Year: 2009

Carbon Tax Update

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Well, it’s beginning to look like France will impose its own carbon tax €17 ($24.90) per ton of CO2.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to move France toward greater reductions in carbon emissions, but it is also a reflection of just how big a failure that Europe’s cap and trade regime has been, with the creation of false offsets overseas, construction of hydroelectric plants without transmission lines in China, and paying farmers not to grow food.

In addition to that, there is the detail that the markets simply do not work, creating a “pollution fire sale,”* which makes this system a joke.

In any case, I ran the numbers,† and got about $0.2212/gallon, which in the scheme of things is not a huge chunk of change, particularly in France, where the price of a gallon of gas is about $6.00 including tax, but it is likely to make coal powered electricity much less competitive, particularly if the tax goes up over time.

France is emulating Finland and Sweden, who implemented carbon taxes over a decade ago, and got reductions in emissions, as opposed to the EU cap and trade, which hasn’t ever worked.

On a related note, both Caterpillar and Federal Express are lobbying for a carbon tax instead of a cap and trade too.

They mention a number of reasons, not the least of which is the giveaways to big coal, but the big reason is buried a few paragraphs down here:

A predictable, graduated tax would have an impact on the role of the military overseas, improve the environment and be good for the economy, [FedEx CEO] Smith argued.

(emphasis mine)

Simply put, they don’t want to live in a world where the cost of carbon credits will fluctuate day to day because of the machinations of that great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,‡ Goldman Sachs.

FedEx and Caterpillar, and pretty much everyone but the coal burning utilities can live with a carbon tax, it effects them all equally.

If you make carbon permits a trade able market commodity, and suddenly you have where the difference between survival and bankruptcy are choices in an opaque and volatile market.

You end up diverting enormous resources from upgrading equipment and doing research on more efficient ways to do things, and drive it into the blood funnel of the vampire squid.

*Original author’s pun, not mine.
†I assume that the tax is actually per tonne (metric ton), so that is 1000 kg of CO2, which is 273 kg of carbon. This means that the actual tax for a kg of carbon is about €0.0623 per kilo of carbon.

A good approximation of the formula for gasoline is C8H18 (It’s actually a witches brew of different hydrocarbons), and the weight of a liter of gasoline 0.76, so the weight of carbon in a liter is about 0.64 kg.

This gives a tax of about €0.03989/liter, or about $0.2212/gallon
‡Alas, I cannot claim credit for this bon mot, it was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.

Economics Update

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Click for Full Size

Blah, blah, blah!

Well, let’s lead with housing sales, since it gives me an opportunity to start with one of my pet peeves: Journalists pumping up news as better than it is.

CNN leads with New home sales rise for 5th straight month in August,which sounds good, sales went from a seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR) of 429K, up from July’s 426K, so what’s the problem?

Well the problem is that the forecast was for 440K, and a 3K gain is about ¾%, nothing to phone home about, and as Calculated Risk so ably notes when he looks at the numbers and declares that sales were flat, “This is a slight increase from the revised rate of 426 thousand in July (revised from 433 thousand).” (emphasis mine)

So there was an increase relative to the revised figure, but a drop when compare initial figure to initial figure, and in any case, an honest description for this would be “flat”, or “down slightly”, not a hed screaming a 5th straight month of increase.

In either case, we are still seeing week demand for manufactured goods, as evidenced by the 2.4% drop in durable goods orders, though the Truck Tonnage Index rose in in August, which compares to the drop in rail traffic I reported 2 days ago.

In the world of finance, banks losses in big mofo loans, the so-called syndicated loans, tripled in 2009.

In energy, revelations regarding Iran’s nuclear program and potential sanctions pushed oil up, though it is still well below $70/bbl, and in currency, the dollar fell broadly, hitting a 7½ month low vs the Yen, and remaining near the 1-year low vs the Euro that it hit a few days ago.

SEC to Take on Ratings Agencies, Flash Trading

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It looks like the SEC will start cracking down on the ratings agencies, like Standard & Poors and Moody’s.

