rice, oil, salt, and monosodium glutamate and these goods are sold at much lower prices than the equivalent items sold in [...]

In the energy market on Tuesday, oil broke over $50 but then retreated, with crude for February delivery closing at $48.58/barrel, down 23 cents. February reformulated gasoline gained less than ¾ of a cent, to $1.1892/gallon.

“The first attempt against the $50 psychological level is keeping a lid on this market,” said Burton Schlichter, of New World Trading.

But Phil Flynn, of Alaron Trading, was blunter. “Oil is running out of steam because at the end of the day the global crises have not cost the globe one drop of oil,” Flynn said.

Yet, one might add, as supply cuts haven’t really kicked in. Iran and Kuwait said they will deepen curbs on supplies to customers this month, joining OPEC peers in cutting back output, Reuters reported.

Source: Crude Little Changed

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On September 5th we reported that Silicon Valley, the major green booster, had retrenched by pulling out of long-term investments in alternative energy. Today, the other shoe dropped. The Cleantech Group in San Francisco reported that venture-capital investment in clean technology fell 35% in Q4 from the prior quarter, the steepest quarterly drop in two years.

Venture capitalists had infused $1.7 billion into the sector, the smallest amount in six quarters, according to Cleantech.

The implications of this reversal are truly profound.

Silicon Valley superstars have been touting green for the past two years. Boosters include Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel; Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google; John Doerr, perhaps the leading venture capitalist in the world; and just about every other venture capitalist within spitting distance of the fabled Sand Hill Road.

Silicon Valley really hit the brakes hard after a frothy third quarter.

Venture capital investment in cleantech hit a record $4.6

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pJan 5, 2009 (WALL STREET JOURNAL) -- As the U.S. seeks to stockpile oil, China has been doing the same, observers say, and is expected to quicken the pace -- a development that already may be helping to boost oil prices./ppOn Friday, the U.S. Department of Energy said that amid low oil prices, it aims to fill the country's Strategic Petroleum Reserve to capacity this year./ppThat news followed a rare public statement last week from China's top energy official, Zhang Guobao, head of the National Energy Administration, in the People's Daily newspaper that China should take advantage of the falling global energy demand to increase its oil reserves. Mr Zhang said China will quot;encourage companies to utilize idle storage capacity to increase inventories.quot;/ppOil prices have been rising lately. On Friday, oil closed up 3.9% to $46.34 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange./ppThough China doesn't disclose its oil inventories ...

Geo-political tensions are mounting in the global energy game. And that could make investing in oil right now the trade of the year, says Manraaj Singh. Buying shares of oil majors is a good move now. But Manraaj says quality mid-sized oil companies are best placed to return big profits in the next oil bull run.

This from Fleet Street Invest:

Israeli tanks have just rolled into Gaza…Almost three thousand miles away, Nigerian separatist blew-up an oil pipeline over the weekend…Meanwhile, Russia is locked in a dispute over the price of gas with Ukraine. Today they stopped deliveries of natural gas to Ukraine, Turkey and Europe to force the Ukrainians to pay up…

While fears about political instability drive the price of oil back up again, the OPEC oil barons are tightening the screws on global oil supplies…Oil was trading at just $35 per barrel on Christmas Eve. It’s over $50 this

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Oil prices had climbed 43 percent from a five-year low of $33.87 a barrel on fears that the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza could spread to the rest of oil-rich Middle East and affect supplies. Today, however, energy prices tumbled across the board after a government report showed U.S. oil reserves were much greater than expected.

According to the Energy Information Administration, inventories rose 6.7 million barrels, well past the 1.5 million-barrel build expected by analysts surveyed by Platts, the energy information arm of McGraw-Hill Cos. Analyst Jim Ritterbusch, president of energy consultancy Ritterbusch and Associates, said it was one of the more bearish EIA reports he’s seen in a while.

Commenting on the recent rally in oil prices, Ritterbusch said, “It didn’t have a lot of fundamental impetus behind it, and now we’re getting evidence that there’s a lot more crude and product supply out there than what we

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by Terry Stanfield

If you are talking to a company about oil and gas investments it is important to know the signs of a scam. There are scams in every industry or anything that pertains to money. Don’t let someone scam you of your money. Here are six easy ways to tell you are talking to a scammer.

1. If you are talking to an oil investments company who claims there is absolutely no risk with the investment, it is a scam. Oil is a risky investment. Any smart investor knows this and any company who tells you otherwise is lying. You can lose every dime when you invest in oil and gas. This is a fact. You can also make a killing, but the risk is very high.

2. If a gas investments company tells you that they have found a well that is …

T. Boone Pickens thought oil was going to hit $150 last year and go up from there. I don’t mean to pick on him. He’s worth about $3 billion. He’s earned his stripes. I have nothing but respect for the man.

Pickens wasn’t the only person who got 2008 wrong. There were plenty of others.

When it comes down to it, anybody can make predictions. It’s not very hard. But it is hard to make ones that do what they purport to do: predict.

My advice is to take them with a grain of salt. If predicting the markets were so easy to do, most of Wall Street’s brightest fund managers wouldn’t have lost 40 percent or more last year.

I’ve made my share of predictions in the last couple of issues, “A Preview of 2009?” and “Six Predictions for 2009″.  So I decided to go back a

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pNo sooner do I say that gold may go lower (and the U.S. dollar higher) than gold ramps up again and the greenback stumbles badly. Sigh. Well, my longer-term (and bigger) bets are on the right side.br /br /Here is news I'm reading ...br /br /a class=summheadline href=http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601083amp;sid=aOsLprMIpWycamp;refer=currencystrongDollar Falls From Three-Week High Versus Euro as ADP Says Job Cuts Rose /strong/aThe dollar fell from a more-than three-week high against the euro after a private report showed U.S. job market deteriorated last month, reinforcing expectations for a long recession. br /br /XX Sean's note -- does the ADP news surprise anybody? Yes, the loss of 693,000 jobs was a href=http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087amp;sid=axprAUuvIM3Aamp;refer=worldwidestronghigher than analysts' expectations /strong/aof a loss of 495,000 jobs. But everyone I talked to thought the real number would be higher than estimates. So again, who is surprised? br /br /a href=http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087amp;sid=ahkU9Lg5fzoAamp;refer=homestrongOil Traders Seek Another 10 Supertankers for Storage/strong/a br /Frontline ...

This market is so wild, so volatile, that I’m calling it the “Andy Warhol market” — everyone gets a turn to be right, but only for 15 minutes at a time! And right now, there are massive forces lined up that could thrust stocks and commodities to the moon … and an equally formidable array of triggers that could send them tumbling lower. The stocks I’ll leave to others … But let me show you the forces that are pushing around gold and oil. Plus I’ll give you four ways to play these wild swings. Gold-ilocks and The 3 Bears I’m generally bullish on gold, so it’s good to acknowledge the bearish forces as well. While total gold demand rose 18% in the third quarter, the fourth quarter was when ...