Blogs : 10th December (en)

Ouf, ni Nadine Morano ni Rama Yade ne succéderont à Jouyet. eurojunkie, Blogactiv.eu (fr)

Nicolas Sarkozy exclut de nommer Rama Yade secrétaire d'Etat aux affaires européennes. Jean Quatremer, Les Coulisses de Bruxelles (fr)
" ... On estime, au château, que Yade sous-estime gravement l’importance du Parlement européen, où cette polyglotte aurait été « une star » et aurait pu se constituer un carnet d’adresse qui lui fait défaut. On fait aussi remarquer qu’elle n’aurait pas été obligée d’effectuer un mandat plein, mais qu’elle aurait ainsi prouvé sa capacité à affronter le suffrage universel. Mais, après tout, Rama Yade est peut-être tout simplement fidèle à elle-même: comme me le rappelle un internaute, elle a reconnu avoir voté non au traité constitutionnel européen en mai 2005... Pas très sérieux pour un secrétaire d'Etat aux affaires européennes ..."

Powerful Women: Follow-up on Rama Yade. Julien Frisch, Watching Europe (en)
" ... It is quite hard to judge from the outside which reasons have led to the decision of Rama Yade, but she does not seem to have serious backing in the French government, with France's foreign minister Kouchner saying that it was a mistake to create the post of secretary of state for human rights (the position Yade occupies today).In this sense, one could also interpret the proposal made to her to run for European Parliament as a smooth possibility to get her out of the way, to keep her somewhere where she could have become a star, but one with very limited influence, far away from the necessary political networks in Paris - something with great disadvantage for a woman who has made her way into influential circles so early in her life ..."

Join the (EU) Navy. Richard, EUReferendum (en)
" ... Since the Royal Navy has already been involved in NATO led counter-piracy operations off the coast of Somalia, using HMS Cumberland, NATO is obviously good enough for this operation. There is no need for an EU presence. But the EU has its vainglorious ambitions to become a military power in its own right. So it is using another of our ships with our men – and a few women – and boasting that it has its own Navy. And our government is mad enough, stupid enough, treacherous enough to let this happen ..."

The New Geopolitics of Oil. Jerome, European Tribune (en)
As a first point, I noted that we were oscillating between supply driven prices and demand-driven prices. In one case, when there is enough supply around, markets balance via supply variation, and the price of oil reflects the marginal cost of production, ie the price to add one more pump to a deep offshore platform off Angola. In the other, with supply constrained, it is demand that has to adjust (via demand destruction), and the price of oil has to go high enough, to imply, to force someone to take the bus instead of the car.
In the summer, we were clearly in a demand-constrained world and that explained the price peak more than any reference to speculation; we've now moved back to a supply-driven one, as the financial crisis has caused massive demand destruction of its own.