President Felipe Calderon said Mexico must move urgently to reverse declines in oil output and reserves and proposed allowing foreign and private companies to refine, produce and transport crude.

“We have to act now because we’re running out of time and out of oil,” Calderon said yesterday during a 13-minute, nationally televised speech from Mexico City. He spoke after his party presented an energy reform proposal to the Senate.

Bringing outside companies into Mexico’s oil industry would free up cash that Petroleos Mexicanos, the state oil company, could use for energy exploration. Calderon’s bill doesn’t propose changes to the constitution, which reserves the ownership of oil and gas to the state and bans any accord that would give outside companies an equity stake in oil projects. Read more…

Two of the world’s biggest oil companies, BP and ConocoPhillips, joined forces Tuesday to try to break a longstanding deadlock over Alaska’s vast reserves of natural gas. They said they would spend billions to build a pipeline from the North Slope to feed energy-hungry markets in the United States and Canada.

The proposal won praise from Alaska’s governor, Sarah Palin. “It’s a good day,” she told reporters in Alaska.

The announcement comes at a time when consumption of natural gas in the United States is increasing and conventional production is declining. Natural gas is cleaner than other power sources, like coal, and analysts say it is becoming increasingly critical to the nation’s energy needs. Read more…

Praise for former Chairman Alan Greenspan has been muted by critics who blame him for current economic troubles.

Alan Greenspan retired in January 2006 as one of history’s most lauded Federal Reserve Board chairmen, the subject of accolades that stopped just short of deification.

But just as markets have a way of overshooting both on the way up and on the way down, the needle on Greenspan’s Fed tenure has swung from adulation to denunciation in a matter of months.

With the economy now sputtering, Greenspan has increasingly been tagged as “Mr. Bubble” — the ideologue whose loose-money policies and lax regulation are blamed for the continuing real estate collapse, the near-meltdown of the mortgage industry and the toppling of some Wall Street giants. Read more…

In another sign of a shake-out in the competitive flat-panel television market, Royal Philips Electronics, the Dutch consumer electronics giant, said it would no longer manufacture televisions for sale in the United States or Canada.

Philips-branded TVs will still be sold, but the sets will now be made under license by Funai Electric for at least five years. While not a well-known consumer brand in the United States, Funai, based in Tokyo, already sells Emerson, Sylvania, Symphonic and other lower-priced brands in the North American market. Read more…

EMC Corp., the world’s largest maker of storage computers, said Tuesday that it had reached an agreement to buy Iomega Corp. for about $213 million in cash after raising its original bid by almost 20%.

The deal values Iomega at $3.85 a share. Last month, EMC offered $3.25 a share for San Diego-based Iomega, a maker of data-storage products.

Iomega rebuffed that proposal March 10, saying it wasn’t better than a pending purchase agreement with Great Wall Technology Co. A week later, Iomega said EMC’s new bid of $3.75 a share was superior to the Great Wall deal. Read more…

Economic damage equals $143 for every person on the planet

The International Monetary Fund estimated Tuesday that the subprime mortgage crisis could suck almost $1 trillion from the world economy, a loss that is only just starting to ripple across America and could worsen as it moves deeper into the financial markets.

Major financial-services firms have reported losses of $193 billion. The IMF added up the batches of bad mortgages, suspect securities and other commercial loans to predict total losses of $945 billion, which translates into about $143 for each person on Earth. Read more…

Washington Mutual Inc (WM.N: Quote, Profile, Research), battered by mortgage delinquencies and defaults, said Tuesday it obtained a $7 billion capital injection from private equity firm TPG Inc and other investors, but projected a $1.1 billion quarterly loss and set plans to eliminate 3,000 jobs.

The largest U.S. savings-and-loan also said it will close its 186 stand-alone home lending offices and stop offering loans through mortgage brokers by the end of June. It will instead offer mortgages in its roughly 2,300 retail branches, where some of the affected workers will be offered jobs. Read more…