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Thinking at a macro level about the global economy as the oil market is a global one.

I think the problem is that the largest beneficiary of QE and ultra-low interest rates has been oil companies. The debts of oil companies have been increasing faster than in any other sector as they have been building out new projects year after year since 2007 across the globe.

On the other hand it has been increasingly difficult to borrow money in the "real economy." There has been a marked reduction in the pace of business and also in the appetite for banks to lend to real estate companies and travel/holiday companies.

Also more small-and-medium sized businesses have been going bust since 2008 than new businesses being created. This, coupled with the growth in sectors of the economy based around computing - (rather than real estate, infrastructure, public services, and travel and leisure) - has meant that oil demand has been declining every year since it peaked back in 2006.

In short, we are quite likely approaching a time of massive oversupply in the oil market and the price will have to head lower or the banks will have to lend more to public services, real estate, the travel and leisure sectors, and to make it easier for people to start-up their own business. In fact why is lending to small-and-medium sized enterprises being gradually cut every year - surely it is time for this trend to be reversed and for banks to encourage the backbone of economies which since the industrial revolution has been providing the finance for industrious individuals to create businesses which better the lives of those other people living in their communities.

If the problem is too little demand for oil (rather than an oversupply - global production has been gradually falling since 2008 so there appears not to be an oversupply of oil) then this problem can only be fixed by stimulating the real economy.

Politicians need to get infrastructure projects started and to increase the flow of bank lending to small-and-medium sized enterprises (especially in the sectors of house building, ship building, mining, travel and leisure, public services, resurfacing roads, and general infrastructure).

But I would say the decisions are the oil majors are not rational (that is quite close to manipulation by a higher power - being some kind of irrational force that has managed to survive for this many generations of evolution without becoming rational).

Politicians have been saying for over a decade that the world must reduce oil consumption by 50% by 2035 and that all new combustion engine cars will be banned in many countries from 2025 onwards.

Yet at the same time major oil companies have done everything to retain staff, cut down salaries and expenses, in order to build out new oilfields. (Anything oil resources they had in the ground, "for future potential," they looked to develop from 2008-2020 to convert into oil production).

I think the problem is that the largest beneficiary of QE and ultra-low interest rates has been oil companies. The debts of oil companies have been increasing faster than in any other sector as they have been building out new projects year after year since 2007 across the globe.

On the other hand it has been increasingly difficult to borrow money in the "real economy." There has been a marked reduction in the pace of business and in the appetite for banks to lend to real estate companies and travel companies.

Also more businesses have been going bust since 2008 than new businesses being created. This couple with the growth in sectors of the economy based around computing (rather than real estate, infrastructure, public services, and travel and leisure) has meant that oil demand has been declining every year since it peaked back in 2006.

In short we are approaching a time of massive oversupply in the oil market and the price will have to head lower or the banks will have to lend more to public services, real estate, and the travel and leisure sectors.

If the problem is too little demand for oil (rather than an oversupply - global production has been gradually falling since 2008 so here is not an oversupply of oil) then this problem can only be fixed by stimulating the real economy. Politicians need to get infrastructure projects started and to increase the flow of bank lending to small and medium-sized businesses (especially in the sectors such as travel and leisure and infrastructure).

I'm very sad to see Thomas Cook go - they offered a lot of good deals last summer. For example to go all-inclusive 5* for 7 nights to Mexico, the Caribbean, North Africa, Turkey, or the Far-East for less than £500 per person.

The economy is strange. With the low prices Thomas Cook were offering for amazing 5* all-inclusive holidays this summer I expected to see their shops constantly packed full of people trying to book-up these great deals. But I didn't notice their shops, nor other outlets selling their holidays, to be any busier than normal this year.

Are the vast majority of people pretty much price insensitive?

I know some people who are price insensitive - you could offer them for £1 per person a 7* all-inclusive holiday to any destination in the world and they would simply say they don't like holiday resorts and would prefer to stay at home. Perhaps a lot more people are like this than I ever imagined would be the case?

Any opinions on what percentage of consumers are entirely insensitive to price?

The issue I have with this project is the scale of the underground area to be mined. What risk factor have the professional surveyors attached to risk such as water ingress and subsidence?

They are planning to mine an area about 40km2 at a depth of 1,350 metres (4,000 feet) underground.

I know that gold mines have gone much deeper but they are normally following fairly narrow seams of gold and can use narrow tunnels.

No coal mine I know of has gone deeper than 1,000 metres in the UK - are there coal mines deeper than this is the USA or Germany?

