• Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan told reporters his country would pursue the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, regardless of diplomatic costs, according to an Agence France-Presse report. Northern Iraq holds some of its largest oil fields, including Kirkuk, the source of much of Iraq's exports.
• "If they start shelling across the border, the price is going to go up,'' said Addison Armstrong, director of market research at TFS Energy LLC in Stamford, Connecticut. "When there is tension in the world, oil gets bid up.''

This unpredictability in the region has kept oil prices up even though demand is not as strong as speculators anticipated during its rise over the last few years. For me, this is an unfortunate irony as I read this news after returning from a breakfast meeting where I told an associate, "Oil will be $60 a barrel before it is $100, unless war breaks out somewhere." This is very sad to me, because just the possibilty of war creates a rise in oil prices that I envision causes more pain for those at the bottom of the economic strata barely getting by now.