Scratch the surface of the planet and the chances that hydrocarbons will spew forth appear to grow by the day. This week America's Energy Information Administration (EIA) released new estimates of the amount of gas in the world's shale beds. It reckons that there are 7,299 trillion cubic feet, 10 % more than its 2011 estimate. The EIA's estimates for shale oil, not included in the 2011 numbers, are a staggering 345 billion barrels, adding a tenth to the world's total oil resources.
You can happily go through a day consuming nothing but the products of family concerns: reading the New York Times (or the Daily Mail), driving a BMW (or a Ford or a Fiat), making calls on your Samsung Galaxy, munching on Mars Bars and watching Fox on your Comcast cable.
He was a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. Like rotten mackerel by moonlight, he shines and stinks.
Koch Industries has also demonstrated a striking ability to reform itself. Prodded by the spate of legal suits in the late 1990s, the firm introduced a big safety programme. Charles's corporate mantra was "10,000 % compliance with all laws and regulations", by which he meant 100 % compliance from 100 % of employees.
Gold miners were supposed to be "believers" in gold rather than efficient managers out to maximise profits.
The best way to find Albany on a map is to look for the intersection of greed and ambition.
Simon Kuznets, a Nobel laureate, is supposed to have remarked: "There are four kinds of countries in the world: developed countries, undeveloped countries, Japan and Argentina."
The supply side sets the scene; the demand side provides the drama.
Facebook, Google and Groupon were all founded by people in their 20s or teens. Mark Zuckerberg, aged 27, will soon be able to count his years on earth in billions of dollars.
Relying on the import of money, workers and brains, America is a Ponzi scheme that works.
Managers who rely too much on their strengths may become hammers that see every problem as a nail.
Diamonds, famously, are a girl's best friend, graphite makes good pencil lead.
Walmart, the world's biggest retailer, has 1,500 employees in Silicon Valley trying to out-Amazon Amazon in areas such as logistics and making the most of social media.
Of the 7 billion people alive on the planet, 1.1 billion subsist below the internationally accepted extreme-poverty line of $1.25 a day. America's poverty line is $63 a day for a family of four.
When, as happened during the Napoleonic wars, a slaver's ship was captured by French privateers, the blacks aboard were often treated more carefully than the white seamen. The blacks were prized goods and their worth soared as commodity-based booms in the New World overwhelmed the sentiments of liberty, equality and fraternity. Once enslaved, the Africans were valuable as "investments (purchased and then rented out as labourers), credit (used to secure loans), property, commodities, and capital, making them an odd mix of abstract and concrete values."
Hundreds of jobs depend on Hollywood productions: blockbusters may require the help of as many as 1,000 firms. Producers need massages, assistants require stationery and starlets want scented candles and fresh roses; let alone what props managers, set-builders and costume departments will holler for.
Aluminium was once more costly than gold. Napoleon III, emperor of France, reserved cutlery made from it for his most favoured guests, and the Washington monument, in America's capital, was capped with it not because the builders were cheapskates but because they wanted to show.
The farthing was once made of silver, was steadily switched to cheaper copper, tin and bronze.
I am young and unemployed and face a lifetime on the dole. Why? This morning I collected my jobseekers allowance from my bank, where I have it paid directly into my account. I did not see a cashier, but withdrew money from a cash point. Then I went to the supermarket and bought French apples, German sausage and Danish bacon. I scanned the items at a self-service till, no need for a check-out assistant. I went home, switched on my Chinese computer and applied for jobs online. I do not send letters through the post; e-mail is more convenient. I then shopped online, I rarely use local shops. Who can I blame for the lack of jobs?
The original sin begins (depending on the chapter) in 1914, when the world suspended the gold standard at the start of the first world war; in 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt devalued the dollar against gold; in 1971, when Richard Nixon ended the dollar's convertibility to gold under the Bretton Woods system; or in 1987, when Alan Greenspan cut interest rates after the stockmarket crash.
What is the single most important price in the world? Popular answers are the price of oil, American interest rates or the dollar. Yet Chinese wages are, arguably, more important. China has by far the world's biggest labour force, of around 800m – almost twice that of America, the European Union and Japan combined.
