Courses Infomation

Oil on the Brain by Lisa Margonelli

Oil on the Brain by Lisa Margonelli

Oil on the Brain is a smart, surprisingly funny account of the oil industry—the people, economies, and pipelines that bring us petroleum, brilliantly illuminating a world we encounter every day.

Americans buy ten thousand gallons of gasoline a second, without giving it much of a thought. Where does all this gas come from? Lisa Margonelli’s desire to learn took her on a one-hundred thousand mile journey from her local gas station to oil fields half a world away. In search of the truth behind the myths, she wriggled her way into some of the most off-limits places on earth: the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the New York Mercantile Exchange’s crude oil market, oil fields from Venezuela, to Texas, to Chad, and even an Iranian oil platform where the United States fought a forgotten one-day battle.

In a story by turns surreal and alarming, Margonelli meets lonely workers on a Texas drilling rig, an oil analyst who almost gave birth on the NYMEX trading floor, Chadian villagers who are said to wander the oil fields in the guise of lions, a Nigerian warlord who changed the world price of oil with a single cell phone call, and Shanghai bureaucrats who dream of creating a new Detroit.

Deftly piecing together the mammoth economy of oil, Margonelli finds a series of stark warning signs for American drivers.

What is forex?

Quite simply, it’s the global market that allows one to trade two currencies against each other.

If you think one currency will be stronger versus the other, and you end up correct, then you can make a profit.

If you’ve ever traveled to another country, you usually had to find a currency exchange booth at the airport, and then exchange the money you have in your wallet into the currency of the country you are visiting.

Foreign Exchange
You go up to the counter and notice a screen displaying different exchange rates for different currencies.

An exchange rate is the relative price of two currencies from two different countries.

You find “Japanese yen” and think to yourself, “WOW! My one dollar is worth 100 yen?! And I have ten dollars! I’m going to be rich!!!”
When you do this, you’ve essentially participated in the forex market!

You’ve exchanged one currency for another.

Or in forex trading terms, assuming you’re an American visiting Japan, you’ve sold dollars and bought yen.

Currency Exchange

Before you fly back home, you stop by the currency exchange booth to exchange the yen that you miraculously have left over (Tokyo is expensive!) and notice the exchange rates have changed.

It’s these changes in the exchange rates that allow you to make money in the foreign exchange market.

Salepage : Oil on the Brain by Lisa Margonelli