“La sabiduría de la vida consiste en la eliminación de lo no esencial. En reducir los problemas de la filosofía a unos pocos solamente: el goce del hogar, de la vida, de la naturaleza, de la cultura”.
Lin Yutang
Cervantes
Hoy es el día más hermoso de nuestra vida, querido Sancho; los obstáculos más grandes, nuestras propias indecisiones; nuestro enemigo más fuerte, el miedo al poderoso y a nosotros mismos; la cosa más fácil, equivocarnos; la más destructiva, la mentira y el egoísmo; la peor derrota, el desaliento; los defectos más peligrosos, la soberbia y el rencor; las sensaciones más gratas, la buena conciencia, el esfuerzo para ser mejores sin ser perfectos, y sobretodo, la disposición para hacer el bien y combatir la injusticia dondequiera que esté.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES Don Quijote de la Mancha.
4 de agosto de 2015
The Oil Crash Has Caused a $1.3 Trillion Wipeout
It’s the oil crash few saw
coming, and few have been spared as it erased $1.3 trillion, the
equivalent of Mexico’s annual GDP, in little more than a year.
Take
billionaire Carl Icahn. When crude was at its peak in June 2014, the
activist investor’s stake in Chesapeake Energy Corp. was worth almost $2
billion. Today, oil has lost more than half its value, Chesapeake is
the worst performer in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index and Icahn has
a paper loss of $1.3 billion. The S&P 500, by contrast, is up 6.9
percent in that time.
State
pension funds and insurance companies have also been hard hit.
Investment advisers, who manage the mutual funds and exchange-traded
products that are staples of many retirement plans, had $1.8 trillion
tied to energy stocks in June 2014, according to data compiled by
Bloomberg.
“The hit has been
huge,” said Chris Beck, chief investment officer for small- and
mid-capitalization companies for Delaware Investments, an asset
management firm in Philadelphia with $180 billion in assets under
management. “Everybody was thinking that oil would stay in the $90 to
$100 a barrel range.”
The California Public Employees Retirement
System, a $303 billion fund that provides benefits to 1.72 million
people, owned a $91.8 million slice of Pioneer Natural Resources Co. in
June 2014. At the time, Pioneer was a $33 billion company and one of the
biggest shale producers in Texas. Today, Pioneer is worth $19 billion
and Calpers’ stake has lost about $40 million in market value.
Since
June 2014, the combined market capitalization of 157 energy companies
listed in the MSCI World Energy Sector Index or the Bloomberg
Intelligence North America Independent Explorers & Producers Index
has lost about $1.3 trillion.
If crude rebounds, investors may
make some of their money back, though values may not recover as quickly
as they fell. After the tech bubble burst in 2000, erasing $7 trillion
from the Nasdaq Composite Index, it took almost 15 years for the market
to return to its pre-crash level.
Oil, which lost more than half
its value in the past year, will rise less than $20 through the first
quarter of 2016, according to the median estimate compiled by Bloomberg. --With assistance from Adam Satariano and Ian King in San Francisco.