In 1820, as some historians reckon and Chinese commentators like to point out, China's GDP was one-third of the world total. Then the reversals of the century of humiliation brought it low. By the 1960s, China's GDP had dropped to just 4 % of the world total. Now it has recovered to about one-sixth of the world's GDP – and at least 90 % of America's – in purchasing-power parity terms, according to the Conference Board, a business research organisation. Nationalists eagerly await the day when China's economy becomes once more the biggest in the world by any measure.
The super-duper rich are surprisingly unimaginative when it comes to dreaming up new ways to outdo each other. It includes such essentials as a mini-submarine, a hair salon and two helipads. Owning a yacht with only one helipad would be embarrassing – a bit like owning a football club that is only fourth in England's Premier League.
Over 1.2 billion people have to defecate in the open. Surprisingly, some of those who have to defecate in the open do not mind. Some rural men, and even women, quite enjoy a social squat in the bushes. Slum-dwellers in Nairobi have to pick their way through streams of sewage and take care to avoid "flying toilets", plastic bags filled with excrement that are flung with desperate abandon into the night. Nearly two-fifths of the United States' 25,000 sewer systems illegally discharged raw sewage or other nasty stuff into rivers or lakes in 2007–09, and over 40 % of the country's waters are considered dangerously polluted. Contaminated water lays low almost 20m Americans a year.
Cyprus never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
In Ghana the funereal send-off is as important as the life itself. But the costs, borne by extended families, can be punitive. Some 45 % live on less than $1 a day, 79 % on less than $2. Yet funerals tend to cost between $2,000 and $3,500. "Money measures the quality of the funeral and the family," says Sjaak van der Geest, an anthropologist. The more cash spent, the higher the reputation of the deceased and the family. Mr Okai died in hospital, then spent almost three months in the morgue, at a cost of $521: the longer your body is in the fridge, the more prestigious. The Ga king, recently buried in Accra, was on ice for 18 months; the Dagbon king, in northern Ghana, for a record four years.
Nobody knows how many homeless there are in Paris.
US Treasury Secretary Geithner's life in the trenches has produced its own vocabulary. Serious decisions are "consequential", good ideas are "cool", better ideas are "compelling" and the best ideas are at "the optimal frontier". During a crisis "plan beats no plan", jury-rigged measures in the face of unavoidable disaster are "foam on the runway", and bad outcomes are "dark". Managing public perceptions is called "theatre". "Fuck" also holds a prominent place in the Geithner lexicon, usually as an adjective, not a verb, as in "I have no fucking idea."
China's epic industrial boom will not be repeated; the days of making billions by shipping iron ore from Goa to Guangdong are over.
You have a decent job and work hard. You keep your nose clean, respect authority and have never joined a protest march. Suddenly you have the bad luck to face a cruel and seemingly impossible choice. Your superiors tell you to do something outrageous or unacceptable. Do you obey or, at grave personal cost, refuse?
China makes things you can drop on your foot. America merely designs, brands and peddles them.
As Fred Hirsch argued in his 1977 book, "The Social Limits to Growth", many good things in life are "positional". You can enjoy them only if others don't. Sometimes, a quick car, fine suit or attractive house is not enough. One must have the fastest car, finest suit or priciest house.
Consumers cannot compare what is legally produced in California with what is legally produced in Colorado – to say nothing of what is illegally sold in New York's Washington Square Park.
Ekhart, Indiana, is the RV capital of the world.
Until recently, Carrefour's supermarkets in France were run along Napoleonic lines. Strict orders emanated from its headquarters in Paris. Every store sold a similar range of products. If selling groceries were like marching an army over the Alps, this strategy would have worked brilliantly. But it isn't, and it didn't. At the big Carrefour in Monacoout went the racks of cheap luggage, of the sort chic locals would be embarrassed to see their servants carrying.
Mr Abe promised that Japan would enter trade negotiations to join the American-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – though he offered no promise to eliminate tariffs of up to 777.7 % on rice.
