Free Republic

Many of the turbines going up in Wyoming are made by Suzlon... which is headquartered where?

In India.

The blades are made in the US. That’s about it.

AFP is a French wire service.

Heh.

We’re going to see what the Euro really means.

And it won’t be pretty - which ever way it shakes out.

But while they’re shaking the tree, some very interesting things are falling out... like this, for example:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,676634,00.html

Those fleece suites were also electrically heated.

No, really?

Communists trying to cut corners on product quality? Whocouldaknown?

If the GOP were smart, they’d return the money.

No, I haven’t. Just found it at crashopedia.com - is that the one you’re referring to?

Ditto on the CMA.

Greenie just set an expectation that non-deposit banks and funds could, if they made a big enough wave, get some sort of helping hand from the Fed, even if it was merely strong persuasion to get other banks to throw good money after bad.

The drop in interest rates following 9/11 tho, was over the top, and Greenie didn’t take rates back up anywhere near fast enough to pull the slop out of the system. Further, Greenie backed all the various alternative mortgage products out there — many of which are obviously structured to allow people to buy a house on a wing and a prayer, and if any assumption went wrong, the buyers were going to be in the street immediately.

Heh. This should be something to see.

Greenspan’s first and biggest mistake was involving the Fed in the prop-up of LTCM. If the Fed had allowed LTCM to take down the investment banks that had extended large positions into LTCM, then Wall Street would have gotten some common sense.

As it was, they started to assume that if they got big enough to cause a real ripple in the waters, they could beg the Fed for a helping hand. And, it turned out, they were right.

By the by, the best defense against an EMP attack for a vehicle is to go find you an old Dodge with a 5.9 Cummins with a mechanical fuel rack. They’re indestructible if you can keep them from rusting out.

Well, to be fully accurate, neither of those require a computer.

And yes, I really do like the heated seats in the new Subie. Wooooooonderful relief for my aching lower back.

My wife just laughs at my startup sequence on the Subie now: Get in, put on seatbelt, close door, check her door/belt, start car, turn on seat heater (to high), then put it in gear to move.

I remember that incident. We were watching the evening news and the weather came on after a crime story about the rape of a CHILD... and he popped out with that “advise”

My Mother hit the ceiling. Made a toll call to NYC to the station. Could not get through, the lines were busy.

He was gone for the 10pm newscast.

I’d have to go back to the manual to check.

I have to say: I’m a retired EE and I despise all the electronic foo-fow-rah that has been festooned all over new cars. It is just more expensive crap to fix.

Exactly what I was thinking.

I, for one, am glad that the General is speaking the truth on this.

NASA has become nothing more than an obnoxious waste of money on a huge PR campaign (with several very visible failures).

During the Cold War, this PR/propaganda served a useful end. Today, the manned space program is a huge sinkhole for cash that would be better spend on probes and unmanned exploration.

My first bet would be s/w as well.

My second bet would be tin whiskers in the lead-free solder.

Even the emergency brake in our new Subaru is electric/electronic.

If the battery goes out while you’re parked, you’re screwed. Won’t be able to even roll the thing in neutral.

There is also a large seasonal adjustment in the reported U-6 number. Look at the unadjusted number in Table A-15 (Household Survey) and you’ll see that unadjusted, it went up. With seasonal adjustment, it went down.

There is also a large seasonal adjustment in the reported U-6 number. Look at the unadjusted number in Table A-15 (Household Survey) and you’ll see that unadjusted, it went up. With seasonal adjustment, it went down.

Here is the full situation report.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.htm

NB that this URL points to the most recent data and will not point to the January 2010 results in another month.

As economists have found out, currency traders and hedgies view these things in relative terms.

Sure the US dollar sucks. And it will suck even harder in the future.

But this week.... who do you trust more? The USD, or the Euro... where they’re talking of sovereign debt problems in not one, but three nations?

These issues are always relative.

No, they’re flocking to the US dollar, seen as a safe(r) haven against instability.

Dollar goes up, gold (and equities) go down.

Dunno.

But if anything could conceivably blow up the EMU, this event is it. They have no prior plan on what to do, and Germany is the bulwark against Euro failure - and they’re getting really tired of the nonsense from the southern tier of the EU. Germany warned that this could happen when Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal were admitted - and the French waved it all off.

