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Canada is cozying up to China as political tensions heat up between Canada and the United States. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney made key deals with China earlier this month on a diplomatic trip to Beijing, including major agreements for Chinese electric vehicles on the Canadian market and Canadian canola on the Chinese market. Carney also agreed to cooperate with China on generating more energy – both clean and conventional – going forward. These deals signal a broad shift in Canada’s diplomatic and trade strategy with a…
Electric utility stocks seem to have tapered off, after all the hoopla about how demand from AI would transform the business turned into concern that demand from AI would raise prices to consumers and rile the politicians who set the rates. Maybe it is time to reassess what investors expect. First, understand that Wall Street focuses most on one number in utility financial valuation nowadays, the growth of rate base, because regulators set earnings as a percentage of rate base. The bigger the rate base, the more the utility’s income. We calculate…
The Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) is once again edging toward a fiscal breaking point. Officials in its Erbil-based semi-autonomous regional government (KRG) say they are receiving only a fraction of the budget transfers they are owed under the current oil-for-budget payments arrangement with the Federal Government of Iraq (FGI) in Baghdad. This revives the same dispute that triggered the collapse of the deal in March 2023 and shut down the crucial Iraq-Turkey Pipeline (ITP) for more than two years. Erbil argues that Baghdad’s shortfalls…
On 12 January 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump announced, “Effective immediately, any Country doing business with the Islamic Republic of Iran will pay a Tariff of 25% on any and all business being done with the United States of America.” Trump’s announcement aims to weaken the government of the Islamic Republic in the wake of weeks of protests against the government, sparked by a weak economy. Trump told the protesters to keep fighting their government and that “help is on the way.” Who is “doing business”…
Power generation from coal and gas-fired plants in China last year went down for the first time in a decade, driven lower by alternative energy sources such as wind and solar, official data revealed today, as reported by Reuters. The decline was minor, at just 1% to 6.29 trillion kWh for the full year. In December alone, China’s gas and coal power generation output dropped by a more marked 3.2%. While modest, however, the annual decline in coal and gas output came in the context of higher overall electricity consumption, which added significance…
