The Macondo well keeps leaking crude and British Petroleum keeps bleeding and weakening. According to WSJ,
BP shares dropped 6% in London on Friday, putting the drop the oil major's market capitalization at more than $100 billion since the Gulf of Mexico oil spill began.Most shares are held by British savers, so if each one lost an average of 30,000 $, we have nearly half a million suddenly impoverished families in Britain. I estimate that about 10% of the British middle class is hurting by BP's loss of value. For the next three years, the London stock exchange will be about 5% lower than it would be.
7 comments:
So very kind of the Americans to spare Transocean and Halliburton. This will be a costly lesson to the British to never trust the Americans to watch their backs.
Koko say, "When the well finally is capped, BP will put on 20% in one day".
Anon.
I have watched so many pelicans trapped in the asphalt or being lovingly washed by volunteers that I thought that BP has caused a catastrophe. Now I learn that the total number of pelicans was in the low hundreds. Each pelican on the TV caused a billion dollar loss to BP. The whole scandal is idiotic. I remember going to the beach in the Rio de la Plata near the oil port, in an era of environmental innocence, when the ships usually washed their tanks in the water. The petroleum forms small balls and dissipate very fast. It sticks to the foot but can be washed with soap. No one considered it an "ecological holocaust" but an inconvenience. It is suicidical to destroy an organization like BP for nothing.
J, although it has been blown up even further by the media, the BP well is no small disaster. Millions upon millions of gallons of (I might add valuable) oil have leaked. The "blowout preventer" which was the technological backstop which was supposed to prevent such a disaster, did not do its job properly. There were clear management failures as BP exerted pressure on the rig management to put speed above safety in the interest of saving money (such measures, when they backfire, inevitably cost orders of magnitude more than the amount they would have saved, so even as pure business decisions, putting aside the environmental damage, are flawed). The US government has again shown itself to be a paper tiger - do not think that the Chinese have not taken notice. All in all, nothing good has come from BP's mismanagement so I do not have sympathy if the amount by which they are penalized is more than pure economics would dictate due to emotion. Of course emotions run high in such a titanic disaster, which never should have happened in the first place had BP been doing its job properly.
K
The papers are starting to foretell the coming bankrupcy of British Petroleum, Britain's largest company. These profecies tend to cause what they foretell, so at this time BP may already be doomed. It is a very big blow to the British economy. It is irresponsible to destroy this large company. The damage they may have caused - which is none in my opinion - does not justify killing BP. The oil will surely disappear during the hurricane season. Oil is degraded naturally and will fatten bacteria and the feeding chain. It is good for ecology. Those heartrendering TV clips of pathetic pelicans are fake. Hayward, the CEO, is an imbecile, he should have been sacked on the first day. The English management lives in a too cozy a world, they need to be meaner and harder.
Actually some of the blame is wioth American companies subcontracted to BP.
Anon.
I'm sure there's enough blame to go around (success has 1000 fathers, failure is an orphan) but there is information to the effect that the rig operators were under pressure by BP to finish up quickly (and thus save BP money). At one point, a rig employee prophetically said to the BP man in charge, who was ordering some measure he thought was unsafe and might lead to blowout, "I'll guess we'll just have to use those pinchers (meaning the blowout preventer - which in the end didn't work). He meant this sarcastically - the blowout preventer is meant as a last resort, like fire sprinklers, and not something that you are supposed to use in the normal course of operations.
If you consider that the rig operators had their own lives and property at stake (and profited each day the rig remained in place) while the incentives were all on BP's side to get it done quickly and end the massive daily rig rental payments, I am more inclined to believe that BP was the one pushing for speed and shortcuts.
K
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