Also, when coal mining the seams tend to be very thick I believe, possibly a couple of hundred metres thick, so that means it isn't necessary to mine an area as large as 40km2.

I'm just thinking how can they know for sure that there will be no ingress from groundwater? (I can't see how they could control an ingress of groundwater if it was along a section of rock a few kms in length).

I assume they have drilled a lot of pilot holes horizontally at that depth of 1,350 metres across the area they intend to mine?

Also, can they really just dig out an area that is 40km2 without the roof collapsing. If it is solid rock then it would be possible to excavate an area of that size - but if the rock is splintered or fractured right up to the next strata above then there surely is a rick of collapse. Oil companies are always talking about faults and about different layers of rock having been uplifted or depressed and therefore the layers join at faults? Now if an area directly under a fault is mined if there not a risk that all the layers of rock above just slide down the sheer wall and collapse down into the mined cavity. Again with a smaller cavity this would be manageable with using artificial supports - but the viability of this sounds like it all depends of the rock structure/layer directly above the area to be mined. Are they 100% sure this is solid rock and zero risk of collapse?

The point is the greed of directors have destroyed the economy. Whilst they were all increasing their salaries from a few hundred k to over a million and then a few million pounds a year the general public were thinking these directors have decided to go and live in a parallel universe. The directors think their world can exist when they want to pay themselves $500,000 per year for sitting in an office telling other people to go and stand out in the cold and rain on an oilrig with dangerous moving parts for $50,000 per year? Not a chance. Their worlds would of collapsed long ago from the principle that anything grossly irrational can not continue in existence in the game of life. That is probably why these companies have done nothing useful for shareholders and the general public for the last decade. The directors closed themselves off in a parallel universe and so far nobody who posts on here has had the guts to walk right into their offices and tell them that they have had their chance and now I am taking over so that we can actually get something useful done which doesn't cost shareholders millions of dollars per year alone in paying these useless directors.

There should be compensation for private shareholders. Everyone else had ways to cover their losses (through insurance, through £425,000,000,000 of QE, through the government bailout, through asset striping small family businesses, through CDS which paid out if a company went bankrupt, through shorting shares based upon inside knowledge). Can't understand why Labour don't just call an election - they would win by a landslide.

In effect I believe everyone made money from the last financial crisis except the owner shareholders (i.e. the private investors). That is why government debts have ballooned whilst there are so many ordinary people who are angry with the government and angry at the banks. What financial markets did was bailout those who were already wealthy whilst penalising owner shareholders who believed that whatever companies they had bought shares in were good for the future of society. All of these private investors can't have been wrong ... many of the companies they backed would have served the economic interests of hundreds of thousands of people ...but they were the easiest target for the bankers to steal wealth from to cover up their own greed, excesses and mistakes.

I think there ought to be some form of redress whereby private investors can claim compensation for 75% of their losses since 2006. In effect they were missold financial products by people who could manipulate share prices in an artificial way because inside the banks they knew that they could make big profits by irrationally refusing to lend to listed companies which didn't have big debts (Debenhams for example) and by shorting the shares at the same time they were able to defraud people who had invested fairly rationally of their money. The debts of Debenhams were really not excessive at all. Tullow Oil and Kaz Minerals both have debts of over $2.5 Billion and yet neither company really has significant scale within their sector. Tullow Oil only produces less than 5% of the oil of companies like BP, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell. And Kaz Minerals likewise only produces less than 10% of the copper output of the major global miners.

The debts of Debenhams were less than £300,000,000 and perfectly manageable (very small compared to Sainsbury, Tesco, M&S etc). The debts of Tullow Oil and Kaz Minerals are over $3,000,000,000 (compared to the percentage of goods they produce in their respective sectors their debts are very excessive).

I think there is big trouble ahead ....Conservatives have closed down steel industry, ****ed up car industry, closed down libraries, abolished free school meals, increased the price of petrol/diesel, increased the price of food by 30%, increased house prices by 40%, increased personal debt levels, filled the high streets with charity shops and betting shops, cut 25% from social services, cut 50% of law and order, frozen the NHS and begun privatising it/selling it off, and now Thomas Cook is gone the cost of holidays will jump massi

The whole point of a rational market would of been to have tanked the share price once investors learned PMO were considering sanctioning the economically irrational Solan project - especially doing so at the expense of putting SeaLion on the back burner. The economically rational course of action by a factor of more than 20-fold (in terms of the rewards which would have been generated from the same money invested) would have been to have scrapped Solan for ever and proceeded full speed ahead with SeaLion in 2012 (as soon as they had bought into the project from Rockhopper). SeaLion would now be up and running and producing 80,000 barrels of oil per day at an all-in cost of about $35 per barrel and the current selling price is $62 per barrel.

