Another force behind the merger mania may be a perverse result of weak oil-share prices: it is now cheaper to buy oil reserves on Wall Street than by drilling your own well.
Bars of olive-oil soap share counter space with piles of lokum (Turkish Delight) and slabs of amber-hued honeycomb.
The bigger question, though, is where both oil and share prices are headed after that.
Oil prices go up, most oil company share prices go up with it.
FORBES: Brazil Oil Giant Petrobras Blames Dollar For Collapse
In part, this is due to a quirk of the rules that oblige Western oil firms to share the crude they produce with state-owned oil firms in many countries.
ECONOMIST: Rising oil price equals rising profits, right? Wrong
What's more, oil's share of the global energy market is down from almost 50% at the time of the oil shock of 1973.
Buying a stake will allow oil companies to add their share of Rosneft's oil and gas to their books immediately.
Alaskans generally support Palin's program, and they like how she's tried to press the oil companies to share more of the wealth with the state.
Look at the chart for 1973-79 when the price of oil quadrupled and you will see that oil as a share of gdp rose to 9.5% from 6%.
Significant challenges remain: relations with the central government in Baghdad remain vexed, not least over how to share oil revenue and the precise demarcation of the border between the Kurdish region and the rest of the country.
And despite what sound like large investments in new oil fields in Russia and elsewhere, Saudi Arabia's share of the world oil market will actually grow over the next two decades simply because it has such huge reserves of cheap oil.
Yet the lion's share of oil-price weakness is a by-product of an increasingly shaky global economy.
But now, at last, they seem close to agreement on how to share the oil revenues.
As shown below, US reliance on oil imports as a share of consumption is gradually declining.
Local investors support these industries by directing oil wealth into domestic share markets, which desensitizes them to negative global trends.
The deficit ends four years when it could claim to be in surplus, on a modest scale, assuming a large share of oil revenue and not including capital spending.
One of the new measures reduces the share of oil revenues that go to the states and municipalities closest to the fields, aiming to spread the wealth more widely.
The same document shows that the percentage deficit for the UK as a whole is greater than for Scotland alone when a geographical share of oil is included in the Scottish figures.
One way of looking at US crude oil supply and demand is to consider world production of oil, and the share of that production apportioned to the United States, by the arbiter of price.
FORBES: Why Oil Prices Rose in the Spring of 2008 and Will Rise Again
You can see a population share of oil and gas tax too, and that still looks grim, but neither of these figures tells us anything about the fiscal position at the heart of the political debate about Scottish independence.
If it had been an independent country over the past decade, with a geographical share of oil and gas revenues, the impact of the recent fall in North Sea output on Scotland's tax revenues and overall economic growth would have been more dramatic.
Only crude oil accounts for a larger share of India's imports than gold.
Mr Correa also says that the state will sharply raise its share of the oil extracted by energy companies.
Their subjects would like a larger share of the oil wealth, they believe.
And he said he wanted foreign investors to pay a fairer share for the oil they extracted from Ecuadorean soil.
India, with about 17% of world population and a current 3.6% share of world oil consumption might add a percent or two.
FORBES: Why Oil Prices Rose in the Spring of 2008 and Will Rise Again
The report has assumed Scotland could expect to have the share of offshore oil and gas revenue that comes from Scottish waters.
Only crude oil accounts for a larger share of India's imports.
应用推荐