Iran Feeling the Pressure

Economic sanctions are starting to have an effect on Iran. Reuters reports that the country has defaulted on its payments for rice to India.

Iranian buyers have defaulted on payments for about 200,000 tonnes of rice from their top supplier India, exporters and rice millers said on Tuesday, a sign of the mounting pressure on Tehran from a new wave of Western sanctions.

Now Iran can’t buy Indian rice on credit.

Now, This Is Interesting…

MarketWatch.com’s Polya Lesova reporting from Davos, Switzerland:

The $10 billion Russia Direct Investment Fund plans to announce three deals in the next month, the chief executive of the Russian government’s private-equity vehicle told MarketWatch in an interview on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting.

The deals will be the first for the fund, which was created in June 2011 and will be capitalized with $10 billion from the Russian government over the next five years. It’s mandated to co-invest with international investors in an effort to attract investment to Russia.

The main industries that this fund will be focused on are financial services, logistics, healthcare, electrical utilities and agriculture. We think something’s missing from this list… and that’s a shame.

The fund is expected to be involved in 15 deals over the next three years, and we hope more than one of those deals finds its way into the energy and infrastructure arena – not just electrical utilities. There are some major deficiencies in this sector that could really hamper growth.

Here’s an article I published right around the holidays on the subject.

China and Natural Gas

China imports a lot of energy, and it’s looking to buy up companies and development plots like a kid in a candy store. Except the stakes are much higher.

Here’s some background.

Is Natural Gas a Worthy Investment?

Over the past week and more, we’ve been talking about crude oil, crude oil and crude oil.

And for good reason. Oil prices jumped above $97 a barrel in after-hours trading on Friday. This industry is so important — and so riddled with corruption and greed — that Sandy Franks and I wrote a book about it. Barbarians of Oil is already on shelves, but you can get a big discount off the shelf price by visiting this link.

But while we’ve been talking about crude oil, natural gas has quietly crept back onto the investment scene. In fact, natural gas prices climbed six out of the past seven trading days.

So we’re asking, “Is natural gas a good investment right now?”