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About Craig Mellow

I can't do much about peace and love. But I will try to do my bit for understanding - markets and the people behind them. It's the greatest work in the world.

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Everybody Loves MBS at These Oil Prices

Saudis Bank Their Oil Windfall, Offering an Opportunity for Investors

Craig Mellow

June 3, 2022

Remember Jamal Khashoggi? Neither, apparently, does the global power elite these days. Crude oil pushing $120 a barrel has expunged concerns about the Saudi Arabian journalist dismembered in 2018, reportedly by minions of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

French President Emmanuel Macron and United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson have both trekked to Riyadh to cajole more production from MBS, as the de facto Saudi leader is known. President Joseph Biden may well follow suit this month, while attending a Gulf Cooperation Council summit in the Saudi capital. That would be thanks for Saudi-dominated cartel OPEC+ lifting output targets by 200,000 barrels daily at a June 2 meeting.

MBS isn’t just raking in political capital. The kingdom earned $1 billion a day on petroleum in the first quarter of 2022, yielding a $15 billion budget surplus.

Russia is a Fertilizer Superpower, Too

Fertilizer Stocks Have Soared on Putin’s War. Proceed With Caution.

Craig Mellow

Updated March 23, 2022 8:26 am ET

Haven’t earned enough on your oil stocks since Russia invaded Ukraine? You should have bought Nutrien , the Western Hemisphere’s top fertilizer producer, based in Saskatoon, Canada.

Its shares (ticker: NTR.Canada) have climbed 37% in the month since Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation.” The Energy Select Sector SPDR exchange-traded fund (XLE), a proxy for Big Oil, is up a mere 13%.

As big as Russia is in oil, it’s more critical to global fertilizer markets. Farmers around the world rely on fertilizer derived from three different natural resources: potash, phosphate, and natural gas. Russia and its satellite Belarus produce more than a third of global potash, and of course dominate in natural gas. Belarus’ potash exports were strangled by Western sanctions even before the war. Russia cut its own off by executive order March 4.

Carbon Trading 2.0

The effect of the Glasgow COP26 meeting continues to grow and is now propelling the carbon-trading market.

JANUARY 28, 2022

Author: CRAIG MELLOW

Early in November eight titans of 21st-century industry—including Amazon, Alphabet/Google, Microsoft and Netflix—formed the Business Alliance to Scale Climate Solutions, or BASCS. The setting, at the sidelines of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, was more than symbolic.

Despite prevailing skepticism about such all-world jawfests, COP26 did achieve something of note in its 23rd hour and after five numbing years of negotiation: a global protocol for trading carbon credits and offsets, known to the climate cognoscenti as Article 6.4.

That’s a big deal, or could be, for a wide range of industries and financial investors. The carbon dioxide (CO2) spewed in order to power, say, an Amazon server in the US could hypothetically be neutralized by forests the company pays to plant in Central Africa or solar energy it finances in India.

Renewable Energy Becomes Cost-Competitive for Business