If the Board would have behaved rationally PMO would have almost zero debt (take off the $1.8 billion misspent on Solan from the current net debt of $2.2 Billion) because SeaLIon would of paid for itself within 4 years of full production and yet would continue to produce for another 21 years (21 years of pure profit oil amounting to about $600,000,000 profit per year or over $12 Billion by 2040) and the PMO share price would currently be £9 per share and you could then raise cheap debt to progress Zama and especially Tolumount (which would get you well in with whatever the government of the day was as producing gas from UK controlled territory is still widely seen as a public good by over 95% of voters!)

If you didn't have idiots in charge but had appointed me as CEO you lot could all of retired by now because the shares you bought at an average of £1.50 pre 2008 would be worth £9 each if this company had acted rationally (which didn't require anything other than common sense to see what the economically rational course of action was in 2012).

How can this share price be so easily manipulated. You say the shares are liquid. Surely this means it would be harder to manipulate the share price. When the share price went above £2.50 in 2010 and all the way up to £5 in 2011 it was clearly madness because PMO were at that time increasing debt to sanction small/insignificant new projects. If the shares were truly liquid there ought to have been mass selling in 2011 until the price dropped below 50% above fair value (call this price £2.50 per share as fair value at the time was probably around £1.60 per share).

Given that PMO have paid the price of the failure of the insignificant Solan project and that is behind them now, and that Catcher did turn out to have enough scale to be a truly economic project, and that other fields have performed better than expectations, and that they have discovered the massive Zama field which is low cost being in shallow water, and that SeaLion can now proceed at 40% of the previous cost (the cost if they had gone ahead in 2014) then fair value now is more than it was in 2011. If fair value for the shares in 2011 was £1.60 per share it is about double that now or £3.20 per share. Yet the share price is the opposite - it was double fair value in 2011 and now in 2019 it is less than a quarter of fair value.

If markets can be this manipulated why don't politicians just do away with them all-together as clearly they no longer serve the interests of society. I think markets better wake up and start to serve the interests of democratic society again because if you no longer have a purpose in a democracy then you can't expect to ride your gravy train in your plush offices in London and Aberdeen.

The whole point of a rational market would of been to have tanked the share price once investors learned PMO were considering sanctioning the economically irrational Solan project - especially doing so at the expense of putting SeaLion on the back burner. The economically rational course of action by a factor of more than ten-fold (in terms of the rewards which would have been generated from the same money invested) would of been to have scrapped Solan for ever and proceeded full speed ahead with SeaLion in 2012 (as soon as they had bought into the project from Rockhopper). SeaLion would now be up and running and producing 80,000 barrels of oil per day at a cost of about $25 per barrel and the current selling price is $62 per barrel.

If the Board would have behaved rationally PMO would have almost zero debt (take of the $1.8 billion misspent on Solan from the current debt) because SeaLIon would of paid for itself within 4 years of full production and yet would continue to produce for another 21 years (21 years of pure profit oil amounting to about $400,000,000 profit per year) and the PMO share price would currently be £9 per share.

If you didn't have idiots in charge but had appointed me as CEO you lot could all of retired by now.

How can this share price be so easily manipulated. You say the shares are liquid. Surely this means it would be harder to manipulate the share price. When the share price went above £2.50 in 2010 and all the way up to £5 in 2011 it was clearly madness because PMO were at that time increasing debt to sanction small/insignificant new projects. If the shares were truly liquid there ought to have been mass selling in 2011 until the price dropped below 50% above fair value (call this price £2.50 per share as fair value at the time was probably around £1.60 per share).

Given that PMO have paid the price of the failure of the insignificant Solan project and that is behind them now, and that Catcher did turn out to have enough scale to be a truly economic project, and that other fields have performed better than expectations, and that they have discovered the massive Zama field which is low cost being in shallow water, and that SeaLion can now proceed at 40% of the previous cost (the cost if they had gone ahead in 2014) then fair value now is more than it was in 2011. If fair value for the shares in 2011 was £1.60 per share it is about double that now or £3.20 per share. Yet the share price is the opposite - it was double fair value in 2011 and now in 2019 it is less than a quarter of fair value.

