HSBC Investor Report on Energy

David Trammel's picture

LewisLucanBooks posted a link to the HongKong and Shanghai Banking Corporation's recent report on Energy. HSBC is the sixth largest bank in the world with over $2.5 billion in managed assets, so they might just have an interest in this.

The link to the report is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9wSgViWVAfzUEgzMlBfR3UxNDg/view (download and store before it disappears)

This article on Alternet does a good job of explaining the findings:

http://www.alternet.org/environment/economic-oil-crash-around-corner

"A report by HSBC shows that contrary to industry mythology, even amidst the glut of unconventional oil and gas, the vast bulk of the world’s oil production has already peaked and is now in decline, while European government scientists show that the value of energy produced by oil has declined by half within the first 15 years of the 21st century.

The upshot? Welcome to a new age of permanent economic recession driven by ongoing dependence on dirty, expensive, difficult oil—unless we choose a fundamentally different path.

Last September, a few outlets were reporting the counterintuitive findings of a new HSBC research report on global oil supply. Unfortunately, the true implications of the HSBC report were largely misunderstood.

New scientific research suggests that the world faces an imminent oil crunch, which will trigger another financial crisis.

The HSBC research note — prepared for clients of the global bank — found that contrary to concerns about too much oil supply and insufficient demand, the situation was opposite: global oil supply in coming years will be insufficient to sustain rising demand.

Yet the full, striking import of the report, concerning the world’s permanent entry into a new age of global oil decline, was never really explained. The report didn’t just go against the grain of the industry’s hype about "peak demand": it vindicated what is routinely lambasted by the industry as a myth: peak oil ,  the concurrent peak and decline of global oil production."

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This confirms the feeling that I have had, that 2017 will see an increase in disruptive events and shocks. I think the new US lead Trump Administration will have a bit of a honeymoon, with things muddling along somehow, but that by 2018 we will see a major crisis much like 2008.

Will this be enough to really shake things up? I don't know but I think I'll try and get a bit more prepared by then.

... but not with a great hope of success...

at least I forwarded the report to a family friend who's a financial adviser. Though we don't talk often, she was also open to my giving her Galbraith's Great Crash title as a good read and who knows, maybe it'll be of help to her to hear what HSBC is saying.

Closer to home, I mentioned this to my husband (who travels for work - nothing I can do about that currently, though we are looking to change that and come up with more crash-worthy livelihood, though he'd not label it like that) - but the assumption that everything is "progressing" along and if it's one way now, it'll still be that way 6 mos., 12 mos., 2.5 years from now is the default mindset.

He nods and goes along with what I'm saying but I can tell the sense of urgency isn't there - the understanding of repercussions related to escalating energy costs and severely curtailed supply.

I've only read half of the report myself (too many irons in the fire) but will finish it.

Meanwhiile, there is much work to be done. I don't anticipate, in spite of my attempts to prepare, that my family will ride this out easily.