Basically, they are going to be issuing a ruling saying that they will be treated as “experts” which creates greater liability for their opinions:

Currently, the rating agencies are not considered experts. They have argued that they are exempt from these rules because they are only providing an opinion and are protected by free speech laws.

Meanwhile, others such as auditors that companies use and cite in their public filings are considered experts and can be sued by investors. Other experts include engineers that oil and gas companies rely on to determine the amount of resources in the ground.

They are also going after the super high speed trading done by some brokerages who have placed their servers in the same room as the exchanges, allowing them to basically front run the entire market, at the expense of honest market participants.

Of course, the idea that the ratings agencies aren’t experts, and until now, never were experts, just buggers the mind.

As it stands now, the exchanges grant access to buy and sell orders a few fractions of a second before they execute to the flash traders, which allows them to pick up a penny or two by buying before a big buy, or selling before a big bell.

It requires the cooperation of the exchanges, and the SEC is moving to forbid any such cooperation:

SEC commissioners unanimously voted today to seek public comment on a rule barring exchanges and trading platforms from giving clients access to information about stock orders a fraction of a second before the market. The proposal requires a second vote at a later public meeting to become binding.

“Investors that have access only to information displayed as public quotes may be harmed if market participants are able to flash orders and avoid the need to make the orders publicly available,” [SEC] Chairman Mary Schapiro said.

This never would have happened under the last guy in the White House.

Washington Post Reporters Don’t Actually Read the Washington Post

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Paul Kane, writing for the Washington Post, notes that Democratic political committees are seeing a major drop in fund raising, but he assigns blame to, “Complacency among their rank-and-file donors and a de facto boycott by many of their wealthiest givers, who have been put off by the party’s harsh rhetoric about big business.”

It ain’t complacency, it’s anger and demoralization, because the Democrats in general and Barack Obama in particular, have folded any time the small by historical standards Republican minority has gotten their nose out of joint.

I saw that in the paper today on the front page, and by paper, I mean paper, I have the ink and newsprint sitting by my keyboard.

You know what else I saw in the paper, just today?

Let me make this clear, this is just what is in today’s Washington Post.

When you add in:

  • Obama’s support of the status quo on gays in the military, the Defense of Marriage Act.
  • Support of Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers and His Evil Minions™ on the idea that there should be no meaningful accountability for banks or their executives.
  • His phony reforms on the state secrets privilege.

Is it any wonder that people are disinclined to donate money to a Democratic Party fund raising apparatus that he is firmly in control of?

You know, if Barack Obama showed a little bit of guts, members of the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party might be inclined to have his back.

But when you are in Baucus and Conrad’s corner, you ain’t in ours.

People Who You Cannot Trust

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Are They Selling Your Child’s Data to Junk Food Makers or a Child Sex Ring?

The publishers of the software known as nannyware:

A software product sold to protect children from predators, cyberbullying, and visiting inappropriate Web sites is also collecting information about what the kids are saying, and its publisher is selling that data–in aggregate form–to other companies for marketing purposes.

In an interview, Echometrix CEO Jeffrey Greene said that the company doesn’t collect or report the names or any identifying information about the children. “We never, ever, ever can identify who the kid is who is saying it. In fact, we don’t have any information about the individual child,” he said.

Yeah, sure, as has been noted with Netflix, bits apparently innocuous data frequently make it trivial to identify a user.

In the case of Netflix, by knowing a couple of their video likes and dislikes, you could extract their entire video rental history with a probability of 28 standard deviations (99.87% probability, or a bout 1 in 800)

You know, if this were video rental data from adults, as opposed to conversations online by children, this would be illegal.

The Term is Pump and Dump

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Happy, happy, joy, joy, the ratio of insiders selling stock to insiders buying stock has
fallen to only 40.6:1 seller:buyer.

At the end of August, it was 61.8:1, but even with the improvement, a lot of folks are getting the f#$@ out of Dodge.

This is what happens when the Federal reserve’s prescription for a financial crisis is to print money for banks to buy stock, which drives the price up, and the insiders are selling stock just as fast as they can.

At the rate that this is going, the smart investment won’t be gold, it will be ammunition and canned goods.