NightBlogger

Denver Post.com
Colorado consumers can expect the summer pinch from high fuel prices to morph into a winter nip from home energy bills, state energy officials said Wednesday. Local heating bills are anticipated to increase about 20 percent to 30 percent, and that’s causing a wave of conservation to become the best battle plan. “We don’t see any scenario of prices going down and staying down,” Susan Arigoni, Xcel Energy’s vice president of fuels, told the Colorado Public Utilities Commission at a meeting Wednesday. Other gas-company executives said the same. But Colorado isn’t expected to get it as bad as the rest of the country, according to the U.S. Energy Department, which Wednesday issued its own dire predictions.

Natural-gas users on average will spend $1,216 to heat their homes in the upcoming season, which runs from November to April. That’s up 43 percent from last season, the government said. Locally, the average natural-gas bill will heat up to $780, according to Energy Outreach Colorado, which helps low-income families meet energy costs. With electricity, the average Colorado household will pay $1,223 this season, EOC estimates. Worst-hit, though, will be low-income families. Even with aid, their portion of the bill is expected to be 44 percent more this year than last, EOC director Skip Arnold told the PUC.

It’s all prompted consumer advocates and other agencies to begin outreach programs in the dog days of summer rather than the cool breezes of fall. “We’re really worried,” said Jennifer Gremmert, deputy director of EOC. “It’s not just rent and mortgages anymore.” The consensus is nothing new: insulate, conserve and winterize. Unfortunately, many consumers don’t think of doing these things until the first snowflake falls. “People just don’t know enough to get going early,” said Steve Byers of the Energy Efficiency Business Coalition. There are other options for dealing with the costs, including bill averaging, where energy companies charge an average amount each month in order to avoid the sting of a large bill during a cold snap. EOC estimates 370,000 Colorado families could qualify for home energy-bill assistance.

WASHINGTON — Driven by a sour economy and skittish consumers, U.S. business bankruptcies saw their sharpest quarterly rise in two years, jumping 17 percent in the second quarter of 2008, according to an analysis by McClatchy. Commercial filings for the first half of 2008 are up 45 percent from last year, as the national climate for commerce continues to deteriorate amid rising energy and food costs, mounting job losses, tighter credit and a reticence among consumers to part with discretionary income. From April through June, 15,471 U.S. businesses called it quits, according to data from Automated Access to Court Electronic Records, an Oklahoma City bankruptcy management and data company. States that saw the biggest increase in filings were Delaware, Montana, Oregon, Maryland and Connecticut, suggesting that the economic gloom is spreading beyond large population centers. More

ft.com
US banks set aside a record $37.1bn to cover losses on real estate loans and other credits during the first quarter in a sign of the growing economic pain being caused by the global credit crisis, regulators said on Thursday. Sheila Bair, chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, said it was likely loan-loss provisions and bank failures would rise in coming quarters as the fallout from market turmoil hits the real economy….one worrying trend was the declining “coverage ratio”, which compares bank reserves with the level of loans that are 90 days past due. This ratio fell for the eighth consecutive quarter, to 89 cents in reserves for every $1 of noncurrent loans, the lowest level since the first quarter of 1993. More

BBC
Oil prices surged to a record high above $135 a barrel early on Thursday, having rocketed more than $4 a barrel on Wednesday. Light, sweet crude for July delivery reached $135.04, taking its gain for the year so far above 40%. The main driver was the weekly US crude stocks figure, which showed a 5.4 million barrel fall, when a small increase had been expected. Read more

Photo ninjapoodles

When looking at the Craigslist listing data and comparing it to U.S. Retail Gasoline Price charts, you can see that July 2007 was after the period America had to deal with $3.00 a gallon gas. Although there is some lag time in the price rises, you can see that for each bump of increase in retail gas price, Craigslist saw stronger and stronger gains in the listing growth rates. When you look at February of 2008, when gas price started to climb to the sky, the listings growth on Craigslist for cars and trucks and recreational vehicles reacted perfectly in line with the gas price increase. More