Good Lord! Where do these people come from? How do they get jobs? Who pays them to write these things?

Shell and Exxon Mobil earned a combined $195.4billion
(£109billion) in revenues in the past three months because of high oil
prices.

The sum is just less than the annual output of both Argentina and New Zealand.

Why compare revenues with GDP? They’re not the same thing at all!  GDP is value added in an economy, not turnover or receipts. If you want to compare with GDP you should be using profits, which is the value added by the company (or, if you want to be on the other side of a little contretemps, profits plus wages paid) which would be this:

Shell said it had enjoyed a 68pc jump in its net profits to
$7.4billion; Exxon’s net profits were up 75pc to $9.9billion – the
largest-ever quarterly profit by an oil company.

Somehow, "Oil companies quarterly earnings are equivalent to the annual output of Albania" doesn’t have quite the same ring to it really.

Oh, and just to be boringly detailed about it the annual GDP of Argentina is apparently some $483 billion and that of New Zealand $92 billion. That’s umm, $575 billion or so? Which is just over $195 billion in what manner?

Sheesh.

There’s also some confusion from the City Editor:

Much of the money also flows into tax. Shell paid 40pc tax on its profits in the quarter, BP slightly less.

And
then there are the dividends: Shell paid $2billion in the quarter and
bought back 1pc of its shares. Out of the £39billion paid out in
dividends by UK companies last year, BP and Shell accounted for
£5billion of it.

What is left is a sizeable profit, but only at a slim margin. Shell’s is 7.8pc and BP’s is 4.6pc this quarter.

Bit of a mish mash there as corporation tax is paid out of declared profits. Unless he means post tax profits, of course. And the dividend is paid out of those as well, so the divi is included in that 7.8% return. Isn’t it?

In the Times slightly better:

As the Dutch multinational revealed its
extraordinary harvest, ExxonMobil, its American sister, also announced
a record quarterly profit of $9.9 billion. Together, the profits earned
by the world’s top three oil companies, including BP’s $5.3 billion, in
just three months exceeded the annual income of Sri Lanka in 2004.

At least comparing like with like (but Sri Lanka’s GDP was $80 billion last year) although this makes the same error, comparing oranges and apples:

Boosted by record oil prices that averaged more
than $60 per barrel during the three months to the end of September,
the combined sales revenues of BP, Exxon and Shell for three months
were some $300 billion, greater than the GDP of Austria last year.