Bass, like PM Harper, thinks Trump is going to push back hard on China wrt to trade.

This is a test of the Generalized Protective Momentum (GPM) strategy from JW Keuning and Wouter Keller. The strategy builds off of the authors’ popular Protective Asset Allocation (PAA) model.

Peter Tertzakian

Examining the headline plays in the United States, the amount of oil and associated gas that can be brought out of the ground with the grinding pipes and bits of one rig has increased in the range of four-fold since 2012.

Take for example the oil-soaked Permian Basin in Texas. Back in 2012 a rig working in the region for one month could drill enough rock to add 150 BOE/d of average production. Four years later the output from one drilling rig was over 600 BOE/d. In the prime postal codes of the Eagle Ford, the rates are over 1,600 BOE/d! No wonder the OPEC-and-friends cartel is concerned about what’s happening on this side of the world.

The reasons for the productivity improvements are many: Drilling faster and more accurately; employing new-age, alternating-current (AC) electric rigs; migrating to development drilling on multi-well pads; using rigs that “walk” and move quickly from one location to the next; high-grading of prospects to the best areas; and realizing learning-curve effects from completion technologies that are leading to more production from each well.  .....

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It’s early days yet. Productivity gains have been impressive in a short period of time, in select areas of the vast WCSB. Learning curve effects are just starting to kick in, so the reserve and production potential of natural gas and low-carbon liquids in the wider WCSB is looking promising.
In past columns I’ve made the claim that the recent upturn in the Canadian oil and gas industry – increasing capital expenditures and rig counts – is being driven by innovation, efficiency and speed to market. The Canadian rig productivity data helps to validate that claim, and explains the shift in investment emphasis away from the oil sands toward resource plays in Saskatchewan, Alberta and BC.

The Economist
EVERY January more than 10,000 economists meet for the annual conference of the American Economic Association (AEA). This year, the shindig was in balmy Chicago, a stone’s throw from its second-tallest building, the name TRUMP stamped in extra-large letters across its base. Most papers had been written months in advance; few sessions tackled the electoral earthquake in November. Yet there was no mistaking the renewed sense, following its failure to foresee the 2007-08 financial crisis, of an academic field in a crisis of its own. The election was seen as a defeat for liberalisation and globalisation, and hence for an economics profession that had championed them. If economists wish to remain relevant and useful, the modest hand-wringing at this year’s meetings will need to yield to much deeper self-reflection.
Their theories had always shown that globalisation would produce losers as well as winners. But too many economists worried that emphasising these costs might undermine support for liberal policies. A “circle the wagons” approach to criticism of globalisation weakened the case for mitigating policies that might have protected it from a Trumpian backlash. Perhaps the greatest omissions were the questions not asked at all. Most dismal scientists exclude politics from their models altogether. As Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate, put it on one star-studded AEA panel, economists need to pay attention not just to what is theoretically feasible but also to “what is likely to happen given how the political system works”......

It’s the politics, stupid
Many economists shy away from such questions, happy to treat politics, like physics, as something that is economically important but fundamentally the business of other fields. But when ignoring those fields makes economic-policy recommendations irrelevant, broadening the scope of inquiry within the profession becomes essential. Some justifiably worry that taking more account of politics could destroy what credibility economists have left as impartial, apolitical experts. Yet politics-free models are no insulation from political pressures—just ask a climate scientist—and nothing would boost economists’ reputations more than results which match, and even predict, critical outcomes.
Political and social institutions are much harder to model and quantify than commodity or labour markets. But a qualitative approach might actually be far more scientific than equations offering little guide to how the future will unfold. Donald Trump campaigned (and may well govern) by castigating the uselessness of experts. To prepare for a time when expertise comes back into fashion, economists should renew their commitment to generating knowledge that matters.

I often show this video at the start of my classes. BTW, Political Economy is at the root of the classical economics-  Smith (wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments) and Ricardo and Malthus (whose adopted policies against the poor are a black mark on our science).

