How the end of cheap oil could finally bring the NHL to Hamilton
Jeff Rubin says oil will soon return to triple-digit prices per barrel, a Canadian dollar at $1.20 US will give Alberta revenge for the National Energy Program, and National Hockey League teams will return to Winnipeg, Quebec and Hamilton.
Of course, it won`t all be fun and games -- Canadians will no longer eat chicken wings imported from China, Ontario autoworkers will need retraining to manufacture buses, and eventually movie director James Cameron may have to ride a bike.
Rubin left his job as chief economist with CIBC World Markets last year to write a book, Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller. In it he postulated that oil hitting $147 a barrel, not the sub-prime mortgage debacle in the United States, caused the recent global recession, and that a return to high oil prices will curtail travel and reverse globalization.
He has just updated his thesis, adding a chapter on recent events like Greece`s debt and the oil-rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. He also muses that a lofty Canadian dollar could make NHL franchises in this country more profitable and return a team to Hamilton, whose Tigers were sold to an American bootlegger in 1925.
Rubin`s message, delivered during the Canadian conference of the Risk and Insurance Management Society Inc. in Edmonton, essentially predicts a last hurrah for oil, as cheap conventional supplies run out and the world turns to more expensive synthetics from oilsands. That will cause people to depend on food from local farms, albeit more expensive ones, and it will be decades before scarcity necessitates full-steam-ahead development of alternative energy.
Read the full article here.
Jeff Rubin says oil will soon return to triple-digit prices per barrel, a Canadian dollar at $1.20 US will give Alberta revenge for the National Energy Program, and National Hockey League teams will return to Winnipeg, Quebec and Hamilton.
Of course, it won`t all be fun and games -- Canadians will no longer eat chicken wings imported from China, Ontario autoworkers will need retraining to manufacture buses, and eventually movie director James Cameron may have to ride a bike.
Rubin left his job as chief economist with CIBC World Markets last year to write a book, Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller. In it he postulated that oil hitting $147 a barrel, not the sub-prime mortgage debacle in the United States, caused the recent global recession, and that a return to high oil prices will curtail travel and reverse globalization.
He has just updated his thesis, adding a chapter on recent events like Greece`s debt and the oil-rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. He also muses that a lofty Canadian dollar could make NHL franchises in this country more profitable and return a team to Hamilton, whose Tigers were sold to an American bootlegger in 1925.
Rubin`s message, delivered during the Canadian conference of the Risk and Insurance Management Society Inc. in Edmonton, essentially predicts a last hurrah for oil, as cheap conventional supplies run out and the world turns to more expensive synthetics from oilsands. That will cause people to depend on food from local farms, albeit more expensive ones, and it will be decades before scarcity necessitates full-steam-ahead development of alternative energy.
Read the full article here.