The Curse of Home ownership

Good old NHPR was on this morning, like every morning. The terrible burden of home ownership was the topic. The new roof required shortly after the closing, the hot water heater that failed, Dad coming home and picking up his tool box to work on the house instead of playing with the children.
Man, I don't know how I survived 40 years of home ownership. I did a roof, all it takes is a little money. I changed out four hot water heaters over the years. Got so good I could get to Sears, get the heater home on top of the car, installed, water back on, and still get to work by 11 AM. Done my share of home remodeling projects, two kitchens, two bathrooms, wall paper, book cases, porch railings, dishwasher replacements, disposal replacements and paint. The children loved every one of these and begged to stay up late and help Dad. Home projects were always cooler than yard work.
Could I be listening to "can't change a lightbulb" journalists whining on the air?

UNH joins the global warming bandwagon

NHPR did a global warming piece this morning. They interviewed a young associate professor from UNH. During a lengthy talk this professor managed to completely avoid the use of numbers. Things are bad and getting badder he said but never a number to say how bad. Then he proclamed that this winter's DC snowstorms were actually caused by global warming. Global warming puts more moisture in the air so we get more precip.
He's wrong on that, the DC snowstorms were perfectly ordinary snowstorms that happened to track a little bit more southerly than usual. Had they gone thru New York state and New England they would have been un remarkable. The distance from the usual storm track and DC is only about 100 miles.
UNH will probably give this guy tenure next week...

Financial regulation, need therefore Part II

The usual suspects, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, are talking up financial reform, now that Obamacare has been rammed thru.
Not that we don't need something to prevent Wall St from driving the economy over a cliff again.
Too bad the Dodd and Frank bill is welfare for Wall St. The bill contains an elaborate and expensive plan for taxpayers to bail out Wall St the next time they wreck the economy. And as a sweetener for taxpayers, there will be a new "consumer protection agency" to limit some of the customer fleecing going on. With lots of well paying jobs for bureaucrats.
We really need rules to prevent the gambling and speculation that put us into Great Depression 2.0. The purpose of Wall St is to finance economic growth, new factories, new products, construction, inventory, and sales. It is not doing credit default swaps, reselling mortgages, or executing stock trades in milliseconds. We need regulations to crack down on the gambling and speculation that crashed the economy, not plans to bail out the gamblers.

Hurrah for Dollar Stores

They may not have everything, but what they do have for $1 costs about $3 at the local food store (Mac's Market). They have crackers, cookies, condiments, shampoo, chocolate bars, dishwash, salami, frozen foods, disposable paint brushes, and tie wraps.

Buzz. Free Media for Ipad

Fox and Friends this morning is so charmed by the new Ipad. The had one on the show, raved about it, showed good video of the screen, showed the thing responding to finger touches. Ran for minutes.
Gotta hand it to Apple. A product so cool that a leading cable news channel gives them a free commercial. Not just a passing mention, but a close up and detailed look at the thing.
Steve Jobs is doing his best to get us out of Great Depression 2.0. The country needs more guys like Jobs.

Is nuclear power affordable?

Maybe. The plants are expensive, the last round of proposals and bids centered around $6 billion dollars to construct a nuclear plant. That's a lot of money. Such a plant would produce 1000 Megawatts of electricity.
If the plant was financed with 20 year bonds, bearing 6% interest, the yearly bond payment would be $480 million dollars. That's the payment to the bank every year to pay off the bonds. That's also a lot of money. Will the plant sell enough electricity to pay its mortgage?
Assume the plant runs at full load 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Assume they get 8 cents a kilowatt hour for their juice. Then the plant makes $700 million and some change a year from sale of electricity. Subtract the $480 million mortgage payment and the owners have a yearly cash flow of $220 million to pay the workers, purchase fuel, keep the plant up, pay their taxes, pay off the lawsuits, and provide some profit.
If any of the assumptions (interest rate, electric rate, demand for all the plant's output all day long) change for the worse, the plant may start losing money. I hear in the Journal that banks are unenthusiastic about lending for nuclear plants for fear they may default on the loans. There has been demand for federal loan guarantees for nuclear construction.
One thing that would help is reducing the cost of the plant. A lot of that $6 billion goes for permits and review of the design and getting Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approval of the plant design. And fighting the greenie lawsuits. These costs could be reduced by coming up with a standard design to eliminate the NRC review costs. Plus legislation to reduce the grounds for greenie lawsuits.
Bottom line. Nuclear power ought to pay for itself, but the margin of profit could be wider than it is.

Wall St attempts to re open the Mortgaged Backed Security Casino

From the Wall St Journal, print version, Tuesday March 30, Page B1. "Securities Debate is All About Trust". Mortgage backed securities are paper IOU's issued by banks. The banks claim the IOU's are "backed" by home mortgages, implying that the buyer of the IOU is buying something as sound as a home mortgage. In 2007 the marks discovered that the mortgages "backing" their IOU's were in default. They wised up and few to no mortgaged backed securities have been sold since.
The banks obtained the mortgages used for "backing" by purchasing them from the likes of Country Wide (home of Angelo) and other mortgage dealers. The mortgage dealers started to give mortgages to anyone who walked (or was dragged) in the door. "Ninja, No Income,No Job or Assets" mortgages became common. The dealer's sold these fraudulent mortgages to the banks for real cash. The banks "backed" their IOU's and sold them to "investors" or in ordinary language, suckers. The vast number of Ninja mortgages caused the crash in housing prices that triggered off Great Depression II.
Currently, the Administration and Congress want to require banks playing the IOU game, tohold onto 5% of the IOU's created, skin in the game, to give a small incentive for the banks to deal honestly. The banks are whining that 5% is too much and will ruin the market.
What ought to be done is to prevent the sale and trading of mortgages at any level. Banks issuing mortgages retain 100% of the mortgage on their books. None of this wimpy 5% stuff. This way the loan officer granting the mortgage, the only individual who actually understands the risks, who has interviewed the borrowers, checked with their employer[s], and inspected the property, has some incentive to do it right. If the bank owns the mortgage for it's full life, then it will be diligent and grant mortgages only to those who will pay them back.
Decent home mortgages are very sound investments. The homeowners are strongly motivated to keep up on their payments. Assuming a proper evaluation of the property, the mortgage is secured by valuable real estate. "Safe as houses" is the old cliche. Ninja mortgages are a scam.
The mortgaged backed security business caused Great Depression II and we need regulations to prevent it from happening again. Nearly two years have gone by and nothing has been done, AND the things proposed to be done are too wimpy to do any good.