Turns out that the Germans had a clue about the spendthrifts to their south.

Well, yes, that’s true. What I’m getting at is the prevailing propaganda from the Obama cadres that we exited the recession by July 2009.

Used to own some paper out of Harrisburg, PA.

It matured two years ago. I wasn’t at all interested in buying any more. Now, the only muni paper I’ll buy is from the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming and Alaska.

These states tend to run a pretty fiscally sound operation, especially NoDak.

The talk of “double dip” assumes that the NBER will declare that the recession ended somewhere between March 2009 and this spring.

Given what Frankel and others on the NBER BCDC have said about the NBER’s current metrics for calling the turning points in business cycles, I’m not entirely certain that the NBER is ready to declare the recession ‘over.’

One of the other things the bankers are missing (and they miss plenty of common sense issues) is that you can’t buy groceries or pay your bills with your house.

You can with a credit card.

If someone gets kicked out of their house, it isn’t a problem in most areas of the country. There’s plenty of places to rent.

If someone loses their credit cards, increasingly people are in a tight fix. They don’t know how to manage cash any more, and e-commerce doesn’t “do” cash well at all.

If the banks had not been willing partners to appraisal fraud, they would never have lent the sums they did on housing - especially in California.

The long term trendline for home appreciation is that it tracks household income at 2.6 to 3.0 times.

In some places in California, the banks lent money on houses in areas where the median prices were over 9 times household income for the area. Any sane banker should have said “Whoa — this market is wildly over-priced, and we should require either a) huge down payments or b) better appraisals.” They did neither.

That they then made these loans to people without verifying their actual income and assets, as well as writing 90%+ LTV notes - well, the banks got what was inevitably coming to them.

It is instructive to see the valuation methods for farmland and lending on same: 35% down, and the property is valued based on what it can cash flow. The lenders learned a bitter lesson lending on outsized ag land valuations in the late 70’s and early 80’s. The rest of the financial sector, however, is simply too stupid to learn from history. They’re going to use the huge infusion of money from Uncle Sugar, with the Fed buying RMBS to keep rates low, as an “all clear” signal to keep lending, regardless of how absurd the valuations are.

IMO, the appraisal process is one of the most corrupt things about the residential real estate market that is receiving nowhere near enough attention in “reform” proposals.

It is entirely consistent with whatever lump of tofu Carly is using for a brain.

The woman is a dingbat, writ most large.

When I started to hear that the GOP was holding her forth as being an ‘advisor’ about matters technical from Silly Valley, I thought “Oh, God, please no... what did we do to deserve this?”

Well, now the GOP has let this bimbo get the bit in her teeth. Real conservatives are who she sees as the problem, not liberals, and she’ll spend her campaign pissing off conservatives - who will return the favor. The net result will be that the Democrat wins again.

You’re right that one needn’t have a degree in finance/economics/MBA/etc. I have a degree in engineering, a field where we can’t lie with numbers because Mom Nature has a way of being arresting officer, DA, judge, jury and executioner in the blink of an eye for those who try to lie with numbers. Economists like to think that theirs is a scientific field, when in fact, it is no more scientific than sociology or psychology: these fields pretend to be science, but in fact they have no predictive skill, no hard accountability for their theories, etc.

If someone claiming to be an engineer came up to me, telling me that he had found a way out of the law of gravity by clever use of mathematics, I’d haul his ass up to a roof, hand him a pad and pencil, then throw him off just to see if he could prove it on the way down.

This level of accountability is lacking in finance and economics. They come up with new crackpot theories every day, with no accountability whatsoever.

When I read into such twaddle as CDO’s — what a load of crap. They’re nothing but obfuscation piled on top of lies with mathematics for derivatives, trying to turn a cow pie into a gold nugget. That these instruments were given “AAA” ratings was absurd. When I finally understood what these things were, that’s when I became smart about what was coming - and that was in early 2007. When I was hearing Bernanke and others claim that this would be “contained” to sub-prime... I threw my head back and laughed like a hyena. Then I started selling, and didn’t stop selling until December 2007.