Noah Smith
Lots of economic policy debates end up going like this: First, one economist or policy wonk will propose a government intervention -- a minimum wage increase, a tax on sugar or subsidies for solar electricity. Another person, usually someone of a more free-market bent, will demand to know exactly which market failure justifies the intervention. A market failure, in the parlance of economics, means a situation in which free markets produce wasteful outcomes. If the advocate can’t produce a theory justifying the policy, the critic claims triumph. If the advocate can find a theory that seems to support the intervention, the critic will typically then criticize the assumptions of the theory. Since most econ theories are highly stylized and have questionable ability to fit the facts, this means that free marketers claim victory quite a lot.
The demand to demonstrate a market failure isn’t fair, because it puts too much burden of proof on advocates of intervention. But it’s often rhetorically effective, because of two sociological quirks. First, many people assumes that free markets are the natural state of things. The flow and bustle of the business world seems much like a jungle, while government action feels forced and artificial. Government interventions can seem a lot like medical procedures. And of course it makes sense for doctors to diagnose an ailment before they start prescribing treatments. The medical rule of first, do no harm is a good one because nature has had millions of years to turn human bodies into self-correcting systems. That principle also makes sense for human societies tampering with natural environments.
But economies are a little bit different from natural ecosystems or the human body. Where the latter is the result of evolution, economies are defined by systems of rules, made by human beings. In some cases, those systems appear to lead to a lot of wealth and prosperity -- the U.S., Japan and much of Europe, for instance. In other cases, as in many poor countries, markets are dysfunctional, inefficient and fail to produce growth. We can’t always know why.
Because the economy is to a large extent a human construct, there’s no reason not to believe that we should always be tinkering and trying to improve it. Think of the economy as somewhere between a jungle and a factory -- the latter is something that can almost always benefit from intentional improvement.
The second sociological quirk behind the show-me-the-market-failure argument is the econ profession’s lingering fetish for theory. There’s a shift underway from what labor economist David Card calls mathematical philosophy to a more data-focused discipline, but theory is still far more privileged and prized in economics than in many natural sciences. The insistence on citing a theory can be a sort of measuring contest.
In fact, economic theory suggests that real-world markets are probably a dense thicket of market failures -- asymmetric information, limited enforceability of contracts, incomplete markets, externalities, public goods and human irrationality. Often, one policy is needed to correct for the failings of another -- a phenomenon economists call the theory of the second-best. It can be politically easier to patch the system up than to overhaul it entirely.

But these theories are usually highly abstract. In order to make the math work, economists simplify their models so much that it can be hard to apply the theories to specific cases -- they end up being more like parables. That’s why when free-marketers demand to see a theory supporting a particular intervention in the real world, they’re making what usually amounts to an impossible demand.
So I propose we minimize our use of the show-me-the-market-failure argument. Sometimes there are policies that people have tried in the past, which seem to work even though it’s hard to tell exactly why. Public education is a great example. It seems to make economies more prosperous, and most economists support it, but no one can point to just why the free market doesn’t educate enough people on its own. Road-building is another -- there are essentially no countries with mostly private high-quality road systems, and economists struggle to explain why.
We know these government interventions work; figuring out why they work is a task for the future. Like the people who chewed tree bark to relieve pain long before the discovery of aspirin, or the engineers who used lithium-ion batteries without quite understanding the physics, sometimes it pays to go with evidence even before you have a theory in hand.

Noah Smith
In 2015, Forbes writer Adam Ozimek suggested that a “new liberal consensus” is forming in the economic-policy world. The data back him up. Many economics professors now tend to favor government intervention in the economy more than the general public. And the profession’s biggest public stars, from Paul Krugman to Thomas Piketty to Joseph Stiglitz, are now more likely to lean to the left than to the right. Meanwhile, I’ve tried to document the flood of new research showing that policies like public housing, welfare and public education spending are more beneficial than conservatives have recognized in decades past.
But there are not one, but two big trends in liberal economic thinking. One wants to modify the economic thinking of the past few decades, and the other wants to rip it up. I expect to see a lot of the economic debate in the coming years play out not between the left and right, but between these two strains of thought.
The research and people I’ve been writing about fit into what we might call the New Center-Left Consensus. This strain of thought is based on data and empiricism. Support for higher minimum wages, for example, has grown among economists because a large amount of careful empirical analysis has shown that minimum wage hikes don’t usually cause sizable immediate disruptions in local labor markets. These economists aren’t ignorant of the basic theory of labor supply and demand -- the kind that every undergrad econ student is forced to learn. They just realize that it might not be the right theory in this case.
The New Center-Left Consensus is attractive to academics and policy wonks. It draws on an eclectic mix of mainstream economic theory, empirical studies and historical experience. It refuses to assume, as many conservatives and libertarians do, that free markets are always the best unless there is a glaring case for government intervention. It’s more willing to entertain all kinds of ways that government can improve the economy, from welfare to infrastructure spending to regulation, but it also recognizes that these won’t always work. It embraces a philosophy of careful experimentation. Sometimes the new center-left is even in favor of deregulation -- for example, loosening zoning restrictions and reducing occupational licensing. It’s not ideologically opposed to the free market.