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Consumer spending is a very big part of the US economy (not to mention other international economies, such as Japan, China). If consumer spending has been higher due to housing bubble, what happens when housing prices decline (or even just level out)?

I would like to add a comment as well - there is a big difference between speculating using index traded futures and actually choosing to deliver/accept delivery of the underlying asset. I don't need to have 1,000 barrels of oil in my house (so to speak) in order to open a short position of CL...

I agree that they are likely using that price range when calculating NPV, I actually think it would be extremely interesting to take a look at the modeling they must do. The above said, I do feel that a drop in oil prices could very easily make some forthcoming oilsands projects uneconomical...

Oil closed at 66.37 Sept 8, 2006. I think we are due for a bit of an upwards retracement, but the chart sure isn't looking very pretty...

I posted about the book a few months back in the "resources" forum. Interesting book, focused a bit too much on US political history for my tastes, but still worth reading.

Oil is looking pretty weak to me. What interests me more though is that there are a number of big projects reaching decision points over the next few months here in Alberta. It'll be quite interesting to see how many projects (if any) are deferred. Oil companies are facing high material...

Will be interesting to see if INTC moves above $19.00 next week.

I was looking through some Stats Canada data the other day regarding housing prices in Edmonton and Calgary, and the graphed indexes illustrate the current housing bubble in Alberta very clearly. I agree that the peak has likely not been reached yet (very difficult to predict accurately), but I...

I previously posted about this in another thread, but last stat I saw was that Calgary was up about 50% year over year and Edmonton was up roughly 34% year over year. Not exactly sustainable housing price increases...

Well, I live in Alberta, Canada, and things are pretty damn nutty up here right now. Last stat I saw was that housing prices were up approx 34% year over year in Edmonton, and roughly 50% year over year in Calgary. I think that this little oilsands boom going on in Alberta will end badly. My...

My take on this issue is that many companies are already frequently paying higher than minimum wage by the time that governments get around to raising wages, depending on employement market conditions. I would also suspect that inflationary pressure is present to a greater degree with...

I think that the single thing most likely to hurt China economically would be the slowing of US consumer spending. That in turn could lead to downturn in commodity prices.

Up until now, this has been correct, but it looks like Vista is going to change that concept. From what I've been reading, it's going to be a real hardware pig, and 3D acceleration will be an important part of daily use of the OS (though I suspect that many will just turn this functionality off...

I think you are mixing up two concepts here - efficient market hypothesis, and random walk theory. The variants of efficient market hypothesis essentially state that all information about a stock is already priced in (i.e. all market participants have equal access to information). Random walk...

I disagree regarding the importance of physics acceleration. Some further research on your part would lead you to a large quantity of articles that are more or less outright bashing discrete physics acceleration (Ageia PhysX). Graphics acceleration was arguably a paradigm shift (starting with...

I'm not arguing this from a trading perspective, I'm looking this from a business perspective. There has been plenty of prior buzz that AMD will buy ATI and/or that Intel will acquire Nvidia. It also looks like this will go through, given the premium offered by AMD to acquire ATI. ATI...

I personally think that this merger is fairly stupid. AMD is primarily a CPU company, and should therefore focus on being the best CPU manufacturer possible, divesting non-core businesses along the way; not the opposite.

Given that the effect of better engineered components leading to higher sales is something that only happened "10 years ago", please explain the reason for AMD gaining market share over the past 2-3 years, vs. Intel losing market share. You might know something about trading, but you sure...

Still, if this is all true, it's a start. That kind of driving range would easily take care of the majority of commutes.

I checked this out at a store, but haven't used it personally. So long as you have a decent network connection it's actually suprisingly acceptable (for streaming video).