I’m not going to call you an idealist (or anything else). My beef is with the bankers trying to lay the morality guilt trip on people who ruthlessly default - and make no mistake, the bankers are out there trying to lay this morality play on people. Obviously two wrongs don’t make a right, but when a banker tries to get all preachy to people - especially after what we’ve been through (and what we still have in the offing for the US taxpayer), I’m not in a mood to listen to any of it. If they want people to honor an obligation, then they’d better set the example - and they’ve utterly failed to do this.

For example: When cisco had to have layoffs in 2002, the CEO John Chambers said that he’d be paid $1/year until such time as the company turned a profit again. Was he hurting? Heck no. And he said as much, quite forthrightly. But he was quite clear that he didn’t think that the CEO should pull down a six-figure salary when the company was losing money. That’s an example - so when Chambers would come down inside the company and say “We need to cut” — people cut expenses, and didn’t bellyache about it, because Chambers had already set the example.

Banks and bankers could be doing this, but they’re so out of touch with the real world that they’ll continue to pay bonuses, claiming that they “would lose talent” without paying these bonuses, and on top of that, clowns like Blankfein will claim that they’re “doing God’s work.”

Employees that helped set up the US financial system to fail possess no talent discernible to anyone but those in the financial sector, and therefore are not worth retaining. If every one of these “talents” walked off the job tomorrow, the banks would be no worse off if they brought in a busload of howler monkeys who spent the whole day flinging dung at each other.

It is amazing how Uncle Sammy is so concerned about contract law for banker comp plans, but he’s completely willing to screw secured, senior debt holders for auto companies.

It doesn’t “destroy their credit.” Sure, there’s a credit hit.

But as we learned going into this thing, the banks are whores. They’ll lend to anyone with a pulse. They’ll just increase the rate on the loan.

That’s what the whole sub-prime market was all about.

The effects of default on a mortgage are overblown. And, quite frankly, the banks brought this situation on themselves. In a BK now, it is easier to walk away from a mortgage than non-secured revolving credit. You can NO LONGER walk from student loans. So in effect, thanks to the 2005 Bankruptcy “reform” legislation, the bankers have created a situation where student loans are most senior, followed by credit cards and then followed by auto loans and mortgages. You’ll have a car repo’d sooner than a bank will foreclose on you.

So mortgage debt has now become the most junior debt. And bankruptcy attorneys, debtors, etc know this.

As I keep saying, the banks brought this on themselves. People should be wary of asking for things, lest they get what they want.... good and hard.

As I said up-thread: Banks do this all the time. Go look at Morgan Stanley’s ruthless default on a huge chunk of commercial real estate in SF only last December.

Banks like to play this “morality clause” with homeowners. Let me ask you this: Has anything the banks have done in this cluster-(*&^ been honorable?

Let me give you an instance of honorable behavior by a lender. Ever wonder why so many US farmers are wed to John Deere equipment?

Because when the Dust Bowl and Depression hit, a lot of farmers could no longer afford to pay Deere for the equipment they had on payment plans. Deere could have been the typical “we’re taking the equipment back!” sort of outfit. But no, Deere said “If you go out of business, WE go out of business. Pay us when you can, as you can. We’ll get through this together.”

And so they did. Deere finally got the last of the Depression-era debt paid off by farmers in the 1950’s - a full 20 years later. But they got paid the vast, vast majority of their outstanding debt.

Today, we see banks lying to everyone and their pet monkey about:

- credit quality
- terms
- restructuring terms
- profits
- assets and liabilities

They obviously have no honor, no business ethics and no scruples.

They’re in no position to lecture anyone about morality. Quite frankly, I couldn’t care a whit if more people used ruthless default on the banks. The bankers are learning the hard way that what goes around, comes around.

And, as far as the threats they keep making about “wrecking credit ratings” — the homeower comes out of the situation better if they default on the note while they were current than if they allow it to go to foreclosure. If you can see in the future that you have no way to continue paying the note, you’re better off to default while you’re current and keep some of your cash, than keep paying the note until you’re destitute, you default into foreclosure and now you’re out of money to boot.

If they followed the terms of the contract, why shouldn’t they be able to look at themselves in the mirror?

