Blair Working for JP Morgan Chase
January 10th, 2008I wonder how much opium will be produced in Afghanistan in 2008?
I bet Tony knows.
Via: CNN:
Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, who left office last June, has taken up a part-job with a Wall Street bank on an estimated $1 million salary.
JP Morgan Chase did not say how much Blair will make in the part-time position.
Blair will work with JP Morgan Chase, a firm with assets of $1.5 trillion and operations in more than 50 countries. He will advise the bank on global political and strategic issues, a company statement said.
“We operate our business all over the world, and Tony Blair will bring our leaders and clients a unique and invaluable global perspective that is especially critical in turbulent times like these,” said Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of the company, in the statement.
Neither Blair nor the bank would say how much the former PM would be paid. A New York recruitment consultant though told the Financial Times that the job was likely to be worth more than $987,000 (£500,000) a year.
Advisory jobs such as the one Blair has accepted are popular among former world leaders. His predecessor as prime minister, John Major, took a position with the Carlyle Group, a private investment house, as did former U.S. President George H.W. Bush.
Cities Holding Lenders Accountable for Foreclosure Aftermath
January 10th, 2008Via: Business Week:
On Dec. 17 in a windowless Buffalo courtroom, Cindy T. Cooper, a prosecutor for the city, buzzes among a dozen men in suits, cutting deals.
“You’ve got to unboard [the house], go in, and clean it out,” she tells one. “If all the repairs are done quickly, I wouldn’t ask for any fines.”
To another, she says, “the gutters weren’t done right,” and asks to see receipts for the work.
It’s “Bank Day” in Judge Henry J. Nowak’s housing courtroom, more typically a venue where landlords and tenants duke it out over evictions and back rent. Instead, Cooper is asking lawyers for CitiFinancial (C), JPMorgan Chase (JPM), and Countrywide Financial (CFC) to fix problems like peeling paint, broken masonry, and overgrown or trash-filled yards at houses the city says the banks are responsible for maintaining.
It may be surprising to find these financial-services giants hauled before this obscure local tribunal. In fact, Cooper and Nowak are at the forefront of a pioneering effort to deal with a vexing problem: the surging number of vacant and abandoned homes resulting from the mortgage market meltdown. The vacancies occur when lenders bring foreclosure suits against delinquent borrowers. Mere notice that such an action might be filed often sends residents packing.
In Buffalo and other Rust Belt cities, the problem has been particularly acute, because in many cases banks are abandoning the houses, too, after determining that their value is so low that it’s not worth laying claim to them. When city officials try to hold someone responsible for dilapidated properties, they often find the homeowner and bank pointing fingers at each other.
Indeed, the houses fall into a kind of legal limbo that Cleveland housing attorney Kermit J. Lind calls “toxic title”. While formal ownership remains with a borrower who has fled, the bank retains its lien on the property. That opens up a dispute over who is responsible for taxes and maintenance. Even when lenders do complete the foreclosure, they may walk away from the property, leaving it to be taken by a city for unpaid taxes, a process that can take years.
Orphaned properties quickly fall into disrepair, the deterioration sometimes hastened by vandals who trash the interiors, lighting fires and ripping out wiring and pipes to sell for scrap. Squatters or drug dealers may move in.
South Africa: Gold Output Falls 12.7%
January 10th, 2008They cant just add more zeros in a computer to make more?
* chuckle *
Via: Reuters:
South Africa’s annual gold output fell in November by its biggest margin in seven months, while total minerals production declined 6.4 percent compared with the same month the previous year, data showed on Thursday.
Gold production dropped 12.7 percent year-on-year in November, according to figures from Statistics South Africa, further tightening supplies in the world’s biggest producer of the precious metal.
Gold production has been on a downward slope in South Africa, tumbling by over 50 percent over the past decade, as high-grade mines run out of ore and firms grapple with more difficult and high-cost underground operations.
Paulson Trying to Prevent “Market Failure”
January 10th, 2008Via: Smart Money:
U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Monday the administration is working to ensure that the subprime mortgage crisis doesn’t lead to a “market failure,” while urging Congress to pass bills to help troubled homeowners refinance their loans.
In prepared remarks for a speech to the New York Society of Security Analysts, Paulson warned that about 1.8 million subprime mortgages will reset to mostly higher interest rates over the next two years, “raising the potential of a market failure.”
