We shall see what happens in the U.S. , but it seems we have the same trend as Canada…
Comments »Monthly Archives: February 2012
Panasonic Nearly Doubles Their Losses to $10 Billion on Thai Flooding Issues
India is Expected to Cut Rates as Inflation Eases
The Euro Gains Slightly Against the Dollar
WTI & Brent Spread Continues to Widen
Spain Proposes the Merger of Banks to Purge Losses
Greek Debt Talks Still Unresolved Over Two Weeks After a Pledge to Do So
Global Markets Trade Mixed While U.S. Futures Show Tamed Upside
Position Management
Comments »Once you are in a trade, only one of three outcomes can be the result:
1. Sell for a profit
2. Sell for a loss
3. The trade just sits thereClick here for a great article on Position Management.
The Effect of 2:1 Debt to GDP Ratio on the Male Sex Drive
A startling number of Japanese youths have turned their backs on sex and relationships, a new survey has found.
The survey, conducted by the Japan Family Planning Association, found that 36% of males aged 16 to 19 said that they had “no interest” in or even “despised” sex. That’s almost a 19% increase since the survey was last conducted in 2008.
If that’s not bad enough, The Wall Street Journal reports that a whopping 59% of female respondents aged 16 to 19 said they were uninterested in or averse to sex, a near 12% increase since 2008.
The survey paints a bleak picture for Japan’s aging population. The Associated Press reports that the national population of 128 million will have shrunk by one-third by 2060 and seniors will account for 40 percent of people, placing a greater burden on the work force population to support the country’s social security and tax systems.
Many commentators in the Japanese and international media have laid the problem squarely at the feet of soshoku danshi — “herbivore men” — a term coined by pop culture columnist Maki Fukasawa in 2006. It refers to Japanese young men who have rejected their culture’s traditional definition of masculinity, and seemingly eschew relationships with the opposite sex as part.
CNN spoke to a Midori Saida, a 24-year-old Japanese woman who described “herbivore men” as “flaky and weak.”
“We like manly men,” she said. “We are not interested in those boys — at all.”
Read the rest here.
Comments »NFL Offers $1M Prize With New Fantasy Game
The NFL wants to add even more fans to the millions already following the sport — and is willing to pay $1 million to do it.
The league will run an ad during the Super Bowl introducing the ”Perfect Challenge,” a deceptively simple new fantasy game.
Each week, participants must pick an eight-player lineup out of the entire NFL. If every selection earns the most fantasy points at their position in a given week, the owner wins $1 million.
The lineups must feature one quarterback, two running backs, two wide receivers, one tight end, one kicker and one defense/special-teams unit. The game is free.
For a sense of the difficulty of picking the perfect lineup, consider that last season 16 different kickers earned the most points (including ties) for at least one week under the standard NFL.com scoring system.
Yes, the hugely popular NFL believes it’s missing out on potential fans, so it’s making a splash with the $1 million prize. An estimated 15 million to 20 million people already play fantasy football, but then again, last year’s Super Bowl was watched by 111 million viewers.
Regular fantasy football requires the organization to set up a league at the start of the season and the commitment to attend a draft and update a lineup every week. The Perfect Challenge requires less time and knowledge, and fans can play as many or as few weeks as they’d like.
For those avid fans already hooked on fantasy, it’s an opportunity to compete for something even if that team they drafted in early September is already eliminated from playoff contention.
”Male, female, younger, older — this appeals across the board,” said Jeff Berman, the NFL’s digital media chief. ”Obviously, having the prize component gives an extra reason.”
The league’s hope is that the people who play fantasy for the first time through the Challenge start paying more attention to the sport — maybe they watch the Thursday night game on NFL Network, or buy official merchandise.
”Bringing new players into the fold is good for football overall,” Berman said.
Organizations can offer $1 million prizes in initiatives like this with the help of the insurance. For the NFL, having to distribute the big payday would carry the kind of buzz the league wants from this program.
”We’d be thrilled for somebody to pick the perfect lineup and win the prize,” Berman said. ”That would be a terrific outcome.”
-AP
Comments »4 Companies Riding Facebook’s Wave $ZNGA, $FIO, $AAPL, $STVI
Comments »NEW YORK (TheStreet) — Facebook’s $5 billion IPO won’t just impact its thousands of employees and corporate culture. The effects will be much more far reaching, touching hundreds of companies that rely on the platform — many of which are already benefiting from buzz surrounding the year’s most talked about public offering.
Climate Change Controversy in the Wall Street Journal
by Patrick J. Michaels
This article appeared in Cato.org on February 2, 2012.