In some states, the homeowners are engaging the banks in exactly that contract.

In a non-recourse state (eg, California), if you’re walking away from the first mortgage used to purchase an owner-occupied dwelling, you’re exercising your option to get out of the contract. And guess what? You paid for that option in your mortgage terms in places like California.

Banks are no more trustworthy on their contracts. It appears you missed Morgan Stanley walking away from loans on $8 billion in commercial real estate in San Francisco last December. To quote Morgan, “it wasn’t a default or foreclosure” — they gave ownership to the lender to get out of their loan obligations.

Translation: it was a ruthless default. Jingle mail writ large.

So if the banks do it, why shouldn’t the little borrowers do it?

Banks have been pulling this crap of morality and “you’ll wreck your credit” and other bluster and BS now for two years. It isn’t working. Want to know why?

Because we’ve figured out that they’re two faced liars, frauds and whores for the next fast-buck deal.

What brought about this crisis in the first place? Lenders making loans to people with bad credit. That’s what a “sub-prime” loan is. A loan to someone who cannot qualify for “prime” credit. So the threat that someone with “bad credit” cannot get a loan was already proven false. Sure, the borrower might pay more, but if there is one lesson to come out of this mess, it is that banks will lend to everyone with a pulse - no matter how bad their credit. So the threat that “you’ll wreck your credit” has already been gutted by the bankers before we got to this point.

Yep.

That’s why I always thought these “grant” programs with such piddling little amounts would not result in anything but a little salve on what amounts to an amputation.

Don’t even get me started on the press’ idiotic blind eye to our Naval nukes and the rock-solid competence of our graduates of Rickover U.

Every time we start talking about nuclear power, they want to dredge up these idiotic fear-mongering stories, yet ignore the direct experience of guys like you and others, who can point to a stellar track record with nuclear power.

Product of fusion, eh?

Which of these reactors is a fusion reactor?

Christ, spare us from liberal arts majors shooting off their mouths.

Ever been around a modern heavy construction project?

If you had, you’d know that both of your questions are moot.

That’s true. And largely the fault of guys like David Obey.

There’s no way to create 15 million jobs. For all the money that the administration has pissed away, they’re not able to support assertions that they’ve created 700K jobs.

A lot of the jobs lost in this downturn aren’t coming back. That’s the brutal truth of the matter. In the hospitality/leisure sector you mention, there will be a lot of jobs that won’t come back because there was quite a bit of over-building in the hotel/resort sector - and we’ll see more of those properties go into default this year. There simply aren’t going to be enough people traveling to support all the expansion that has been done in the last 10 years.

This is why debt deflations are so deadly to economies on a macro scale - cheap/easy debt results in over-expansion that cannot be supported by actual demand. When the cheap/easy debt is withdrawn, the truth is revealed - there is no way to stimulate enough demand to soak up the excess capacity.

This is why trade wars often erupt during debt deflations - countries try to protect their markets from outside suppliers so as to try to prop up their excess capacity.

The issue isn’t whether or not he “wants” to create jobs in these sectors. The issue here is that there are vast areas of America’s infrastructure (bridges, tunnels, roads, pipelines, etc) that are in need of repair, refit or replacement that need to be done. The idea in DC is that “as long as we need to create jobs, we might as well put the money into fixing the infrastructure that needs fixing.”

The bitter symbology in your picture is that Uncle Sugar can’t even use a US-made handgun to blow his brains out any more. He has to resort to using a handgun made by a Belgian company...

Nope, that probably would not have happened. The 2005 bankruptcy “reform” law effectively made non-secured credit card debt more difficult to discharge in BK than a mortgage. Student loans are no longer dischargeable at all.

So the net result is that the banking industry set themselves up for this - that mortgages end up being the easiest debt to walk away from.

You’re right, they are, but there is a very noisy minority who has a 200 year old chip on their shoulder about the influx of English-speaking people into Canada.

This joke might help illustrate some of the issues in Canada:

Three Canadians are walking along the beach - a cowboy from Alberta, a Newfie fisherman and a Quebecois.

They happen upon a lamp.

“Eh, look at that, a lamp!” said the Newfie to the Albertan. “Pick it up and rub it...”

