But the popularity is reaching a point where the demand can not keep up with the supply. The sales of Pickups has risen nationwide more than 19 percent in a year on year basis for raw sales figures, and according the Wall Street Journal. The Ford’s F-series was the leader of the pack, with a 49 percent sales this year.

However dealerships aren’t the only ones cashing in, car hire and van hire companies are noticing an increasing interest in renting trucks.

The Donovan & Bauer Auto Group in particular is seeing its truck sales roaring at a Chevrolet, Buick and Pontiac dealership where truck sales account for nearly three-quarters of its business, said Troy Donovan, the dealership’s sales manager and treasurer.

“All of these things are coming together — new designs, new features once mainly found in cars, better fuel economy — and that’s been good,” said Matt Clark, general manager of Humes Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge and Sprinter in Waterford. “A couple of years ago, when the gas prices were high, sales were softening. But in the last 15 months or so, sales have nearly doubled.”

Mervyn King, the Bank of England Governor, summed it up best: “Dealing with a banking crisis was difficult enough,” he said the other week, “but at least there were public-sector balance sheets on to which the problems could be moved. Once you move into sovereign debt, there is no answer; there’s no backstop.”

In other words, were this a computer game, the politicians would be down to their last life. Any mistake now and it really is Game Over. Or to pick a slightly more traditional game, it is rather like a session of pass-the-parcel which is fast approaching the end of the line.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/edmundconway/7770265/Is-Europe-heading-for-a-meltdown.html

Both the Greek government and its citizens have blamed international banks for fanning the flames of the debt crisis with comments about Greece’s likely default, actions that are causing the country’s borrowing costs to soar.

“I wouldn’t rule out that (legal action) might be a recourse. But we need to let due process (take its course) and then make our judgments once we get the results from the investigations,” Papandreou said in a CNN interview broadcast Sunday.

He did not elaborate further on any actions against U.S. banks.

Continued…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/16/greece-may-take-legal-act_n_577854.html#movers

Their new research argues that estimates of conventional reserves should be downgraded from 1,150bn to 1,350bn barrels to between 850bn and 900bn barrels and claims that demand may outstrip supply as early as 2014. The researchers claim it is an open secret that OPEC is likely to have inflated its reserves, but that the International Energy Agency (IEA), BP, the Energy Information Administration and World Oil do not take this into account in their statistics.

“It is necessary to investigate ambiguities and sources of error that are broadly acknowledged but not taken into account in public data due to political sensitivities,” the researchers said. The paper also raises concerns that public statistics have started to incorporate non-conventional reserves such as the Canadian tar sands, where oil and gas are much more difficult to extract and may never be economically attractive to develop.
Sir David said that although the IEA was doing a good job of warning that more investment in oil and gas exploration is needed, governments need to pay more attention to independent research.

“The IEA functions through fees that are paid into it by member countries,” he said. “We’re not operating under that basis. This is objective analysis. We’re not sitting on any oil fields. It’s critically important that reserves have been overstated, and if you take this into account, we’re talking supply not meeting demand in 2014-2015.”

Continued…

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/7500669/Oil-reserves-exaggerated-by-one-third.html

The Bank of England released the results today that show a 25 per cent fall in January, down from 3.92 per cent in December and the lowest rate recorded since comparable records began in 1997.

The Business Banks stopped collating information on 95 per cent loan-to-value mortgages in 2008 as there were so few on the market at the time. But there are growing signs that lenders are becoming more willing to lend to borrowers with smaller deposits, although there is unlikely to be a return to the abundance of 95, 100 and 125 per cent mortgages seen before the credit crunch.

The number of deals available to people who need to borrow up to 90 per cent of the value of their home jumped by 26 per cent in January, while Nationwide yesterday said that it was reducing the minimum deposit people needed to put down to qualify for its best rates from 40 per cent to 30 per cent on nearly half of its mortgage products.