Estimates from experimental tests indicate that the process can recover as much as 80 percent of original oil-in-place while partially upgrading the crude oil in situ.

Korean National Oil Company’s decision to buy Harvest Energy Trust is curious on many levels. But the difficulty resource-hungry SWFs and SOEs face is that most of the plum assets--productive and located in safe jurisdictions--are already under the control of global resource heavyweights.

Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney is more concerned about the strengthening Canadian dollar right now than he is about inflation.

For the US-based investor, buying Canada right now means accessing a relatively stable, low-beta play on a global economic recovery. It means benefitting from fundamental factors that support a strong and rising Canadian dollar. It means owning solid businesses that pay sustainable distributions.

The Australian dollar has rallied over the last several months on speculation its central bank would act before its global monetary peers, but only one analyst of 20 surveyed by Bloomberg predicted a rate hike this soon.

While Canada enters this period of change with enviable strengths, Canadian businesses “will need to develop new markets as the traditional advantage of relatively open access to US markets becomes less valuable.”

The recently announced “agreement” between the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) and Verenex Energy (TSX: VNX, OTC: VRNXF) is bound to attract significant attention: LIA, a sovereign wealth fund (SWF), has become the instrument by which its sponsoring state authority has impeded market processes and damaged shareholders.

The Obama administration, the Federal Reserve and governments and central banks around the world have difficult needles to thread on several levels: scaling back fiscal spending programs to restore budgets to balance; unwinding extraordinary liquidity provisions; crafting a regulatory framework that prevents a similar situation from happening in the future.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers ushered in what’s widely acknowledged to be the worst global credit crisis since the 1930s. It’s axiomatic that credit is the lifeblood of a capitalist economy. Signs that credit is circulating are therefore good. According to Statistics Canada, Canadian household and corporate borrowing rebounded in the second quarter.

The Middle Kingdom, its leaders focused on maintaining social order through managed economic growth, is deploying its vast excess currency reserves through SOEs such as PetroChina and sovereign wealth funds (SWF) such as China Investment Corp (CIC) to buy overseas commodity assets.