No, not Ireland. 2 reasons. 1) supported by UK (not the mob on...

No, not Ireland. 2 reasons. 1) supported by UK (not the mob on the continent); 2) problem was popping of property bubble, which took their banks out - not massive over-spending and shortfalls in the economy. Ireland has managed 1.6% growth in the last 2 qtrs.

Don't know what the plonkers on the continent think that they are doing. If they make the banks take a haircut on the Greek sovereign debt they will lose the liquidity of the banks and the insurance companies for generations. Banks are required to hold a proportion of their funds in treasuries but they can only be forced to hold treasuries issued by their own government. The ECB should do the necessary with Greece, print the money (the Fed has, the Bank of England has - they call it quantitative easing) and the cost of a 50% write down will be approximately 2% of aggregate GDP for the eurostates, which is 1 year's normalised growth - but they've lost that blundering around and wringing their hands.

Once the cloud lifts, the oil price should stabilise - comments on Libya are that normal production could be some way off. The Saudis have a problem in that they are using increasing amounts of their own oil to generate electricity to power their desalination plants - the principal user is agriculture (in the desert!!!), which is a big employer, and so something that they will not wish to tamper with at this time of discontent. They are also encouraging their mining industry and that is water hungry as well. So, their increased production doesn't necessarily hit the world markets. Anyway, it is sour crude.

The pricing of the hub gas and wti is out of line with world markets and 2 or 3 years will see new distribution that will correct that. The valuers and the markets will build that in. Evidence for likely oil price normalisation is the shedding of refining assets (which exploit this distortion) by companies like Marathon Oil, which spent $3.5bn buying into the EFS paying, per brokers' allocation of the consideration paid, some $75,000/acre for the acreage in the part of the trend that Eagle Landing is buying into. STX's net acres are worth MORE than $1/share on the basis of that price IF the Fayette and Lavaca acreage is of similar quality - but STX quotes the CEO of GEO Resources saying that it is.

STX SP has sunk proportionately little more than AUT's so there's little to read into it. When the hedge funds unwind their short positions on the market, we should see some return to normalisation.