Tuesday 15 September 2009

Monday 3 August 2009

Ghana oil................. a reality check

Reading through the Wall Street journal I came upon a report about what Ghana's new oil discovery will mean to Ghana.
Tullow oil estimates that the recoverable resources are over 600 million barrels of oil and could potentially be as much as 1.8 billion barrels. To put that in perspective the US (No1 oil consumer) consumes 20 million barrels a day (2007 est) so theres at least 30 days oil consumption for the US .
Ghana (95th oil consumer) on the other hand consumes 49000 barrels a day (2006 est)

So what to do? sell it to the US for a very strong dollar (in comparison to the Cedi)? or refine it for its own use and provide Ghana with its oil needs for the forseeable future?


What would you do?




http://www.marketwatch.com/story/what-will-oil-mean-for-ghana-2009-07-31?pagenumber=1
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2174rank.html

Wednesday 8 April 2009

The economy in a nutshell

Once upon a time Ben bought a horse from a farmer for $2000, the horse was promised to be delivered the following day. The next day the farmer came to Ben teling him that sorry, the horse died during the night.

"Thats ok," Ben said. "Just give me my money back."

"Cannot," the farmer said. "I already spent the money."

"Well, ok, just give me the dead corpse," Ben said.

"What do you want with that?" asked the farmer.

"I want to use it as a price in my competition."

"But no one would want to buy tickets on a dead horse?" the farmer said.

"Sure they are," Ben said. "I will not mention that its dead."

Some weeks later Ben and the farmer met on the street. The farmer asked how it went with the dead horse.

"Pretty well," Ben said. "I sold 500 tickets for $100 each making $50,000."

"Wow," the farmer said. "And no one complained?"

"Oh yes, the guy who won did. So I gave him back $100."

Ben works today in a high powered job in finance.


And there you have whats really happening to the economy and why. very depressing

Saturday 3 January 2009

From BBC news

Town shoppers prove their honesty

Honesty box message
The message said staff had the day off and customers should help themselves

A shopkeeper in North Yorkshire who wanted a day off on Boxing Day decided to leave his store open and let his customers help themselves.

Tom Algie, who runs the Practically Everything hardware store in Settle, returned to work at the end of the day to find an honesty box full of money.

"It was stuffed with notes and coins," said Mr Algie. "There was £187 in it and two euros, which is pretty good."

Grateful shoppers had also left notes thanking him for trusting them.

"Somebody wrote that if it had been in Bolton the shop would have been cleaned out in two-and-a-half minutes," said Mr Algie.

"And somebody else said if it had been Keighley it would would have been two minutes and the shop would have burnt down, which I thought was quite funny."

Nothing had gone, nothing was missing and nothing was damaged and I had a pretty good day's takings
Tom Algie, shopkeeper

Mr Algie said he had come up with the idea when he woke up on Boxing Day morning.

"I got up and thought people need things like batteries and silver foil, the sort of things I sell.

"I wanted the shop open but at the same time I wanted the day off.

"So I thought perhaps I would just leave an honesty box and see what happened."

When he returned to the shop that evening he was pleasantly surprised.

"Nothing had gone, nothing was missing and nothing was damaged and I had a pretty good day's takings," he said.

The people of Settle proved to be so honest Mr Algie said he would consider repeating the experiment another time.

However, he said he was not expecting his next door neighbour - the local branch of NatWest bank - to follow suit.