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The 6-foot-4-inch Texan nicknamed “Big Ed” said steering the nation’s largest automaker after bankruptcy is “a public service.” People who know him say he can meet GM’s need for the type of transformation he orchestrated at Dallas-based AT&T.

Light, sweet crude oil for July delivery recently traded $1, or 1.4%, higher at $71.01 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. July crude set an intraday high of $71.65 a barrel, a seven-month high. Brent crude on the ICE Futures exchange traded 76 cents, or 1.1%, higher at $70.38 a barrel.

Oil prices began to rise late Tuesday after the American Petroleum Institute, an energy industry group, reported a 6 million-barrel draw on crude stockpiles in the week ended June 5. Analysts surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires had given an average forecast of a 700,000 barrel decline.

The Department of Energy will release its oil inventory data at 10:30 a.m. EDT.

“The market was surprised,” said Morgan Downey trader at Standard Chartered. “We are going to $90 dollars before OPEC opens the spigots.”

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has cut production by at least 3 million barrels a day, well above the amount that the global economic downturn has reduced demand, Downey said.

“Until OPEC increases production or consumers are reluctant to bear high prices we are going to see an increase in the crude price,” Downey said.

Prices topping $100 a barrel could prompt OPEC to raise production, a Kuwaiti official said Wednesday.

“All OPEC members are concerned about high oil prices and they do not want very high prices,” Nawal Al Fuzaia, the oil ministry’s assistant undersecretary of economic affairs, told Zawya Dow Jones. Fuzaia said $100 is a very high price for oil and a price range of $70-75 would be suitable for investment in oil production.

While analysts are expecting oil inventories to fall in U.S. government data, they also predict an 800,000 barrel increase in gasoline stockpiles, while distillates, including heating oil and diesel, are seen increasing by 1.5 million barrels. Analysts see U.S. refineries operating at 86.8% of capacity, up 0.5 percentage point.

Some market participants are still wary of the spike in oil prices in recent months, as demand remains weak and inventories were recently at their highest since 1990. The oil price has more than doubled from their February low.

The weakening of the dollar against the euro has also boosted the oil price in recent days, as investors are looking at commodities as a hedge against inflation. But tightening supplies are currently the main factor, traders said.

“The weakness in the dollar is taking a back seat over the inventory data today,” said Peter Donovan, vice president at Vantage Trading said.

His commitment started to pay off in 2000, when some 50,000 transactions suddenly passed through his system in just two months — more than the previous three and a half years combined. By that November, E-Gold, now with 20 employees, had processed 1 million transactions, and Jackson’s business reputation was growing. He was invited to speak at the prestigious World Gold Council conference in Rome, the gold mining industry’s leading event. In 2001, the growth continued, with customer accounts expanding from 134,000 to nearly 288,000, holding about $16 million in value.

While officials at the Royal Canadian Mint have not publicly released a value, insiders have confirmed that auditors are trying to track precious metals, believed to be gold, worth in the “double digits” of millions.

At today’s prices, $10 million worth of gold would weigh more than 250 kilograms.

An external audit, launched in early March, is trying to reconcile the mint’s records with the physical stocks of gold, silver, platinum and palladium, the four precious metals used by the Crown corporation in its production of coins and collector sets.

Mint officials remain confident that bookkeeping errors are to blame. But they haven’t ruled out theft and some at the institution now believe a police probe is inevitable if the review – due to be released in two weeks – is unable to provide good answers.

Given the high value of the missing metals, NDP MP Thomas Mulcair said yesterday that mint staff should be calling on police to immediately launch a criminal investigation.

“There’s no possible way to explain the loss of tens of millions of dollars through simple administrative or bureaucratic foul-ups and missteps,” he said in an interview.

He faulted the Conservative government for not being more forthcoming about the controversy.

“People understand that mistakes happen … but they tried to dismiss the whole thing from the beginning,” said Mulcair (Outremont). “Well, if there’s tens of millions of dollars missing, there’s clearly lots to worry about… This is a really serious amount of money and it deserves really serious attention.”

Liberal MP Joe Volpe (Eglinton—Lawrence) said the mint’s international reputation – it produces coins for at least 12 other nations – is taking a battering each day the probe drags on with the prospect security may have been breached.

“How long does it take for this government to figure out what is going on?” Volpe said. “Either money is running out the door or they have a serious problem making two and two add up to four.”

In fact, Volpe suggested the mint and the government already know the results of the audit and are sitting on bad news. “I suspect they have the answer and they have reason for not publicizing it,” he said.

Mint spokeswoman Christine Aquino yesterday declined to comment on the value of the metals or any aspect of the audit.

