Announcement of American projects to explore for oil in the continental shelf, Alaska, Colorado oil shale, just about anywhere, will drop the price of crude, and do so in a matter of days. Even if the project won't come on line years. The outrageous crude oil prices are caused by fear, fear that oil will be unobtainable without a contract. Users have to get crude oil, or go out of business. So they pay six kinds of prices for it. Everyone can see demand going up and up, and production struggling to stay level, let alone grow.
Once the world sees the Americans committing to a large scale oil project, it will come to believe that more oil is out there, and oil will be available. America has a rep for pulling technological rabbits out of hats that is unmatched. America is the land that invented telegraph, telephone, oil wells, electric light bulbs, aircraft, nuclear energy, moon landings, polio vaccines, integrated circuits, microprocessors and more. An Exxon-Mobil announcement of an oil project that will come on line in 2009 and produce a couple of million barrels a day would have instant credibility. In part because the Americans are experts in this kind of thing and in part because American companies must be honest, 'cause the SEC will crucify them for flim flamming investors if they are dishonest.
Just one good oil strike will go far to convince the world's nervous oil consumers that more oil will be available in the future.
And, despite T. Boone Pickens TV ads, we can drill out way out of the shortage. US consumption is 20 million barrels per day. The undrilled resources are estimated in the billions of barrels. Twenty billion barrels is three years of supply. Two hundred billion barrels is thirty years of supply.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Kilowatts are not Kilowatt-hours.
Heard two pieces about alternate energy this morning. Both of them described the size of the device as so many kilowatts. In both cases they should have said kilowatt hours. Most reporters are too dumb to read their own electric bills.
Kilowatts measures the rate of using electricity. A 100 watt (0.1 KW) light bulb uses electricity faster than a 60 watt (0.06 KW) light bulb. But you pay for electricity by the kilowatt hour. An ordinary two slice toaster draws a kilowatt. but it has the toast nice and brown in a minute so it doesn't draw all that much electricity overall. You'd have to toast 60 batches of toast in order to consume a kilowatt hour.
If you are thinking of buying a solar electric rig, you want to know both numbers. Kilowatt hours per day tells you how much money you save using your solar power as opposed to buying juice from the electric company. Kilowatts tells you the heaviest load the rig can power. For example if your air conditioner needs 3 kilowatts to work, it would be nice if your solar electric rig could produce 3 KW to power the AC.
The kilowatt-hour rating of a rig can be estimated from the kilowatt rating. The sun stays up 12 hours (on average) so each day it will produce 12 times the kilowatt rating. So a 1 kilowatt solar collector will furnish 12 kilowatt-hours in the course of a day. Up here the electric company will furnish 12 kilowatt-hours for $2.40. If the solar electric rig costs $7000 (as quoted in the NPR piece) it will take 8 years for the electricity produced to pay for the rig.
Kilowatts measures the rate of using electricity. A 100 watt (0.1 KW) light bulb uses electricity faster than a 60 watt (0.06 KW) light bulb. But you pay for electricity by the kilowatt hour. An ordinary two slice toaster draws a kilowatt. but it has the toast nice and brown in a minute so it doesn't draw all that much electricity overall. You'd have to toast 60 batches of toast in order to consume a kilowatt hour.
If you are thinking of buying a solar electric rig, you want to know both numbers. Kilowatt hours per day tells you how much money you save using your solar power as opposed to buying juice from the electric company. Kilowatts tells you the heaviest load the rig can power. For example if your air conditioner needs 3 kilowatts to work, it would be nice if your solar electric rig could produce 3 KW to power the AC.
The kilowatt-hour rating of a rig can be estimated from the kilowatt rating. The sun stays up 12 hours (on average) so each day it will produce 12 times the kilowatt rating. So a 1 kilowatt solar collector will furnish 12 kilowatt-hours in the course of a day. Up here the electric company will furnish 12 kilowatt-hours for $2.40. If the solar electric rig costs $7000 (as quoted in the NPR piece) it will take 8 years for the electricity produced to pay for the rig.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Naked short selling. Modern financial sin
Heard the phase "naked short selling" on the radio this morning. New one on me. Visions of middle aged stock brokers pole dancing on conference room tables passed thru my mind. The Vermont Public Radio story alleged that short selling was responsible for the fall of Fannie and Freddie. This sounded so juicy that I googled for it, and found definitions.
