Sours

Having characterized the nation’s major energy firms as “failing miserably” to deliver promised increased cash flows from merchant energy businesses, most of the private-sector energy companies were blistered last Thursday by critical Standard & Poor’s analysts who conducted a conference call on the global utilities/energy merchant sector. The same firms with aggressive diversification plans five years ago, today for the most part, are “desperately trying to unwind” those businesses in response to a severe liquidity and capital crisis, triggered by the plunge in their stock prices, the analysts said.