Big pickups are seen in the car industry as a leading indicator: rising sales point to Americans starting to build kitchens, fix roofs and hire contractors.
Family history has large effects that persist for much greater spans of time. Fathers matter, but so do grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Indeed, it may take as long as 300–500 years for high- and low-status families to produce descendants with equal chances of being in various parts of the income spectrum.
Some 3m wrecks pepper the ocean floors, according to the UN (though few contain riches). Finding them involves lengthy research and lucky breaks. Recovery can take months of work by specialist crews. Of 52 annual reports filed by publicly listed shipwreck-recovery firms since 1996, only five show a net profit.
Acquisitions can also be a form of financial engineering. This was a favourite game of the conglomerates of the 1970s and 1980s. A company with highly rated shares would bid for a group with poorly rated equity. Say Acme has 100m shares, earnings of $10m (earnings per share of 10 cents) and a share price of $2 (a price-earnings ratio of 20). Grotco has the same earnings and number of shares but its share price is just $1 (a p/e of 10). If Acme makes an all-share bid valuing Grotco at $1.20, it will need to issue 60m new shares. The combined group will have $20m of earnings, 160m shares and earnings per share of 12.5 cents. With the help of nothing more than maths, Acme's earnings per share will have jumped by 25 %. Merger booms usually peak with the kind of deal that resembles a Las Vegas wedding after an alcohol-fuelled night: both parties regret it in the morning.
Chairman Mao, as ever, had said it best: imagine the ping-pong ball as the head of your capitalist opponent, and each shot a point for the motherland.
Overall, the number without homes in the US is staggering. The number of homeless veterans of the Vietnam war is greater than the number who died in it. On any given night in America more than 640,000 men, women and children are forced to seek shelter, live in their cars, or sleep on the streets. Last year nearly 1.6m people used an emergency shelter.
A Polish Jew in an Episcopal graveyard in a largely Dominican neighbourhood. What could be more New York?
Obama sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China.
The average Swiss watch costs $685. A Chinese one costs around $2 and tells the time just as well (see chart). So how on earth, a Martian might ask, can the Swiss watch industry survive? Yet it does. Few can match the precision of a Nivarox ("Nicht variabel oxydfest" (G.) or "Non-Variable Non-Oxidizing") balance spring.
The euro needs French reform, German extravagance and Italian political maturity.
In happier days before the euro crisis, one government in Lisbon rebranded the Algarve as the Allgarve, hoping to appeal to English-speaking tourists. Now a Portuguese wit suggests rebranding the whole country as Poortugal.
The cult of the insider in Japan is rooted in its paddy fields, some scholars argue. To cultivate wet rice, villagers need to work together, sharing land, labour, water and gossip. Anyone not in the group is out of the loop. There is something of the rice paddy about Japan's capital markets, too.
"LVMH is like a mini Germany," boasts an insider. Like that country's Mittelstand, it has built a reputation for craftsmanship and quality that people are happy to pay extra for. The difference is, the Mittelstand makes unsexy things such as machine tools and shaving brushes, whereas LVMH makes champagne, handbags and other objects of desire.
The 1912 games were the last one where gold medals were made entirely of gold. Now they consist mainly of silver with a thin coat of gold. Winners in London are advised not to bite too hard on their medals, as they will have a gold content of only about 1.5 %.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote that: "In every big transaction, there is a magic moment during which a man has surrendered a treasure, and during which the man who is due to receive it has not yet done so. An alert lawyer will make the moment his own, possessing the treasure for a magic microsecond, taking a little of it, passing it on." Like so many novelists, he was talking bosh. No alert lawyer takes only "a little".
When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton, a prolific bank robber (pictured, after he retired), is said to have replied: "Because that's where the money is." Sutton reportedly pinched $2m during a lifetime of crime.
The phenomenon has been described as the Wimbledon effect: Britain provides the beautiful arena where foreign champions come and beat the hell out of British players. The annual Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race is much the same: a slugfest between predominantly non-British mercenaries.
The real money is where the pain is.
The human animal is a beast that must die. If he's got money, he buys and buys and buys everything he can, in the crazy hope one of those thing.