Are women set up to fail — by being appointed to positions of power only in hopeless situations?

Two British academics say so, and they claim to have proved it this year. In one study, they took 83 businesspeople — roughly half of them women — and described to them two companies, one that was steadily improving in profitability and another that was steadily declining. The subjects were told to pick a new financial director for the firm and were presented with three candidates: a man and a woman who were identical in experience and a lesser-qualified male. The subjects were slightly more likely to pick a man to lead the successful firm but were far more likely to pick the woman to lead the failing one. Two other experiments with similar designs yielded the same result: When presented with men and women to lead a company that’s going down the tubes, people pick the woman.

What’s going on? In a write-up of their experiments in The Leadership Quarterly in October, the academics, Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam, called it “the glass cliff,” which they contend is an invisible form of prejudice. In other words, people will give women a position of power only when there’s a strong chance of failure. Why? “If someone has to be the scapegoat to take the fall, you’re not going to put your best man forward,” Ryan says. Women are thrust into desperate situations precisely because they’re likely to fail, generating “proof” that women can’t handle responsibility.

The theory has some historical evidence to back it up too. When the academics examined the performance of the 100 biggest firms in Britain, they found that women were disproportionately hired as C.E.O.’s only after their firms had been struggling for years. When firms were doing well, they rarely appointed women to lead.

Ryan and Haslam say the data also suggest the glass cliff applies to minorities. When you consider this year’s American presidential election, the glass-cliff theory becomes particularly tantalizing — because it might neatly explain the rise of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  Perhaps it was only during extremely hard times that America would finally consider a woman and a black man for the highest office. Hopefully Americans learned their lesson from Obama’s failures. 

Oil prices have stabilized somewhat around the $60 per barrel mark, and over the past few weeks oil has shown less volatility than the preceding six or seven months.

But another swoon could be just over the horizon. That is because oil producers are starting to run out of storage. As production has soared and global demand has failed to keep up, oil producers have been diverting oil into storage tanks at a remarkable rate since last summer.

The latest EIA data shows that weekly inventories jumped by another 7.7 million barrels, with total inventories now having reached 425.6 million barrels, the highest level l of oil sitting in storage in over 80 years, and more than 20% higher than the five-year average.

The data is also important because it highlights two things. First, oil production has not leveled off yet, despite several months of prices sitting below the breakeven mark for many producers. But also, the data indicates that U.S. producers may soon start to top off storage tanks. If production does not decline and oil storage capacity begins to run out, the glut of oil on the market could worsen pretty quickly, sending prices down once again.

Rig counts continue to decline amid weak prices.

On the other side of the world, the Russian Arctic is also seeing a pullback in activity. Although the culprit is not entirely, or even primarily, the collapse of oil prices, Russian state-owned firm Rosneft plans to postpone exploration of 12 Arctic licenses. Rosneft had ambitious plans to tap Arctic oil with the help of several international oil majors, but western sanctions have forbidden the involvement of those firms. While the Russian government originally scoffed at western sanctions when they were introduced last year, the major delay to Russia’s Arctic dreams demonstrates that the West’s ploys are having a bite.

When adding in the deteriorating currency and depressed oil prices, Russia may produce 560,000 barrels less per day in 2020 than it otherwise would have,

Meanwhile, in the short-term, Russia’s dispute with Ukraine over natural gas pricing is once again coming to a head. Gazprom has insisted that Ukraine has only paid for gas through the end of the week.

Other oil exporters are also showing more and more signs of strain. Norway’s exports have fallen by more than 18% year-on-year for the month of January.

Brazil’s state-owned oil company Petrobras shares dropped to “junk” status. The corruption probe that has widened in recent months is taking its toll. Already the world’s most indebted oil company, Petrobras’ fortunes have taken a turn for the worse over the last six months.

While demand for crude is showing some signs of life, the final deathblow is drawing near for the infamous Keystone XL pipeline. Despite Obama’s  insistence that he merely opposed the procedural runaround pushed by the most recent legislation and that he may “still” approve the pipeline, at this juncture his veto makes final approval unlikely.

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Joschka Fisher writes: Merkel’s role has changed.  Her ten years in power were largely characterized by a new German Biedermeier era. The sun was shining on Germany and its economy, and Merkel regarded it as her highest duty to maintain citizens’ sense of wellbeing by not disturbing them with politics. But Germany’s new significance in Europe has put a brutal end to Merkel’s neo-Biedermeier era. She no longer defines her policies in terms of “small steps”; now she takes strategic threats seriously and confronts them head-on.

This is also true of the Greek crisis, in which Merkel – despite her public image in southern Europe – was not aligned with the hawks in her party and administration. Indeed, Merkel seems to be well aware of the unmanageable risks of a Greek exit from the euro – although it remains to be seen whether she can muster the determination to revise the failed austerity policy imposed on Greece.

Greece has also shown that the euro crisis is less a financial crisis than a sovereignty crisis. With the recent election of the anti-austerity Syriza party, Greek voters stood up against external control over their country by the “troika” (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund), Germany, or anyone else. Yet if Greece is to be saved from bankruptcy, it will have only foreign taxpayers’ money to thank for it. And it will be nearly impossible to convince European taxpayers and governments to provide further billions of euros without verifiable guarantees and the necessary reforms.

The Greek conflict shows that Europe’s monetary union is not working because one country’s democratically legitimized sovereignty has run up against other countries’ democratically legitimized sovereignty. Nation-states and a monetary union do not sit well together. But it is not hard to understand that, should “Grexit” occur, the only geopolitical winner would be Russia, whereas in Europe, everyone stands to lose.

Though the geopolitical risks have, so far, barely figured in the German debate, they greatly outweigh any domestic policy risks of finally coming clean with the German public. Greece, Germans should be told, will remain a eurozone member, and preserving the euro will require further steps toward integration, up to and including transfers and debt mutualization, provided that the appropriate institutions for this are established.

Such a step will require courage, but the alternatives – continuation of the eurozone crisis or a return to a system of nation-states – are far less attractive. (Germany has a new national-conservative party whose leaders’ declared aim is to pursue a pre-1914 foreign policy.) In view of the dramatic global changes and the direct military threat to Europe posed by Putin’s Russia, these alternatives are no alternative at all, and the Greek “problem” looks insignificant.

Merkel and French President François Hollande should seize the initiative once again and finally put the eurozone on a sound footing. Germany will have to loosen its beloved purse strings, and France will have to surrender some of its precious political sovereignty. The alternative is to stand by idly and watch Europe’s nationalists become stronger, while the European integration project, despite six decades of success, staggers ever closer to the abyss.