Apparently ordinary short selling (selling a stock you don't own, waiting for the price to fall, and buying it at the lower price to deliver to the previous buyer) is now "naked" short selling. It isn't illegal per se, at least not in the US, but the SEC frowns on the practice. They prefer "covered" short selling, where in the seller "borrows" the stock, sells it, and then buys it back later to repay the lender of the stock. Naked short selling for the purpose of effecting a stock's market price is forbidden. Another one of those highly effective laws. "No your honor, I never intended for my short sale of two million shares to lower the price of ..." More welfare for lawyers.
Even in this day and age of gigahertz computers, sellers have three business days to deliver the stock to the seller. That's three days to allow the stock price to fall and make the short sale profitable. If the SEC really wanted to make short selling go away, they could shorten up the delivery time to something reasonable like three hours after the market closes for the day. And prohibit paying over the money before delivery of the stock.
There is a small number of "failure to deliver" events in the ordinary course of business. You could clamp down on that with stiffer penalties. Taking money and not delivering stock is straight out fraud.
As for Fannie and Freddie, whose stock is in the tank. Both companies have lost a lot of money this year and everyone expects them to loose a lot more in the future. Stocks are only worth owning if they are expected to go up in price. If the company is loosing money, its stock isn't going up, everyone knows this. So stockholders sell while the stock is still worth something.
Apparently ordinary short selling (selling a stock you don't own, waiting for the price to fall, and buying it at the lower price to deliver to the previous buyer) is now "naked" short selling. It isn't illegal per se, at least not in the US, but the SEC frowns on the practice. They prefer "covered" short selling, where in the seller "borrows" the stock, sells it, and then buys it back later to repay the lender of the stock. Naked short selling for the purpose of effecting a stock's market price is forbidden. Another one of those highly effective laws. "No your honor, I never intended for my short sale of two million shares to lower the price of ..." More welfare for lawyers.
Even in this day and age of gigahertz computers, sellers have three business days to deliver the stock to the seller. That's three days to allow the stock price to fall and make the short sale profitable. If the SEC really wanted to make short selling go away, they could shorten up the delivery time to something reasonable like three hours after the market closes for the day. And prohibit paying over the money before delivery of the stock.
There is a small number of "failure to deliver" events in the ordinary course of business. You could clamp down on that with stiffer penalties. Taking money and not delivering stock is straight out fraud.
As for Fannie and Freddie, whose stock is in the tank. Both companies have lost a lot of money this year and everyone expects them to loose a lot more in the future. Stocks are only worth owning if they are expected to go up in price. If the company is loosing money, its stock isn't going up, everyone knows this. So stockholders sell while the stock is still worth something.
We don't have enough troops in Afghanistan
"because all the troops are in Iraq. Barack Obama said that on TV yesterday. Not true. If we don't have enough troops for Afghenistan, it means the Army isn't big enough. Or too many Army troops are paper pushers, button pushers and REMF's, and not enough are infantry. We only have 130K troops in Iraq. Compared to WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and Gulf War I, that's nothing. We need an Army /Marine Corps big enough to deploy 250K troops overseas.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Obama on Iraq
Watched Obama on TV today. He started out, lambasted the war, decried the expense, blamed just about everyone. I'm saying out loud to the TV, "Come on, tell me what you going to DO about it." Finally Obama got around to saying he would withdraw American troops. If you are into tea leaf reading, he did NOT restate the "one brigade a month" timetable, but I think that's nit picking. He did say clearly that he would pull the Army out.
Obama claims he is turning Iraq over to the Iraqi government. I think he's turning Iraq over to Al Quada.
Just to show he is tough, Obama promised to reenforce Afghanistan.
