A few weeks ago, every politician in Washington seemed to be blaming speculators for driving up oil prices last year. The chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said in July that the agency was likely to clamp down on…

The markets haven’t been kind to MegaWest Energy, the Canadian company that began producing oil in western Missouri last year. Falling oil prices forced the company to suspend production jst a few months after it started, and the wells have been idle…

It’s not exactly a gusher, but oil is flowing from the Missouri oil find that we took note of last winter. MegaWest Energy of Calgary announced that the first sale of oil from its Missouri well, which it now calls the…

An English company, Nighthawk Energy, has begun an aggressive drilling program in western Missouri after it found “promising” amounts of oil in four test wells. In a regulatory announcement, Nighthawk says that it and a partner control 7,000 acres in…

The news that the U.S. will stop adding oil to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve draws a barbed comment from Bob Howard, who writes the Positive Patterns investment newsletter from Turners, Mo. He doesn’t think the decision will make much difference to world…

A fourth-grader named Katie recently sent me a question that a lot of adults are wondering about, too. She writes:

I am a student in fourth grade and we are studying Economics. We
were talking yesterday about the price of gasoline, and I…

The cost of the war in Iraq is getting a lot of attention in this political season. A coalition of Democratic groups is raising $20 million for an effort to link the weakening economy with the war effort, and Nobel-winning…

You may have seen the stripper wells pumping oil out of neighboring Illinois, Kansas and Oklahoma, but did you know Missouri now has an oil industry of its very own? A Canadian company called MegaWest Energy is drilling into a sandstone formation…