Dave Richmond and Matt Curfman will be attending the Inland Securities Corporation Educational Meeting on Tuesday, June 15 and Wednesday, June 16. They will be receiving updates on Inland Western and Inland American. They will also learn the Inland Group’s position on acquisitions and financing in today’s environment.

Dave and Matt are looking forward to learning new information to share with clients who hold these investments.

Although  environmentally disastrous (see: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/06/caught_in_the_oil.html), the BP oil spill is not large enough on its own to shrink the amount of supply and affect oil prices, but it does have a larger, indirect impact.

Minerals Management Service (MMS) just announced Thursday that they will not approve any shallow water exploratory drilling until safety standards are reviewed and agreed upon.  This caused shallow drillers who, until yesterday, had been spared the large hits to their stock to sell off, many as much as 10%.  The larger question is two-fold:  what does this do to the political climate and the debate on drilling as a source of energy?  If it curtails or slows drilling, there would be a large and far-reaching impact.  Second, how bad does the spill get and are other areas or sectors of the economy hit that in theory had nothing to do with this spill?

On Wednesday, two U.S. senators asked BP to suspend dividend payments to shareholders until the full costs for cleaning up the spill can be determined. Yesterday, two key BP (NYSE” BP) debt ratings were downgraded by Fitch Ratings from “AA-plus” to “AA” and were also placed on watch for continued lowering. Although the oil spill has an effect on stock and oil prices, to what degree is still unknown at this point.

A couple of articles that may be of interest:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/37488441

http://www.advisoranalyst.com/glablog/2010/06/01/the-oil-spill-disasters-and-opportunities/