Foreign Reports has been in this business for more than 50 years and counts among its subscribers many of the world's largest oil companies—both international and national—as well as many other financial institutions.
As any potential crisis builds, often over a period of months, Foreign Reports writes up a contemporaneous narrative, covering the story as it develops, often focusing on key details, which, only later, historians pick up on and piece together.
The Middle East, with its vast reserves of petroleum, was an obvious early focus of Foreign Reports, especially as the firm's subscribers had substantial equity interests in oil concessions in that volatile part of the world, where Kern remained a frequent visitor to many of the key players—the Shah of Iran, Gamal Abdul Nasser of revolutionary Egypt, Crown Prince Faisal of Saudi Arabia, etc.
Kern also maintained close relationships with the leading foreign policy actors in the Eisenhower administration, notably Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles, forging a long relationship with U.S. intelligence, both in Washington and in the agency's foreign "stations".
By the time he graduated and joined the firm, rumblings of the first full-scale "energy crisis" had begun and the role of Saudi Arabia on the world scene began to be transformed.
This required an understanding of the technologies, engineering and procurement issues inherent in complex projects, and Foreign Reports brought on board the necessary skilled individuals in these areas.
By the early 1980s, the nature of the world oil business began to change in a number of different ways, all of which affected how Foreign Reports would be able to continue to provide services to its client base.
As the pace and sophistication of NYMEX trading has accelerated greatly since those days, and as access to the incredible amounts of information over the internet has exploded, the services that Foreign Reports has offered have also changed, while still staying with time-tested methods: follow the narrative; know the actors; know their characters; understand the rules; understand cultures and histories; pay ever increasing attention to separating the wheat from the chaff in an information-laden age; and communicate concisely and clearly.
It closely monitors and reports on the political and economic situations in places such as: Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Venezuela.