So the Albertan does. Out pops (you guessed it) a jini.

“Oh, so there’s three of you, eh? (this was a Canadian jini) Well then, all of you get only one wish, just to be fair about it. And no wishing for more wishes, or trying to bum smokes and beers out of me, eh?”

The Newfie cries “Me first! My grandpa was a fisherman, my pa was a fisherman, I’m a fisherman. I want there to be lots of fishes in the sea so my sons and grandsons can be fishermen forever!”

“Wishing something for someone else - that’s new” said the jini. “OK, so you have it, and I’ll send you back to Newfoundland to be with your sons and grandsons to give them the news that they’ll be hip-deep in fish guts for the rest of their lives.”

Poof - the Newfie is gone.

The Quebecois hears this and says “Sacre bleu! Then I shall wish for something for alls of Quebec! I want no one to get into Quebec any more! No more English inside Quebec! I want you to build a wall 10 meters high and so tight that nothing can get in at all - so the English cannot get into Quebec! And I want to go home to tell my fellow French speakers the good news!”

The jini rolls his eyes, but he says “Very well. You have your wish, and I’ll send you to Montreal to tell everyone this ‘wonderful’ news.”

Poof, the Quebecois is gone.

“So what is it you want, Albertan?”

The Albertan cowpoke scratches his chin and thinks a bit. After awhile, he asks the jini “This wall you just did for that fella from Quebec, eh? If nothing can get in, does that mean nothing can get out at all either?”

The jini says (somewhat peeved) “Yes, otherwise what would be the point, eh?”

The Albertan smiled. “Fill it with water.”

I have to correct you a bit here. The Canadians do have a grievance industry - the Quebecois complaining about their culture, their language, outside people marrying their women, their women not having enough children to make sure there are french-speaking people in Canada 100 years from now... on and on and on and on and on and on...

You just don’t know about it because their whining, griping and complaining is done in French.

The Quebecois have forced legislation that they have two official languages, all manner of subsidies for Quebecois and French language culture, and they’ve proposed CASH incentives for women to have at least two children, more cash for three.

No, I’m not kidding. At least these cash incentives are a provincial issue, not a federal one.

Don’t fool yourself - Canada has a racial grievance industry. It just has a different color than the one here in the US.

There’s one other thing that is rarely discussed that factors in as well:

Canada’s banking system takes after the Scottish banks of old, not the English banks as we do.

The Scots bankers were more risk-averse, much more oriented around the idea that “there’s a price too high” to lend on certain assets. Scots bankers were disposed to give up possible future gains to reduce the chance of loss, and Canada’s banks are similar in this aspect.

Nah, they’re not building to spec, as I pointed out.

They, however, have the capabilities of building to spec. They have the money, the expertise, the engineers, the equipment, etc.

They just *choose* not to do so.

I forgot to add:

The NFPA (who writes, promulgates, etc the NEC) is an international standards organization. That greatly amplifies the complexity of getting a standard out there.

For truck shore power, they’d want to write specs that will be used in Mexico, Canada and the US, because truck commerce crosses all these borders.

Yes, as I mentioned. Still, since they’re a standards organization, there is a mountain of paperwork, meetings, etc to draw up the code, get it reviewed, get public input on it, etc. Until there’s a push to get it done, it won’t happen.

Not exactly. What is becoming more commonplace are “no idling” laws, where the main engine cannot be idled for more than X minutes in the period that the truck is parked. These are imposed by states, cities, counties, etc. Some of them have exemptions for high or low outside temps (typically < 32F or > 80F) or for recharging the air system.

The Feds are just after a reduction in NOx, soot, the usual diesel emissions stuff. There’s several ways to meet these mandates - shore power, APU’s, aux heaters like the Espar units, etc.

The legislative and regulatory skids appear greased for APU’s tho - there are the tax, loan, grants, etc available from the Feds that I mentioned earlier, there are more and more states putting in a weight waiver for about 400 lbs of APU weight on a truck (so that the trucker isn’t being penalized with a reduction in net cargo capacity).

I’m not a trucker either - I just used to get an earful of the upcoming regs from the hay truckers that came to our farm in Nevada from California. All the draconian laws that will be imposed nationwide on trucks got their start in California.