The White House has not settled on a plan for working with Congress to raise the federal debt limit, U.S. budget director Mick Mulvaney said on Thursday, even as the deadline loomed for the government to increase its borrowing authority. The Trump administration has urged Congress to increase the debt limit before it heads out for its August recess, but Mulvaney said officials had not decided what form the legislation should take. Source Reuters
It is less than two months since U.S. President Donald Trump travelled to Texas to declare that the U.S. energy industry, laid low by this year’s oil price crash, was back on its feet. “We’re OK now,” the president told the assembled crowd.
But bankruptcy numbers released this week tell a different story. Another 16 upstream U.S. oil and gas companies — producers and service providers — hit the wall in August, the same number as in July, according to law firm Haynes and Boone. Source Financial Post
The Bank of Italy said Italy’s public debt hit a new high of 2,560.5 billion euros in July, up 29.9 billion with respect to June. Source Ansa
Austria has said it still supports the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, despite growing reservations about the project in parts of Europe following the poisoning of Russian opposition figure Aleksei Navalny. Source Radio Free Europe
