Rating: 
Summary: The peak of oil production and the fate of the world economy
Review: There are many excellent books on the approaching peak of oil extraction (by Deffeyes, Heinberg, Goodstein, Youngquist, to name a few), but none of the books on this subject so far addressed the consequences of a permanently declining world oil production for the financial markets. The book under review is the first book to explore this topic in greater detail. In the first part, the book reviews the geological constraints underlying the coming peak of oil production (expected to hit the world within the next 6 years). A review of alternative energy sources (from natural gas and coal to fusion and solar energy) follows ending in the conclusion that no real substitute for oil seem to exist. The authors then explain why the economy needs to grow in the future in order to be able to service the huge debt loads dominating the world economies. Taken together, they conclude that inflation is the inevitable fate of the world economy. In the second part of the book, the authors discuss various investment strategies designed to take advantage of these trends. Overall this is a very important book which should be welcomed by all investors who are concerned about the long term safety of their retirement savings. I see its main value not in the specific portfolio recommendations given in the second part, but in the more general speculations (outlined in the first part of the book) about the forces shaping our economic future. The book is not perfect but I give it 5 stars mainly because this extremely important subject is not discussed in any other investment book. I am quite sure that many more books on this subject will be published in the coming years. This book is the first one in a long series of books to come.
Rating:
Summary: Thinking About the Future
Review: There have been several books about the future of the oil economy. Nearly everyone who thinks about it all realizes that the easy to find oil has been found and produced. We are at or near the world's peak production, and the direction in the future is grim. Oil supplies will never run out. We will always be able to get oil out of the ground. But less and less, at higher and higher prices. Today gasoline is about $2 a gallon and consumption has not declined. Europe tells us that at $5 a gallon, people keep driving. But what happens at $10 a gallon, or $25 or a hundred dollars. You probably don't keep a commute of 40 miles each way.
What I like about this book is that its orientation is to investing in ways that will keep your portfolio protected during this coming crisis. This at least shows that he is thinking about which industries will continue to do well. He also recommends a visit to hubbertpeak.com, which contains a series of papers on oil production and life post-cheap-oil.
The one thing you can say for sure is that the future won't be like the past. The Leeb's way of the future may not hold up, but the problems they discuss are real. It's up to the rest of us to decide what to do.
Rating: 
Summary: An interesting piece of fiction
Review: These doomsday scenarios are a dime a dozen. They're so easy to write, anybody can do it. You can always come up with data to support your apocalyptic conclusions. You might as well write a book about how we're going to run out of air and suffocate to death, and then show a lot of data that you dug up to prove your point. Just look at all the books that have been written in the past predicting horrendous problems which never occurred. Remember "Silent Spring" and Ehrlich's book which predicted that we should all be starving to death as we speak from world wide famine? What, you mean they were wrong? How could they be wrong? They were supported by all that great data and research. Last year all these books came out predicting the end of the world from deflation. It's hysterically funny that only a year later we have all these books predicting hyperinflation! You can always find data to prove whatever you want to prove. Now the Leebs are trying to convoince us that we are going to have a horrible oil shortage. But, people have been predicting that we would run out of oil reserves for decades. Not only have we not run out of reserves, but we have found a huge amount of new reserves that these authors said did not exist! In 1914 the U.S. Bureau of Mines predicted the world's oil supply would last 10 years. In 1939 and then again in 1951 the Interior Dept. predicted we had 13 years left before the world's oil supply would be completely depleted. Jimmy Carter predicted in 1977 that we had 10 years left before all the oil in the world would be gone. Obviously, these predictions were not even remotely close to being correct. In 1982 proven oil reserves were 677 billion barrels. In 2002 it was 1048 billion barrels. We keep finding more and more oil, even while these geniuses keep predicting that the oil that we just found doesn't exist! And, you can bet that this will keep happening, and we will continue to find more and more oil reserves that we don't even know about now. We can also adapt to rising oil prices by changing our behavior, with new technology etc. We have a tremendous ability to adapt, and find ways to deal with problems that aren't even on the radar screen yet. You can bet that since everybody is convinced that oil prices are going way up, that they have probably peaked and will heading back down again. Whatever everybody thinks is likely to happen, ususally doesn't. The Leebs also do not have a very good track record for predictions. I used to read their investment newsletter.
Rating: 
Summary: interesting idea
Review: this book is a nice introduction for investors. However the style of this book is overly simplistic. Housing boom, running out of oil, deficits, pollution and much more was too much ground to cover. While the predictions might very well come true, based on this book alone one cannot make that judgement but has to belief the author at face value.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent, but not sure of author's motives
Review: This is a lucid and stirring overview of the implications of an accellerated Hubbert's Peak for global oil production. Leeb focuses on the financial implications, but also touches on the social. Not preachy or "sky-is-falling" oriented. Very straightforward and factual.
However, Leeb manages a $100 million fund and is often featured on stock pick TV shows (CNBC, et al). So I kept wondering what his motivations might be.
One major conclusion (really the point) of the book is that you should divest from non-nimble, energy dependent holdings (S&P 500) and invest in energy, oil production and oil discovery holdings (among others). The trick is to figure out the timing of these exchanges. Hubbert's Peak theorists' dates range from Thanksgiving 2005 to US DOE 2112 [approx]. Are you willing to risk your investment portfolio on such a range?
Nonetheless, very interesting and highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Just buy it
Review: To paraphrase an ad, "just buy it." I'm a pretty sophisticated investor, and I read all the financial papers and have read a slew of investment books. Most of them have been disappointing; they stress the obvious, they're misleading, or they're just not very informative. This book is totally different; it's one of a kind. It contains an amazing amount of relevant information, boiled down so as to be completely understandable without being overwhelming. The Leebs point out a key reality that should have been obvious but that investors and analysts largely ignored in the 1990's tech boom: energy is the key to our economy, and the energy we've depended on, oil and natural gas, is finite - and production of it is going to be slowing down. This will lead to a sustained uptrend in oil prices. The Leebs explain what this means to investors - specifically, buy not just energy stocks, but gold, defense stocks, and other industries that benefit from inflation. They also explain how to protect yourself against deflation and why that's so important. And there's no hype in the book, no effort to create some easy-to-sell but unreal doom and gloom scenario - just a patient outlining of what really counts. As I said, just buy it.
Rating:
Summary: Best of its kind
Review: Unlike most books dealing with the approaching limit in the world's ability to increase oil production, this is a book that supports the view with both geological and economic evidence. For example, it notes oil prices moved to a higher level in the slower growing 2000's after being range bound in the 1990's. The book's epilogue is chilling - especailly the quote from Arthur Clarke who cites our limits on oil production as a reason he sees only a 51 percent chance for human survival. While the first half of the book makes a compelling case for higher oil prices and the inevitable inflationary and possibly deflationary consequences, the second half is a road map for investment survival in the coming tumultous years. The author's whoes portfolio in their previous book outperformed the market by about 50 percntage points and thus avoided the bear market urge investors to roll back the clock to the 1970's. This is a must read for investors, politicians and parents.
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