Noting that the mortgage industry isn’t equipped to handle the volume of resets, Paulson said the administration is fostering an effort to “prevent this market failure,” citing its plan to help fast-track a large number of refinancings for borrowers able to afford their current mortgage rates but not the reset rate.
The administration estimates that as many as 1.2 million subprime borrowers could be helped by its initiative, either through refinancing or a workout. Those that can’t pay the reset rate and are unable to refinance will be eligible to receive a freeze on their starter rates for five years. Most mortgage services are expected to start fast-tracking borrowers in coming weeks.
Paulson defended the streamlined process against criticism that it is breaking mortgage contracts, saying mortgage servicers are fulfilling their contractual obligations by “pursuing all loss-mitigation options when it is the best interest of investors, as they normally would.”
Citibank Refusing to Process Firearms Related Credit Card Transactions
January 10th, 2008Via: NSSF:
Citi Merchant Services and First Data Corp. are refusing to process any credit card transactions between federally licensed firearms retailers, distributors and manufacturers — a move which will severely limit available inventory of firearms and ammunition to military, law enforcement and law-abiding Americans.
The first company to be affected by this decision appears to be firearms distributor CDNN Sports Inc.
“We were contacted recently by First Data/Citi Merchant Services by a June Rivera-Mantilla stating that we were terminated and funds were being seized for selling firearms in a non-face-to-face transaction,” said Charlie Crawford, president of CDNN Sports Inc. “Although perfectly legal, we were also informed that no transactions would be processed in the future, even for non-firearms. I find this very frightening.”
What Happened to Polls in New Hampshire?
January 10th, 2008Via: Rasmussen Reports:
Hillary Clinton’s victory in New Hampshire was a shock to anyone who followed the pre-election polls. At Rasmussen Reports, our final numbers suggested a 7-point victory for Barack Obama. In the end, Clinton won by three. Other polls also foreshadowed a solid victory for Obama, some projecting a double digit margin. The campaigns themselves expected a significant victory for Obama (the Clinton campaign was even saying that anything less than a double-digit loss would be a victory of sorts for their candidate).
It is hard to remember a time when the polling and expectations were so universally different from what really happened.
More: Black Box Voting
Out of 19 Industrialized Countries, U.S. Is Dead Last in Healthcare
January 9th, 2008I had to go with the Agence France Presse piece for this news.
Via: AFP:
France is tops, and the United States dead last, in providing timely and effective healthcare to its citizens, according to a survey Tuesday of preventable deaths in 19 industrialized countries.
The study by the Commonwealth Fund and published in the January/February issue of the journal Health Affairs measured developed countries’ effectiveness at providing timely and effective healthcare.
The study, entitled “Measuring the Health of Nations: Updating an Earlier Analysis,” was written by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It looked at death rates in subjects younger than 75 that could have been prevented by timely and effective medical care.
The researchers found that while most countries surveyed saw preventable deaths decline by an average of 16 percent, the United States saw only a four percent dip.
The non-profit Commonwealth Fund, which financed the study, expressed alarm at the findings.
“It is startling to see the US falling even farther behind on this crucial indicator of health system performance,” said Commonwealth Fund Senior Vice President Cathy Schoen, who noted that “other countries are reducing these preventable deaths more rapidly, yet spending far less.”
The 19 countries, in order of best to worst, were: France, Japan, Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Some countries showed dramatic improvement in the periods studied — 1997 and 1998 and again between 2002 and 2003 — outpacing the United States, which showed only slight improvement.
White the United States ranked 15th of 19 between 1997-98, by 2002-03 it had fallen to last place.
“It is notable that all countries have improved substantially except the US,” said Ellen Nolte, lead author of the study.
Had the United States performed as well as any of the top three industrialized countries, there would have been 101,000 fewer deaths per year, the researchers said.
Nanoantennas Could Collect 80% Solar Energy, Continue to Work at Night
January 9th, 2008Immediately after reading this story, I emailed the U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory to find out how much money had been allocated to this research.
The helpful INL media relations person wrote back:
The INL has spent about $4 million to date on the energy management aspects of this project… The INL team is looking for industry partners to support further research.
