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Gold/Mining/Energy : Big Dog's Boom Boom Room -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: chowder who wrote (134302)	6/10/2010 2:11:59 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 206227

PM David Cameron has backed Barack Obama in his criticism of BP over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. By James Kirkup - 10 Jun 2010 - telegraph.co.uk The oil firm has seen almost £50 billion wiped off its value since oil began leaking from one of its pipelines following an explosion on a gas platform in the Gulf of Mexico. Investors say the hardline approach taken by Mr Obama – who has promised to "kick ass" over the incident – has contributed to the share price declines. The US administration last night threatened to block BP paying a dividend in order to ensure victims of the spill off the coast of Louisiana got sufficient compensation. The pension funds of millions of Britons have been hard hit – as exposure to BP, Britain's biggest company, is high. Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, this morning became the most senior UK politician to defend BP, saying "anti-British rhetoric" levelled at the company was a matter of "national concern" and that the oil giant was paying "a very, very heavy price" for what had been an accident. "I would like to see a bit of cool heads rather than endlessly buck-passing and name-calling," he said. "When you consider the huge exposure of British pension funds to BP it starts to become a matter of national concern if a great British company is being continually beaten up on the airwaves." Speaking to reporters in Afghanistan, Mr Cameron refused to follow suit, instead offering his backing to Washington. He said: "I completely understand the US government's frustration because it's catastrophic for the environment. He added: "BP needs to do everything it can to clear up the situation. "The most important thing is to mitigate the effects and get to the root of the problem. "Of course it's something I'll discuss with the American president when we next speak." BP says the cost of the clean-up and containment efforts had now hit US$1.43 billion (£979 million). In the past week, Mr Obama, who insists on referring to BP by its former name British Petroleum, has suggested that its chief executive, Tony Hayward, would have been sacked if he worked for him. BP's position at the top of the London Stock Exchange and its previous reliability have made it a bedrock of almost every pension fund in the country, meaning its value is crucial to millions of workers. The firm's dividend payments, which amount to more than £7 billion a year, account for £1 in every £6 paid out in dividends to British pension pots. Mark Dampier of the financial services company Hargreaves Lansdown said: "[Mr Obama] is playing to the gallery but is not bringing a solution any closer. Obama has his boot on the throat of British pensioners. There is no point in bashing BP all the time, it's not helpful. It is a terrible situation, but having the American president on your back is not going to get it all cleared up any quicker." Last week Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, described America’s anti-British rhetoric as “extreme and unhelpful”. On Monday, The Daily Telegraph disclosed that the Foreign Office was concerned that the criticism of BP was harming Anglo-US relations. .

To: chowder who wrote (134302)	6/10/2010 5:04:36 PM
From: JimisJim	11 Recommendations Respond to of 206227

<Just 6 months ago, sources like Value Line were saying BP was a quality company.> dabum, love your work and have learned a lot from you over the past years. However, Value Line knew nothing about BP as an operator of a large oil company and fell down on doing real due diligence when labeling them as a quality company. As I've posted before, when I began transitioning as you did from swing trading to divvy income for retirement, I could not bring myself to include BP regardless of their yield and/or divvy growth. I shopped elsewhere to cover the oil sector part of my restructured PF. I, and anyone who has spent much time in the patch, have said long before this current disaster that BP was (IMO as well as anyone I've talked to about it over the years) one of the worst operators out there. It seemed to me that BP has had a habit of NOT following proscribed safety and maintenance procedures consistently and seemed to generate many more accidents/incidents than other companies I have dealt with over the past 20-25 years. I'll have to dig it up, but I recently saw a chart that listed various types of actual citations/violations that actually made some official list/report filed with someone (various agencies that monitor and/or regulate such things) and BP seemed not only to have significantly more of these, but in some cases as many as 95% of some sort of citation (for not following proscribed procedures as required). The positive news in that chart/list was that once cited, BP rarely, if ever got a repeat citation for the same thing. My impression was that BP will do what it feels like doing until actually caught NOT doing something they should, or doing something they shouldn't. And once caught they straighten up. Anecdotally, this jives with my own experiences wrt to BP. Doing business like that over time has to eventually cost shareholders money even if they save money by doing their own thing until caught. One example in this case is how little money they were trying to save wrt mud -- if as it seems they directed that seawater be used rather than mud at the end there -- they ended up buying/using 1000 times as much mud as they would have if they'd just done what they apparently were advised to do. Naturally, they are not going to be able to monetize all of the oil and gas that got away which will hurt their balance sheet down the road. And then there's the cost associated with cleaning up something that probably would NOT have spilled had that field been controlled by someone like Shell or PBR. I have never seen, or heard, or even hear rumors of ANYONE ever arguing with RIG personnel about rig operations in the field, and yet it now seems like BP and RIG were having vocal and heated arguments over a couple of what turned out to be very key operational issues wrt to that particular well in the days and hours leading up to the blowout. Value Line's endorsement was likely based solely on BP's record wrt to dividends and other INVESTMENT/financial data concerning the company/stock, without any real research into how they actually carry out their day to day activities to achieve whatever data Value Line evaluates. Remember Enron? I bet Value Line had good things to say about them at some point in time, too. Or WorldCom. Sometimes one has to open the hood and look at the engine and not just admire the paint job. Quite frankly, the value of Value Line just sank to a "sell" rating in my book based on this -- and it isn't exactly a cheap service from my perspective. Best, Jim