You just can’t keep those
characters at Telstra down, and Henry welcomes Sol, Donald and the gang back to
the front pages after a short absence – but don’t expect high petrol prices to
go anywhere.

It’s pretty serious
stuff at Telstra and Sol’s strategies seem more-or-less clear – laying the
groundwork for an “I told you so” defence of a falling share price when the
inevitable happens and Telstra gets caught between regulatory mandated
maintenance of services and survival mandated network and technology upgrades.
More here.

On petrol prices,
Nicholas Gruen writes:

Instinctively unable to believe our luck, we’ve been
predicting the imminent exhaustion of our resources since the industrial
revolution first took hold.

Oil is the first major
global commodity showing signs of exhaustion. US Government geologists have
production peaking somewhere between 2021 and 2112. Meanwhile
China and India’s
demand surges as they more than quadruple the number of rich people on
earth!

So where will it all
end? First the good news. Those old pals, capitalism and technology will
handle resource scarcity admirably.

Oil prices could stay
high for quite a while. (I guess you were hoping I wouldn’t say that). That
would slow our economies as we adjusted to the new scarcity. But adjust we
would – by reducing demand and improving the viability of alternatives – both
fossil fuel and renewable. And the alternatives will keep getting cheaper.

But the thing that
really scares me is about too many resources, not too
few.

Read
the full article
here.