That’s $4 million (so far) with INL looking to private industry to support further research. Sorry if I’m repeating what she wrote, but it so incredible that I want to get it clear!
You know where this is going, don’t you…
The U.S. Government spends more on the war in Iraq in twenty minutes than it has spent on a technology that captures 80% of available solar energy and, “could potentially cost pennies a yard, be imprinted on flexible materials and still draw energy after the sun has set.”
Now, maybe you’ve heard of a company called Lockheed Martin; the largest armaments manufacturer in the world. In 2006, Lockheed Martin had defense related revenues of more than $36 billion. Four million dollars—the amount the U.S. Government spent on the nanoantenna research so far—represents about .01% of Lockheed Martin’s defense related revenues in 2006. That’s one one hundredth of 1%.
There’s a power crisis alright, and it has nothing to do with energy.
Via: Idaho National Laboratory:
Researchers at Idaho National Laboratory, along with partners at Microcontinuum Inc. (Cambridge, MA) and Patrick Pinhero of the University of Missouri, are developing a novel way to collect energy from the sun with a technology that could potentially cost pennies a yard, be imprinted on flexible materials and still draw energy after the sun has set.
The new approach, which garnered two 2007 Nano50 awards, uses a special manufacturing process to stamp tiny square spirals of conducting metal onto a sheet of plastic. Each interlocking spiral “nanoantenna” is as wide as 1/25 the diameter of a human hair.
Because of their size, the nanoantennas absorb energy in the infrared part of the spectrum, just outside the range of what is visible to the eye. The sun radiates a lot of infrared energy, some of which is soaked up by the earth and later released as radiation for hours after sunset. Nanoantennas can take in energy from both sunlight and the earth’s heat, with higher efficiency than conventional solar cells.
“I think these antennas really have the potential to replace traditional solar panels,” says physicist Steven Novack, who spoke about the technology in November at the National Nano Engineering Conference in Boston.
…
Commercial solar panels usually transform less that 20 percent of the usable energy that strikes them into electricity. Each cell is made of silicon and doped with exotic elements to boost its efficiency. “The supply of processed silicon is lagging, and they only get more expensive,” Novack says. He hopes solar nanoantennas will be a more efficient and sustainable alternative.
The team estimates individual nanoantennas can absorb close to 80 percent of the available energy. The circuits themselves can be made of a number of different conducting metals, and the nanoantennas can be printed on thin, flexible materials like polyethylene, a plastic that’s commonly used in bags and plastic wrap. In fact, the team first printed antennas on plastic bags used to deliver the Wall Street Journal, because they had just the right thickness.
By focusing on readily available materials and rapid manufacturing from inception, Novack says, the aim is to make nanoantenna arrays as cheap as inexpensive carpet.
…
While the nanoantennas are easily manufactured, a crucial part of the process has yet to be fully developed: creating a way to store or transmit the electricity. Although infrared rays create an alternating current in the nanoantenna, the frequency of the current switches back and forth ten thousand billion times a second. That’s much too fast for electrical appliances, which operate on currents that oscillate only 60 times a second. So the team is exploring ways to slow that cycling down, possibly by embedding energy conversion devices like tiny capacitors directly into the antenna structure as part of the nanoantenna imprinting process.
“At this point, these antennas are good at capturing energy, but they’re not very good at converting it,” says INL engineer Dale Kotter, “but we have very promising exploratory research under way.” Kotter and Novack are also exploring ways to transform the high-frequency alternating current (AC) to direct current (DC) that can be stored in batteries. One potential candidate is high-speed rectifiers, special diodes that would sit at the center of each spiral antenna and convert the electricity from AC to DC. The team has a patent pending on a variety of potential energy conversion methods. They anticipate they are only a few years away from creating the next generation of solar energy collectors.
Super Soaker Inventor Aims to Cut Solar Costs in Half
January 9th, 2008Via: Popular Mechanics:
Solar energy technology is enjoying its day in the sun with the advent of innovations from flexible photovoltaic (PV) materials to thermal power plants that concentrate the sun’s heat to drive turbines. But even the best system converts only about 30 percent of received solar energy into electricity—making solar more expensive than burning coal or oil. That will change if Lonnie Johnson’s invention works. The Atlanta-based independent inventor of the Super Soaker squirt gun (a true technological milestone) says he can achieve a conversion efficiency rate that tops 60 percent with a new solid-state heat engine. It represents a breakthrough new way to turn heat into power.
