Exxon: #@&% the Police.

Sure, the margins aren't that high versus pharma or banks, but $116 million a day or 80k a minute still attracts attention. The wrong types, unfortunately, from, to use McCain's term, "wackos". Ours and theirs..

One Senate hearing not enough? You couldn't have put a little away for a rainy day, Rex? [I guess you're not supposed to do that anymore, but geez..]

Let the political grandstanding begin!

USA Today: ExxonMobil amasses record $36B 2005 profit.

Quotes:

ExxonMobil (XOM) reported the largest annual profit in U.S. corporate history Monday, a $36.1 billion jackpot that included a record-setting fourth quarter.
Exxon earned $10.7 billion, or $116 million every 24 hours, in 2005's final quarter, up 27% from the same period one year earlier.

Quarterly revenue of $99.7 billion was 19.5% higher than last year's fourth quarter. For the year, Exxon took in $371 billion — equal to the total annual economic output of Argentina and Thailand.

It's not going to make negiotiations with the "wackos" any easier though.

IHT: Exxon adds it all up: $36 billion.

Quotes:

Production at Exxon's oilfields around the world declined 1 percent in 2005, excluding stoppage at platforms in the Gulf of Mexico from last year's hurricanes, illustrating an industry-wide dilemma: an inability to tap into the world's richest oil exploration areas in the Middle East and Venezuela because of political limitations.

"Lack of access to new reserves is the most important problem Exxon and the other large oil companies are facing," said Michael Economides, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Houston. "It should make them paranoid about the future."

Major oil producers like BP and Chevron are exploring more remote areas of the globe and drilling wells to record depths to bolster production as older fields in North America and the North Sea near exhaustion.

Exxon will this year tap new oil fields holding an estimated 1.75 billion barrels, or 34 percent of all the new projects by publicly traded oil companies scheduled for 2006, according to analysts at Deutsche Bank.