Obama Pushes Offshore Drilling
A truly brilliant path towards energy independence. I’m sure glad that while President Obama continues to search for ways to bankrupt our nation, he finds the time to spend more of our tax dollars on programs that have little benefit to the taxpayers that are funding them.
The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil’s Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan.
The U.S. Export-Import Bank tells us it has issued a “preliminary commitment” letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion and has discussed with Brazil the possibility of increasing that amount. Ex-Im Bank says it has not decided whether the money will come in the form of a direct loan or loan guarantees. Either way, this corporate foreign aid may strike some readers as odd, given that the U.S. Treasury seems desperate for cash and Petrobras is one of the largest corporations in the Americas.
This come on top of the Congress introducing legislation to permanently ban drilling in ANWR, the Obama Administration backing a nuclear energy program for the UAE, banning offshore drilling here off the U.S. coast, scrapping oil and gas leases in Utah, stopping the nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain (effectively killing future nuclear plant construction), and forming a joint task force to help Pakistan’s energy crisis. h/t Gateway Pundit
And a new twist has emerged in this story as reported by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.
Who else besides Obama has taken an interest in Petrobras?В Hmmmmmm:
His New York-based hedge-fund firm, Soros Fund Management LLC, sold 22 million U.S.-listed common shares of Petrobras, as the Brazilian oil company is known, according to a filing today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Soros bought 5.8 million of the company’s U.S.-traded preferred shares.
Soros is taking advantage of the spread between the two types of U.S.-listed Petrobras shares, said Luis Maizel, president of LM Capital Group LLC, which manages about $4 billion. The common shares were 21 percent more expensive than preferred today, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. …
Petrobras preferred shares have also a 10 percent additional dividend, said William Landers, a senior portfolio manager for Latin America at Blackrock Inc.
“Given that there will most likely never be a change in control in the company, I see no reason to pay a higher price for the common shares.” Brazil’s government controls Petrobras and has a majority stake of voting shares.
This story is from last Friday. Is it a coincidence that Obama backer George Soros repositioned himself in Petrobras to get dividends just a few days before Obama committed $2 billion in loans and guarantees for Petrobras’ offshore operations?
August 18, 2009
Tags: Barack Obama, Democrat Congress, Energy, Energy Independence, Energy Policy, National Debt, WSJ Posted in: Energy, Politics
Leave a Reply