Johnson, a nuclear engineer who holds more than 100 patents, calls his invention the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Conversion System, or JTEC for short. This is not PV technology, in which semiconducting silicon converts light into electricity. And unlike a Stirling engine, in which pistons are powered by the expansion and compression of a contained gas, there are no moving parts in the JTEC. It’s sort of like a fuel cell: JTEC circulates hydrogen between two membrane-electrode assemblies (MEA). Unlike a fuel cell, however, JTEC is a closed system. No external hydrogen source. No oxygen input. No wastewater output. Other than a jolt of electricity that acts like the ignition spark in an internal-combustion engine, the only input is heat.
Here’s how it works: One MEA stack is coupled to a high- temperature heat source (such as solar heat concentrated by mirrors), and the other to a low-temperature heat sink (ambient air). The low-temperature stack acts as the compressor stage while the high-temperature stack functions as the power stage. Once the cycle is started by the electrical jolt, the resulting pressure differential produces voltage across each of the MEA stacks. The higher voltage at the high-temperature stack forces the low-temperature stack to pump hydrogen from low pressure to high pressure, maintaining the pressure differential. Meanwhile hydrogen passing through the high-temperature stack generates power.
“It’s like a conventional heat engine,” explains Paul Werbos, program director at the National Science Foundation, which has provided funding for JTEC. “It still uses temperature differences to create pressure gradients. Only instead of using those pressure gradients to move an axle or wheel, he’s using them to force ions through a membrane. It’s a totally new way of generating electricity from heat.”
The bigger the temperature differential, the higher the efficiency. With the help of Heshmat Aglan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Alabama’s Tuskegee University, Johnson hopes to have a low-temperature prototype (200-degree centigrade) completed within a year’s time. The pair is experimenting with high-temperature membranes made of a novel ceramic material of micron-scale thickness. Johnson envisions a first-generation system capable of handling temperatures up to 600 degrees. (Currently, solar concentration using parabolic mirrors tops 800 degrees centigrade.) Based on the theoretical Carnot thermodynamic cycle, at 600 degrees efficiency rates approach 60 percent, twice those of today’s solar Stirling engines.
Housing Outlook Takes a Grim Turn
January 9th, 2008Via: AP:
Shares of Countrywide Financial Corp., the nation’s largest mortgage lender, sank to an all-time low Tuesday as a major homebuilder offered a grim outlook for the industry and the Bush administration signaled it is growing more concerned about rising mortgage defaults.
KB Home reported a mammoth loss for the fourth quarter and said there are no indications that the housing market is stabilizing. The head of Fannie Mae, a government-sponsored mortgage lender, predicted the housing market would weaken through 2009 and said a turnaround wasn’t likely until 2010.
President Bush, meanwhile, conceded, “It’s going to take awhile to work through the downturn,” and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said he is concerned about the potential for additional home defaults.
Paulson said the administration is exploring expanding a deal it brokered with mortgage lenders last fall to include relief to people who borrowed at prime, conventional rates as well as those with subprime, adjustable-rate mortgages that were due to reset.
Countrywide stock fell in morning trading after The New York Times reported about accusations that the company had fabricated letters submitted in a court case involving a foreclosure in Pennsylvania.
By early afternoon, the New York Stock Exchange temporarily halted trading of Countrywide shares before the company issued a statement denying rumors that a bankruptcy filing was imminent.
“There is no substance to the rumor that Countrywide is planning to file for bankruptcy, and we are not aware of any basis for the rumor that any of the major rating agencies are contemplating negative action relative to the company,” the statement said.
When trading resumed, the shares rebounded somewhat, but then slid again. They finished with a decline of $2.17, or 28.4 percent, to $5.47 after falling to an all-time low of $5.05 earlier in the day.
A rating analysis issued by Egan-Jones Ratings Co. suggested Countrywide “is severely challenged and might falter if it does not receive an infusion of at last $4 billion within the next couple of weeks.”
The agency said the lender will need the funding to weather a steep decline in mortgage originations and its shift to less-profitable, non-subprime lending.
Uneasy investors were hard-pressed to find reassurance elsewhere.
