Free Republic

The slowdown in the Permian production growth is likely to be just temporary, and the U.S. shale boom is unlikely to end soon, the new U.S. Secretary of Energy, Dan Brouillette, told Bloomberg in an interview on Tuesday. U.S. oil production will continue to grow, despite the slowdown which is already evident across the shale patch, Brouillette said.

The Texas Workforce Commission released state employment data today for the month of December, and job growth in the Lone Star State continues to lead, and in fact carry the nation’s improving labor market as the chart above shows. Here are some highlights of the December employment report for Texas:1. Texas ended the year with the state’s largest ever year-over-year payroll gain with the eye-popping addition of 457,900 new jobs between December 2013 and December 2014. That’s more than 1,700 new payroll jobs that were added every business day last year in the Lone Star State, and 220 new jobs...