“We’re going to wait for the review to come out in the next couple of weeks,” she said.

However, last week she said an unprecedented demand for gold in 2008 put pressure on the mint’s internal control systems, which led to the “unreconciled difference” between the gold on hand and the value recorded in the mint’s books.

The No. 1 U.S. automaker, which filed for bankruptcy on June 1, plans to undertake a quick sale process that would allow a much smaller company to emerge from court protection in as little as 60-90 days.

GM said the new chairman will take over when the smaller, restructured company is formed in the next few months. The automaker’s current interim chairman, Kent Kresa, will continue to serve in that position until then.

Kresa, former chief executive of Northrop Grumman Corp, became GM chairman in March when the Obama administration ousted Rick Wagoner, who had been both GM’s chief executive and chairman.

Whitacre and Kresa, along with current board members Philip Laskawy, Kathryn Marinello, Erroll Davis Jr, E. Neville Isdell and Chief Executive Officer Fritz Henderson, will serve as the “nucleus” of the restructured company’s board, GM said in a statement.

“Arcandor AG today filed with the Essen District Court to open insolvency proceedings due to threatening illiquidity,” the statement said.

Travel agency Thomas Cook, in which Arcandor holds a 52-percent stake, “will remain unaffected by the insolvency proceedings,” the statement added.

The Anglo-Dutch oil giant faced a lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan under the Alien Tort Claims Act, on allegations that it was complicit in the 1995 deaths of Mr. Saro-Wiwa and other activists. The lawsuit was brought by family members and surviving activists.

Shell has denied it played any role in the execution of Mr. Saro-Wiwa by the military government. In a statement, Malcolm Brinded, head of the company’s exploration and production unit, said: “Shell has always maintained the allegations were false. While we were prepared to go to court to clear our name, we believe the right way forward is to focus on the future for Ogoni people, which is important for peace and stability in the region.”

A massive oil spill in Ogoniland in 1970 inspired Mr. Saro-Wiwa, founder of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People to launch two decades later a campaign against Shell’s Nigerian onshore unit. The campaign led to the abandoning of oil production in Ogoniland in 1993.

The Ogonis’ plight was the focus of global criticism of the oil industry when Mr. Saro-Wiwa and eight other activists were executed by a Nigerian military regime in 1995.

Plaintiffs said $5 million of the settlement amount would go into a trust fund for the Ogoni people and the balance for lawyers fees and to the 10 plaintiffs who brought the case.

“It has been a good case to help set the foundation for allowing human rights plaintiffs to get some degree of accountability from corporations,” said Paul Hoffman, the trial counsel for the plaintiffs.

Mr. Hoffman said the plaintiffs decided to settle because “after 13 years, they believed this was a satisfactory result.”

Guo Shuqing, the chairman of state-controlled China Construction Bank (CCB), also said he is exploring the possibility of issuing loans to trading companies in yuan, allowing Chinese and foreign companies to settle their bills in yuan rather than in dollars.

Mr Guo said the issuing of yuan bonds in Hong Kong and Shanghai would help to develop the debt markets in China and promote the yuan as a major international currency.

It was the first time the head of a major Chinese bank has called for the wider use of the yuan, although a chorus of senior government officials have already voiced their concerns about the stability of the dollar and have said the yuan should be used more widely.

“I think the US government and the World Bank can consider the issuing of renminbi bonds,” he said, asking for a “mutual cooperation” between the US and China to promote Chinese financial services. He said bond issuance could be relatively small, at between 1bn and 3bn yuan (£100m to £300m).

HSBC and Standard Chartered have both said they are preparing to issue bonds denominated in yuan.

Of those two, Britain is the only one with its sovereign credit rating on “negative” watch, suggesting if S&P is to cut another sovereign it’s the UK triple-A rating that could go.

The sheer scale of government borrowing and projected deficits over coming years, coupled with the banking sector’s growing liabilities, mean a downgrade could be on the cards if policy steps fail to impress the ratings agencies.

Austria still has its triple-A rating and is on “stable” outlook. But that could change if financial and economic turmoil in the Baltics and Eastern Europe, to which Austrian banks have large exposure, deepens.

“The UK is a point of reference. If S&P is worried about Ireland’s exposure to banks, it could well be worried about UK’s exposure to banks,” said Ciaran O’Hagan, senior strategist at Societe Generale in Paris.

Britain will borrow 175 billion billion pounds this fiscal year and the budget deficit will swell to a record 12.4 percent of GDP.

O’Hagan noted that “contingent liabilities” of the UK financial sector, mostly banks’, are estimated at almost 30 percent percent of gross domestic product and will almost certainly rise this year.