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You read that headline correctly. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration is financing oil exploration off Brazil.
The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil's Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil's planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan.
The U.S. Export-Import Bank tells us it has issued a "preliminary commitment" letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion and has discussed with Brazil the possibility of increasing that amount. Ex-Im Bank says it has not decided whether the money will come in the form of a direct loan or loan guarantees. Either way, this corporate foreign aid may strike some readers as odd, given that the U.S. Treasury seems desperate for cash and Petrobras is one of the largest corporations in the Americas.
But look on the bright side. If President Obama has embraced offshore drilling in Brazil, why not in the old U.S.A.? The land of the sorta free and the home of the heavily indebted has enormous offshore oil deposits, and last year ahead of the November elections, with gasoline at $4 a gallon, Congress let a ban on offshore drilling expire.
Originally posted by LeaderOfProgress
already being discussed
US oil industry has crashed, Obama is paying Brazil to drill and sell us oil
As reported at Bloomberg.com, George Soros purchased an $811 million stake in Petroleo Brasileiro SA (PBR), (better known as Petrobras) in Q2. The Brazilian oil company is now the largest holding in his fund, amounting to 22 percent of the total $3.68 billion of stocks and American depositary receipts held by Soros Fund Management LLC
Via Bloomberg
* Soros Fund Management LLC, billionaire investor George Soros’s hedge-fund company, cut stakes in Petroleo Brasileiro SA and Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan, its biggest holdings in the first quarter, according to a filing.
* The New York-based fund sold 5 million U.S. shares of Petrobras, (PBR) as the company is known, during the quarter, according to a filing today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Soros’s remaining 32 million shares of the Brazilian state-controlled oil company were valued at $963 million at the end of the quarter.
* The fund also held 5.6 million shares of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan-based Potash (POT) at the end of the first quarter, compared with 5.9 million shares as of Dec. 31.