Vladimir putin

Oil giant Shell said on Tuesday that it would take a $400-$800m (£325-£650m) charge in the first quarter as a result of plunging crude prices. The company is already planning to slash $9bn (£7.2bn) from its spending plans to weather the collapse in prices amid the coronavirus pandemic. … [Read more...] about Oil prices edge higher as Trump-Putin call raises truce hopes

Trump said he expects Putin to ask the US to lift various sanctions in place on Russia, but did not say whether he would comply in order to seek an end to the ongoing price war. The sanctions were mainly put in place over Russia's annexation of Crimea, and the alleged part that the Russian government played in the 2016 US presidential election. … [Read more...] about Saudi Arabia to raise oil exports to record high

Some settled into a vigil for liberal democracy worldwide, believing that it would be eventually ushered in by capitalism, and end history altogether. Fervently promoting free markets in Russia, the pundits failed to foresee the country’s descent into gangster capitalism. Globalisation, they sang almost in chorus, is “lifting” hundreds of millions of people in India and China out of poverty, without anticipating that these numerous beneficiaries might get trapped in the limbo of frustrated ambition and rage where strongmen thrive. Hardly any of those who hailed the flattening of the world by consumer capitalism paid attention to the simple but devastating fact that, as the novelist Amitav Ghosh writes in his new book The Great Derangement, “the patterns of life that modernity engenders can only be practised by a small minority of the world’s population”. … [Read more...] about Easternisation by Gideon Rachman and The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh – review