Today, we'll focus on energy/oil, the dollar, sad affects from the home bust, and what I contend will be the best long term investment - undervalued farm land (and it's not in the USA)

As our President trots with hat in hand to Saudia Arabia to ask them to pleeeeeaaseee open the spigots.... the NYTimes asks What Can we Do about Rising Oil Prices? Not Much

• With gasoline closing in on $4 a gallon, Washington is awash in proposals to bring down prices — once more turning the energy debate into political football.
• There have been calls for a gasoline tax “holiday” this summer, cries to force OPEC to pump more oil (or else!), appeals by President Bush to allow “environmentally friendly” drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and demands to tax Big Oil’s billion-dollar-plus profits.
• But what can the White House, Congress or competing presidential candidates do to reduce gas prices in the near term? The short answer, alas, is not much.
• No industrialized economy is as reliant on oil, or as obsessed with gasoline prices, as the United States, the world’s biggest consumer of oil. But the oil market is largely immune to Washington’s machinations, and prices have more than quadrupled over the last six years for reasons that are increasingly disconnected from what happens in the United States.
• In the long term, there are only two ways to reduce prices: boost supplies or reduce demand. The country’s energy policy does exactly the opposite: it encourages consumption by keeping energy taxes low and discourages exploiting new supplies because of environmental concerns and not-in-my-backyard political objections.
• Lawrence J. Goldstein, an economist at the Energy Policy Research Foundation, estimated that the nation’s oil import bill would probably reach $450 billion this year, up from $120 billion in 2002. “Our energy policy is bankrupt,” he said. “It is not prudent any more to ignore the supply side of the equation.”

So my "World of Shortages" thesis is beginning to pick up into the mainstream - more and more people are finally realizing the US is not the end all and be all; that there is a global competition for resources. Sadly, if we dropped everything today and put together a coherent energy policy (what I call a Manhattan Project II) it would still take 4-7 years to really make serious inroads - and the time between "now" and "then" will be filled with serious strains for many. But don't you worry folks, our leadership won't be working on a coherent strategy - they will be fighting, pointing fingers, and continuing their typical incompetence. So we'll keep pushing out solutions down the road a few more years. Even if we wanted to do nuclear for example... the Wall Street Journal reports the New Wave of Nuclear Plants Faces High Costs

• A new generation of nuclear power plants is on the drawing boards in the U.S., but the projected cost is causing some sticker shock: $5 billion to $12 billion a plant, double to quadruple earlier rough estimates.
• Nuclear plants haven't been built in meaningful numbers in the U.S. since the 1980s. Part of the cost escalation is bad luck. Plants are being proposed in a period of skyrocketing costs for commodities such as cement, steel and copper; amid a growing shortage of skilled labor; and against the backdrop of a shrunken supplier network for the industry. (as opposed to say if we built them maybe a decade ago? No, that would take proactive action - we are a reactive country; only after the emergency is here will we act)
• The price escalation is sobering because the industry and regulators have worked hard to make development more efficient, in hopes of eliminating problems that in the past produced harrowing cost overruns.

Last, we finish off the energy section with an interesting story in the NYTimes: As Gazprom Goes, So Goes Russia

• Gazprom certainly had reason to party: its chairman, Dmitri A.