TABLE OF CONSEQUENCES

If you can find the interesting part of this chart you're pretty sharp.

Earlier this year we took some profits in our energy positions. One of the reasons we took them is because they were at five year highs. The other reason is in this chart. You could call it the German Problem.

Germany gets much of its oil and gas from Russia, not a position we'd much want to be in.Three of the companies in the chart we've owned, we continue to own and we will be buying more on any reasonable weakness.

With the Ukraine mess Germany finds itself being pushed and pulled--pushed by the US and some its allies to impose more sanctions and pulled by Russia to lighten up. Given what we know about the commerce and amount of money changing hands between the two which way do you think Germany's going to go?

Owning energy companies that depend for a large slice of their business on foreign governments can be risky, to say the least, a fact Germany is learning the hard way. There is and has been anti-US sentiment in Germany and other countries. This is hardly new. What is new is it's growing.

The current administration is one of the weakest, least competent to occupy the Oval Office in foreign policy for some time. But there have been plenty of others. It's been an on-going drought in modern America. And as Robert Louis Stevenson noted long ago: "Everyone, sooner or later, takes a seat at the table of consequences." 

To comply with full disclosure we and our clients own three of the stocks in the chart.