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Stocks closed out their worst week in more than three months on fears that trouble at two Bear Stearns hedge funds may signal bigger problems ahead for credit markets. The main stock indexes all fell by more than 1 percent Friday.

The week brings no shortage of other events to test investors' nerves, with the foremost being a two-day Federal Reserve meeting on interest rates. Data on inflation and home sales are also on the slate.

For the stock market, a rise in bond yields has stalled a long-running rally. Some are worried that two troubled hedge funds managed by Bear Stearns Cos. Inc. may only be the tip of the iceberg.

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In an exclusive interview with the Times Record News, ExxonMobil Chairman and CEO Red Tillerson provided his views on oil and energy issues facing the United States.

On $3 gasoline

"You have $3 a gallon gasoline, which a lot of people don't like. I don't like it. Believe it or not, I don't like it because it brings a lot of the kind of negative discussions that are occurring with policymakers. It causes government to do things that are not in the long term best interests of the consumers because they're reacting to the fact that people don't like it.

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Someone once said that we are entitled to our own opinions, but not our own facts. So, please bear with me while I use a little of both to try to answer a recent letter writer's questions ("President's actions fall short on many accounts," The Reporter, June 15).

First question: Why hasn't President Bush signed onto the Kyoto Protocol? Maybe because it would cost the United States $160 billion for very little measurable benefit (Copenhagen Consensus). Maybe he recalled that in 1997, under Clinton/Gore, the Senate passed a resolution (Byrd-Hagel), 95-0, rejecting approval of the Kyoto Treaty, objecting mainly to the lack of any "specific scheduled commitments" on the part of China and India, the second- and fourth-most-powerful economies in the world. As ...

Second question: Are gas prices holding steady or dropping because Advertisementthe oil industry is pumping millions of dollars into political favors? It may be true in part, but I have read that there is an abundance of crude oil and not enough refining capabilities. Even Saudi Arabia outsources its refining processes. The United States hasn't built a refinery in 30 years, and those that we do have are shut down periodically for repairs, which may affect the supply. And then there are always th...

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•With interest rates rising and home inventories high, existing home sales nationally for May should show a decline. The outlook has been a bit better locally, but the local number is not out yet. Sales of existing homes peaked in September 2005. The decline through April 2007 has been a relatively modest 16.9 percent compared with the drop in new home sales, which are down 29.3 percent since peaking in July 2005.

TUESDAY | New home sales

•New home sales will be down in May after showing a surprising uptick in April. Economists are having a hard time predicting how long the housing slump will last, given that mortgage rates have been rising.

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In a recent essay, Thomas Frank, author of the best-selling liberal lament "What's the Matter With Kansas?", decries "the centrist fantasy" current among "Washington's responsible non-Republican classes." Viewing this "unthinking consensus" as little more than the doppelganger of the poisonous partisanship it opposes, Frank lists as one of the characteristic positions of this new centrism "political libertarianism, which for this particular class of people is so self-evident that it requires of its proponents not advocacy but simple assertion."

On the face of it, such a claim is remarkable. Libertarians, who laud the efficiency and freedom of the market and oppose the coercive nature of government, believe the state should limit itself to national security and crime prevention. Historically, the movement has been the domain of zealots along the lines of Ayn Rand and Alex Jones, as well as more scholarly thinkers such as Freidrich Hayek, Robert Nozick and Milton Friedman. As such, it has seldom ventured near the mainstream, where most A...

Yet the increased prominence of libertarianism in America is difficult to deny, as evidenced by the increasingly common political self-description of "economically conservative and socially liberal." As a college philosophy teacher, for example, I have observed that students generally eschew moral principles, except for the one forbidding one person from telling another what to do.

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