Some fun facts just in from JP Morgan’s economics team (I can’t find it online, but it presumably will show up eventually here):

* Emerging market economies accounted for the majority of global oil consumption for the first time in 2007

* Oil consumption was actually down in the developed world in both 2006 and 2007; it just rose enough …

My new column is online and in the issue of Time with the excellent cover story about a fence by the Next Editor of the Washington Post (well, maybe) inside. It begins:

Last October, I stood in the back of a packed Manhattan ballroom listening to hedge-fund manager David Einhorn explain to an audience what had gone wrong with Wall

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Here’s the beginning of that story I mentioned yesterday:

Nearly 9% of all U.S. mortgages–or 4.8 million loans–are past due or in some stage of foreclosure. So when a company claims to offer distressed homeowners both relief from their mortgages and revenge against the bankers who saddled them with too much debt (“Give the lenders back

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In a comment to my post on offshore drilling, odograph writes (and my Dad agrees):

If I could ask reporters to do one thing, it would be to always frame coastal reserves in terms of current consumption.

There is a strong (predictably irrational?) tendency to only mention the one-time gift this oil might give us in prices, and not where

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