It's newly good to live in places like Williston, North Dakota. About one homeowner a day in such places is becoming a millionaire at current oil hyper-prices. They are, of course, the people whose houses sit over the newly economically viable Bakken shale formation.

The number of taxpayers reporting adjusted gross income of more than $1 million in North Dakota rose from 266 in 2005 to 388 in 2006, [tax analyst] Strombeck said. The 2007 numbers won't be known until October, she said.

Bruce Gjovig, director of the University of North Dakota's Center for Innovation, said his informal survey estimates the number of new millionaires in Mountrail County, one of the biggest drilling areas of the Bakken, may be as many as 2,000 — or nearly a third of the county's population — in the next three to five years.

[via AP]

Congress has a mind to save us all from speculators and their evil-doing ways in commodities markets. Trouble is, as the following Bloomberg figure shows, oil prices have ramped hugely over the last year despite the number of open contracts having peaked almost twelve months ago. In other words, by at least one measure the influence of speculators in commodities futures markets is down, not up.

If Congress is set to save us from speculators, who will save us from Congress?

[via Bloomberg]

I have various proprietary tools I have created to track layoffs, and they are all through the roof right now. Admittedly the tools have only been around for one economic cycle, but the explosion in layoffs I've been observing over the last ten days is like nothing in recent memory.

Remarkable stuff, and it shows up in Google Trends.

So, the venture capital "asset class" is in crisis. Or at least that's what the NVCA is saying today as it rings the alarm bell asking for politicians, regulators, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, dogcatchers, presidential candidates, philatelists, etc., to do something -- anything! -- about it.

Of course, readers of this blog won't be surprised at news that this is the first quarter in recent history in which there have been zero, zip, nada VC-backed IPOs. I wrote about that fact here last week, and the story was picked up over the weekend by the good folks at the NY Times. So, no surprise.

Anyway, some quick points on the crisis claim:

• Venture capital is not in crisis. It is a cyclical, bubble-driven business, and it is between bubbles.
• Sarbanes-Oxley hasn't helped, admittedly, but that is not the core issue. Among other things, the industry hasn't been able to find enough companies about which Wall Street can get excited.
• Venture capital still has too much money under management.
• Average fund size remains too large. Adjusted for inflation, and based on pre-bubble 1994 figures, the median VC fund size in 2008 would be $100m, not the current $200m figure.

As an aside, I'm fond of the claim from entrepreneurs cited in the release saying that they don't want to go public anyway. Damn straight! That'll teach those Wall Street bastards! We don't want your million of dollars. We don't want to be rich. We don't want ... wait, maybe we do.

I like this quote from Andy Rappaport of August Capital about social investing -- the idea that you can do good via investing in social funds:

A lot of socially responsible funds have this idea that they’ll provide a social return, but you’ll have to accept a below-average financial return. I disagree. Once you give a business an opportunity to make a below-average return, you make it more likely it will.

Right on.

[via VCJ]

Many moons ago I wrote a piece for Men's Journal -- yes, that's just the kind of renaissance guy I am -- on the joys of cycle-climbing. I had originally planned on chronicling my effort to do the equivalent of the Seven Summits of biking; that is, chronicling summiting on bicycle the highest road on all seven continents.  (Yes, there is a road on Antarctica.) That didn't work out, so I wrote a general thing about anaerobic hill-climbing efforts instead.

Anyway, I got to thinking about cycle-climbing today when reading the excellent NYT "The Climb" blog about one journo's training to do L'Etape du Tour. I am so-oooooo envious.

More here and here and here.