If markets can be this manipulated why don't politicians just do away with them all-together as clearly they now longer serve the interests of society. I think markets better wake up and start to serve the interests of democratic society again because if you no longer have a purpose in a democracy then you can't expect to ride your gravy train in your plush offices in London and Aberdeen.

How can this share price be so easily manipulated. You say the shares are liquid. Surely this means it would be harder to manipulate the share price. When the share price went above £2.50 in 2010 and all the way up to £5 in 2011 it was clearly madness because PMO were at that time increasing debt to sanction small/insignificant new projects. If the shares were truly liquid there ought to have been mass selling in 2011 until the price dropped below 50% above fair value (call this price £2.50 per share as fair value at the time was probably around £1.60 per share).

Tiggerman have you thought this through?

Say if a million people emailed Sajid Javid or Simon Clarke. How long would it take to read a million emails? It would take me a few years and by the last one I would have forgotten what most of them said.

You may think I am being facetious by using a million emails as an example. But what about 10,000 emails. It would still take most people a few weeks/perhaps months to read that volume of emails.

Then what about the people who have created 100 email accounts? Should we take each email as a separate opinion or should we try and work out who is sending us emails from 100 different accounts?

The best method would be to turn up outside the directors house in a tractor wide enough to block the whole road and to politely ask them why they are letting the markets destroy the value of your shares.

If it was a guaranteed stop loss then the company should reimburse you.

In a way they should reimburse you anyway because they may not have explained the risks to you properly.

Also the way AIM works is pretty much to defraud investors (look at Afren and Xcite Energy as two examples) .... so they should probably reimburse you because they are running a market which isn't reputable. Any market has a duty to try and screen out unsuitable companies ...personally I don't think shares in Afren or Xcite Energy should ever have been sold in London. Why would anyone buy shares ever again?

I think I have found a better car to offer you (should I ever make a shedload from investing in PVR).

https://www.autotrader.co.uk/classified/advert/201909071962527?advertising-location=at_cars&onesearchad=Used&onesearchad=Nearly%20New&onesearchad=New&postcode=ls29pr&sort=relevance&year-from=2015&make=MERCEDES-BENZ&model=AMG&radius=1500&page=1

Would you prefer the Mercedes-Benz AMG G 63 5.5 5dr ? Or would you prefer the Dark Knight below?

https://www.autotrader.co.uk/classified/advert/201908281582845?postcode=ls29pr&model=AMG&sort=relevance&radius=1500&year-from=2015&advertising-location=at_cars&onesearchad=Used&onesearchad=Nearly%20New&onesearchad=New&make=MERCEDES-BENZ&page=1

If you need a car longwait then I'll buy you a TVR - this one to be precise (unless you'd prefer a 4x4 or a people carrier for your family/friends?) - that's if I ever make at least $500,000 from investing in PVR. If I make less money I'll buy you a cheaper car as I can't tell whether you think people who drive cars to the beach are selfish capitalists for not wanting to walk 100 miles?

https://www.autotrader.co.uk/classified/advert/201906038631665?postcode=ls29pr&sort=relevance&radius=1500&advertising-location=at_cars&make=TVR&onesearchad=Used&onesearchad=Nearly%20New&onesearchad=New&page=2

Nobody on these boards knows what will happen. The same handful of people make comments. There are 6 million citizens of Ireland and 550 million citizens in Europe as a whole. All of these people need to live, to eat, to have fun, the same as me and you. Personally I wonder if governments might lose control if the citizens knew there was plenty of oil still in the ground ...only they were not going to be allowed decent food or two cars per household.

That's what I'm ashamed of ...the government not addressing fuel poverty.

Any damage inflicted by a drone could be repaired in a few days - just turn off the taps to the affected parts - then weld the damage - then turn the oil flow back on.

Taking seriously, "it's going to take six months to fix," just shows what a false world listening too much to the media can create.

This bull market started with the closing down of most of the US steel industry, the destruction in business models/valuations of Alcan and AIG. Investors in Fannie May, Freddie Mac, Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, RBS, Lloyds were wiped out in a few short weeks in 2008.

(Larger share sales of the above companies, and others, led share prices to fall to almost zero before the market's valuations from a few weeks previously could be converted into cash, bonds, or money market funds).

There was real panic back in 2008 as I recall. Many investors had no idea that unknown tech companies were planning expansions and that these would drive the future bull market (if one can call a market driven by central banks favouring just one sector a market).

Those who had invested/(or were investing) in "normal" ideas such as insurance, housebuilding, banking, (and even the Yellow Pages) suffered financial losses of over 90%.

