Oil-producer meetings from Vienna and Paris to Moscow have attempted to reach a consensus before talks in the Algerian capital next week.

In a statement, her government said it had decided to proceed with the Hinkley Point C project in central England after a comprehensive review, but was clear Britain would have greater control over future deals when foreign states were involved in buying stakes in "critical infrastructure".

... [plus] with all the effort and high oil prices from 2011-2014 (first half of 2014), the energy companies producing shale oil in the Bakken are in the hole for $32 billion. Well done.... hat's off to the new wonderful fracking technology.

... the $36 billion in total cumulative debt will occur by June 2017. Thus, it would take an average $65 a barrel to just pay back the debt in seven years. With the way things are going in the U.S. and world economies, I doubt we are going to see much higher oil prices.

...

In Vienna, Falih floated a number of ideas in private meetings on how best to manage the supply glut, and questioned independent OPEC analysts during separate meetings as to the possible price impact of a production freeze or even a cut.

At private talks with the Nigerian oil minister before the June 2 OPEC meeting, Falih was willing to revive the idea of a production freeze while showing more tolerance towards Iran, which is raising output post-sanctions, sources said.

...

The Saudis "want higher oil prices for a better Aramco valuation", one industry source said, adding that some think Aramco could be valued as high as $4 trillion.

Countries that ratified the Paris agreement early would benefit from better policy certainty and would attract investment in low-carbon technology, the signatories said in a letter before the G20 heads of government meeting in September.

They called for strong carbon pricing to be implemented, as well as regulations that encouraged energy efficiency and renewable energy. Plans for how to phase out fossil fuels also needed to be developed, they said.

Australia's Treasurer Scott Morrison, who must approve major foreign investments, formally blocked the sale of Ausgrid to State Grid Corp of China and Hong Kong's Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings earlier in the day.

Last month, Britain said it would review plans to build two nuclear reactors at Hinkley Point with financial backing from China General Nuclear. Prime Minister Theresa May was concerned about the security implications of the proposed Chinese investment, a former colleague and a source said.

...

Foreign bidders will likely need to restructure their deals and bring in local partners to succeed in Australia, said Matthew Fitzgerald, an Australian-based corporate partner at law firm Herbert Smith Freehills.

"One example would be that rather than have a majority Chinese consortium buying the asset, you might have three or four different investors, some of whom are Australian, some of whom are Chinese," Fitzgerald said.

...

Stoked by a booming Chinese economy and brisk foreign direct investment flows, Mongolia was one of the fastest-growing economies in the decade that ended in 2015. Its economy clocked in with an average real GDP growth rate of 8 percent, while per capita income surged to about $4,000.

It all went bad when China's growth throttled back from double-digit levels in 2011, just as a coalition government led by Altankhuyag Norov went on a debt-fueled spending binge.

...

"It seems unlikely that the country will be able to avert the need to restructure its debts or seek a bailout from the IMF," said Renata Lagierska, a senior associate at a Alaco, a London-based business intelligence consultancy.

...

Trump also touted his plan to eliminate the estate tax, put a moratorium on new federal regulations and reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent, in his speech at the Detroit Economic Club.

...

In his speech Monday, Trump also announced his plan to allow parents to fully deduct the cost of childcare from their taxable income. He also called again for boosting domestic energy production -- a plan his campaign estimates can add $6 trillion in local, state and federal revenue over the next four decades.

...

This wasn't the first time Trump set out his economic vision. He first unveiled his tax plan in the fall of 2015, framing it as a boon to the middle class. "It's going to cost me a fortune," he told reporters as he vowed to lower taxes across the board without exploding the deficit.

But a host of independent groups crunching the numbers soon concluded otherwise. The plan, they said, dramatically favored the wealthy over the middle class and would increase the debt by as much as $10 trillion over the next decade.

... Politicians don't understand these things for the most part. They're complicated ideas and they don't have demonstrable outcomes, the wheels that get set in motion when you do things like go to negative interest rates and print money start spinning very slowly and you don't really see what comes out of the machine for an indeterminate amount of time. We haven't seen it yet, but we will. There are no free lunches, but the very fact that the political class has seen this happen without any obvious ill effects has emboldened them and Trump... He thinks he understands debt and he will have no qualms about going deeper into debt.

At some point, however, the question of faith in the finances of the US Government, faith in the quality of the dollar are going to be raised again by the market in general, and when that time comes, it's very hard to see how there is a solution to calm any nervousness that people have around the dollar without some significant pain being felt. There is a storm coming. There is no two ways about it, and I think if people pay attention, you will have heard recently some really significant names starting to express the fears they have. Guys like Carl Icahn, guys like Stan Druckenmiller have been very outspoken about how concerned they are for what's happening. And if you listen to those things carefully and you understand that these guys are some of the smartest investors in the world, if guys like that are getting out of equities, getting into gold, getting into cash, there are very good reasons for that, and the average investor in the street should be listening to that and trying to understand why the smartest investors in the world are thinking that way because it's extremely important to try and understand.

...

Provisions for credit losses more than tripled to $1.07 billion from a year earlier, tied largely to the bank's oil and gas portfolio, while net write-offs rose about 42 percent to $924 million, Wells Fargo said. Net interest income, including the loan-loss provision, declined 2.8 percent to $10.7 billion from a year earlier... "... "The oil and gas portfolio remains under significant pressure," Chris Wheeler, an analyst at Atlantic Equities LLP wrote in a note to clients.

Energy companies accounted for 56% of those defaults. The energy sector default rate shot up to 15%. Within it, the default rate of the Exploration & Production (E&P) sub-sector soared to 29%!

...

Between E&P and Oilfield Services companies, the Great American Oil Bust has now generated a combined 157 bankruptcies involving $73 billion in debt, much of it unsecured and by now mostly evaporated.