U.S. Oil and Natural Gas Production Rising

Crude oil and natural gas production in the U.S. has strongly rebounded in the past few years according to an article by Thomas Helbling in the latest edition of IMF’s Finance & Development magazine. As a result, natural gas prices are at a 20-year low. But gasoline prices have not followed natural gas prices and have …

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A Look at Two Large Food and Consumer Staples Retailers

Walmart(WMT) and Costco(COST) are two of the large retailers that sell food and other consumer staples. In addition, they also sell consumer discretionary items. Both these companies offer membership-based wholesale bulk shopping stores for food and other items. Costcco operates these stores under the Costco brand while Walmart runs it under the Sam’s Club brand. …

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A Comparison of U.S. Health Care To Other Developed Countries

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to decadence without the usual interval of civilization. – Georges Clemenceau, French journalist, physician and statesman The U.S. health care system is actually a hodge-podge of many entities, some of which may have conflicting interests, meshed together to operate under the …

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The Top 10 Safest Banks in North America 2013

The Global Finance magazine publishes their top bank rankings each year for various categories. The lists for this year were published last month. In this post lets take a quick look at the top banks in North America. From the report in the magazine: The banks were selected through a comparison of the long-term credit …

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