Obama claims he is turning Iraq over to the Iraqi government. I think he's turning Iraq over to Al Quada.
Just to show he is tough, Obama promised to reenforce Afghanistan.
My internet blackout, Part 2
So, after the very nice Time Warner service man called, Trusty Desktop ran fine til bedtime. This morning, I powered him up, and lo and behold, it was just as broke, and broke the same way, as before the service guy arrived. Same deal, the laptop (Angry Pierre) worked and Trusty Desktop didn't. After a couple of hours of messing around, I finally disabled the Zone Alarm firewall. Presto, internet came back.
So, I used Add/Remove Programs to zap Zone Alarm for good. Turned on the less effective built in Windows firewall. In actual fact the Netgear router is a very good firewall, and hackers/crackers/spyware and such get stopped by the router. I checked the Zone Alarm logfile and it hadn't seen an attack since it had been installed. So, for now, bye bye Zone Alarm. Been running Zone Alarm for years and years, without trouble, but looks like it's broke now.
So, I used Add/Remove Programs to zap Zone Alarm for good. Turned on the less effective built in Windows firewall. In actual fact the Netgear router is a very good firewall, and hackers/crackers/spyware and such get stopped by the router. I checked the Zone Alarm logfile and it hadn't seen an attack since it had been installed. So, for now, bye bye Zone Alarm. Been running Zone Alarm for years and years, without trouble, but looks like it's broke now.
Fannie & Freddie
Ray Suarez was interviewing US Rep. Barney Frank on the news hour last night. Barney was defending the Fannie & Freddie bailout. They got into the history, and Barney was very firm that the entire disaster was caused by a lack of regulation, and of course he, the democratic party and the US house had pushed for appointment of a regulator. The evil Republicans in the Senate had failed to approve Barney's pet regulation bill, and so the Fannie & Freddie disaster was all the fault of Republicans.
A regulator was going to save Fannie & Freddie? A clueless back seat driver overseeing company management is going to raise their stock value, sell their bonds and prevent a wave of foreclosures? Maybe in Barney's universe. Barney is very smart, very liberal, Jewish, and from Brookline Masschusetts, a town that makes the People's Republic of Cambridge look conservative.
As it is, looks like Fannie and Freddie's $5 TRILLION dollars of debt is going to be added to the existing $9 TRILLION dollars of the existing federal debt. Scary. That's an unbalanced budget that will never quit.
The other option would be to tell the Fannie and Freddie bond holders that they won't get paid, they are out $5 TRILLION bucks. That will make a load of unhappy investors, pension funds, banks, builders, real estate brokers and every one in the housing business. Law suits will go on for 50 years. Without Fannie and Freddie, banks will have to relearn how to do mortgages and attract depositors, and mortgage money will be very hard to get. It will damage the credit of the United States, making it harder to sell US treasury bonds to the Chinese. All in all, the "let 'em crash" option is even scarier than absorbing $5 trillion of debt.
A regulator was going to save Fannie & Freddie? A clueless back seat driver overseeing company management is going to raise their stock value, sell their bonds and prevent a wave of foreclosures? Maybe in Barney's universe. Barney is very smart, very liberal, Jewish, and from Brookline Masschusetts, a town that makes the People's Republic of Cambridge look conservative.
As it is, looks like Fannie and Freddie's $5 TRILLION dollars of debt is going to be added to the existing $9 TRILLION dollars of the existing federal debt. Scary. That's an unbalanced budget that will never quit.
The other option would be to tell the Fannie and Freddie bond holders that they won't get paid, they are out $5 TRILLION bucks. That will make a load of unhappy investors, pension funds, banks, builders, real estate brokers and every one in the housing business. Law suits will go on for 50 years. Without Fannie and Freddie, banks will have to relearn how to do mortgages and attract depositors, and mortgage money will be very hard to get. It will damage the credit of the United States, making it harder to sell US treasury bonds to the Chinese. All in all, the "let 'em crash" option is even scarier than absorbing $5 trillion of debt.
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