The last ten years (2009-2019) were almost unforeseeable from the horizon of most investors, but especially citizens managing their own money.

How could citizens have imagined back in 2007/2008 that people would pay $1,000 for a phone. Everyone back then was competing to have a bigger house or a faster car and then suddenly people wanted phones??? :o) . And how could anyone have imagine Apple would produce these phones in China and pay their employees 50 cents an hour? The 40% profit margin was driven by exploiting the Chinese. How could this have been predicted?

As a cultural note, (a footnote to a lost civilisation that was thriving before tech ruined the small businesses relying on cars rather than phones)): a phone used to just be a way of speaking with one's friends and family: to arrange a meet up for example.

Ten years ago we had no clue that within a few years people would be able to use Apps to order takeaways to coincide with their arrival at an Airb'n'b. Back in 2007, I don't think Airb'n'b even existed as a concept that anyone in the mainstream investment community would of taken seriously.

Since 2007, the number of bankrupted businesses has manyfold exceeded the new businesses created. If this has been a bull market it has been a strange one because it didn't benefit the majority of the population.

But it's been a fake bull market. The DOW is not weighted by market capitalisation. Look at the stock markets of Greece, Paris, Berlin, Rome to see the huge amount of value destruction in the markets in Europe.

This bull market started with the closing down of most of the US steel industry, the destruction in business models/valuations of Alcan and AIG. Alose investors in Fannie May, Freddie Mac, Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, RBS, Lloyds were wiped out in a few short weeks in 2008. Small investors might have been able to offload their stakes but large investors unloading caused the prices of these companies to fall to almost zero before the prior market valuations could be converted into cash, bonds, or money market funds.

There was real panic back in 2008 if people remember. Many investors had no idea that there were tech companies planning expansions and that these would drive the future bull market. Almost everyone who had invested/(or were investing) in "normal" ideas such as insurance, housebuilding, banking, (and even the Yellow Pages) suffered financial losses of over 90%.

I think the last ten years (2009-2019( were almost unforeseeable for most investors. How could citizens have imagined back in 2007/2008 that people would pay $1,000 for a phone. Everyone back then was competing to have a bigger house or a faster car and then suddenly people wanted phones??? :o) . How could this have been predicted? A phone used to just be a way of arranging to meet up with one's friends and family - I'm not sure the average person had any idea that many people would be using Apps in a few years time to book hotels and order takeaways to coincide with their arrival at an Air'B'n'B.

It all depends how you define stupid.

If a CEO says I'm going to earn $4 million a year whilst the average employee earns £26,000 per year then rationally they would not find a single employee who has their self respect plus a reasonable amount of intelligence. Ergo despite earning $4 million per year a wise person could conclude the CEO is an idiot because they have constructed an irrational world purely to satisfy their own ego. They could challenge their own beliefs ...and in a rational thought world there would be no problem in doing so.

But why would one allow oneself to think rational thoughts if one has already created an egotistical thought-world that was constructed so poorly that it would fall to pieces at the simplest of challenges from rationality? This shows the importance of good parenting within a democratic society - to ensure we teach our children that financial self-interest is not the greatest good .... that perhaps there are higher values ...values more conducive to our happiness (which is in our genuine self-interest) ...and one of these higher values may be believing in the value of thinking in a rational way for its own sake ...without allowing thoughts of self-interest to interfere with the actions that an objectively rational person would take. The basis for doing so being the belief that acting rationally without spending too long regretting that the objectively best decision is not serving one's immediate goals will be better for our species as a whole and therefore will create better lives for our children....

It all depends how you define stupid.

If a CEO says I'm going to earn $4 million a year whilst the average employee earns £26,000 per year then rationally they would not find a single employee who has their self respect plus a reasonable amount of intelligence. Ergo despite earning $4 million per year a wise person could conclude the CEO is an idiot because they have constructed an irrational world purely to satisfy their own ego. They could challenge their own beliefs ...and in a rational thought world there would be no problem in doing so .... but how can you think rational thoughts when you have created a world that would fall to pieces at the simplest of challenges from rationality?

It all depends how you define stupid.

If a CEO says I'm going to earn $4 million a year whilst the average employee earns £26,000 per year then rationally he would not find a single employee who has their self respect plus a reasonable amount of intelligence. Ergo despite earning $4 million per year a wise person could conclude the CEO is an idiot because they have constructed an irrational world purely to satisfy their own ego. They could challenge their own beliefs ...and in a rational thought bubble there is no problem in doing so .... but how can you think rational thoughts when you have created something merely to serve your own ego?