Saturday 7 January 2017

Crude Oil. Enter Sandman

Is the 1991 hit for heavy metal group, Metallica, taken from their self titled album.

With crude oil now trading at US$57 a barrel, many people are expecting an oil and gas stock rally in Kuala Lumpur.

Enter sandman, with fresh data showing that this mini little crude oil boom, has given life to shale oil producers in the USA, and it might just come back to haunt OPEC big time.

CNBC has the story. Read Below :

The pain in the U.S. energy sector — the biggest job cutter in both 2015 and 2016 — appears to be easing.

The U.S. jobs report for December offered further signs that employment is stabilizing in America's oil patch, which has seen mass layoffs throughout more than two years of low oil prices.

For the seventh month in a row, employment in the oil and gas extraction industry came in near or above 172,000, according to the Current Employment Statistics survey.

Oil companies may once again start to expand in 2017. Ironically, the only obstacle in their way may be a shortage of skilled workers," Challenger, Gray & Christmas CEO John Challenger said in the firms monthly report.

"When the last boom got underway, oil firms had the luxury of building their work forces amid high unemployment across the nation. Before the most recent downturn, drilling firms were already struggling to find workers.