The Current Wisdom is a monthly Cato feature written by Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels on global climate change. These articles usually feature new and interesting items in the scientific literature with important implications for climate change regulations.
This edition departs from our usual routine because of the very vitriolic fight that has broken as the result of publication of a January 27 op-ed titled “No Need to Panic about Global Warming” in The Wall Street Journal. Authored by 16 high-profile scientists, it made common-sense climate arguments that readers of this Wisdom and other Cato publications on climate science and policy are certainly familiar with.
The January 27 piece can be summarized as follows:
Patrick J. Michaels is a Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies at the Cato Institute.
• There has been no net warming for “well over ten years;”
• Global warming forecasts confidently made by the UN in 1990 were clearly exaggerations;
• Carbon dioxide, the main “greenhouse” emission, stimulates plant growth;
• Climate scientists on the federal dole have a track record of punishing those who do not express alarmist views;
• Climate alarmism, public funding, and the growth of government and taxation create self-feeding mutual incentives; and
• Doing “nothing” about climate change in the next 50 years has little effect on climate mitigation compared to initiating taxation now.
None of the above are earthshaking propositions to any serious student of climate change. Monthly temperature departures from average show no significant trend going back to 1996. If one is concerned about biasing from the warm El Nino year of 1998, beginning post-2000 yields the same result. The UN was forecasting that global temperatures would be rising around twice the mean rate actually observed in surface temperatures. Greenhouse owners jack up the carbon dioxide concentration of their air several fold to stimulate plant growth. Alarmism breeds funding and new agencies that require more tax dollars, and funding begets tenure. The futility of politically feasible emissions reductions policies has been demonstrated for decades.
By January 30, the New York Times, whose editorial stance on global warming is (to put it mildly) different than that of the Journal, brought in their high-profile environmental blogger, Andrew Revkin, to carp principally about the last bullet item.
His post, “Scientists Challenging Climate Science Appear to Flunk Climate Economics,” claimed that the Journal scientists had misrepresented the work of Yale economist William Nordhaus, quoting the latter’s “wise policy” (no bias there) of slowly introducing a carbon tax.
Nordhaus responded that the Journal piece “completely misrepresented my work.”
At that point, Revkin opened up the controversy to commentary. Readers can decide for themselves.
Here is Nordhaus’s complete comment on the Journal op-ed:
The piece completely misrepresented my work. My work has long taken the view that policies to slow global warming would have net economic benefits, in the trillion of dollars of present value. This is true going back to work in the early 1990s (MIT Press, Yale Press, Science, PNAS, among others). I have advocated a carbon tax for many years as the best way to attack the issue. I can only assume they either completely ignorant of the economics on the issue or are willfully misstating my findings.
And here is the response of the Journal article authors:
We have accurately represented Professor Nordhaus’s findings in our Wall Street Journal editorial of 01-27-12, while making and intending no statement regarding his policy beliefs and advocacy. In his 2008 book, A Question of Balance, Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies, Professor Nordhaus provided the computed discounted costs and benefits for a variety of policies, assuming the IPCC central value for warming due to increased atmospheric CO2 (3 degrees C for doubling of CO2).
He finds (Table 5.3 of the book) that a policy of delaying greenhouse gas controls for 50 years gives a benefit-to-cost ratio just slightly less than his “optimum” policy. The optimum policy is a universal harmonized carbon tax, which Professor Nordhaus advocates. It starts small and is increased gradually over decades. In terms of net benefits, the 50-year-delay policy is far better than more aggressive policies that would severely limit atmospheric concentrations of CO2 or model-calculated global temperature rises.
Both the 50-year-delay policy and the optimum policy allow world economies to continue to develop with relatively little disruption. Aggressive policies considered in the book do not have this characteristic and display sharply higher abatement costs and lower benefit-to-cost ratios.
As we note in the Wall Street Journal editorial, several more aggressive policies are negative return propositions.
Furthermore, in Chapters I and VI, Professor Nordhaus takes pains to explain that the requirement of universality of policy application is critical; regional, national, or group participation differences can be expected to lower policy effectiveness, perhaps substantially: “… there are substantial excess costs if the preponderance of sectors and countries are not fully included. We preliminarily estimate that a participation rate of 50 percent, as compared with 100 percent, will impose an abatement-cost penalty of 250 percent.” (Chapter 1, p.19). Therefore the optimum policy should be considered an ideal upper limit that may not be achieved in real world application.
We wish to emphasize once again that the above assumes that the IPCC climate results are correct and that significant environmental damage would result, both of which we strongly dispute. The statements made in the Wall Street Journal editorial report Professor Nordhaus’s findings accurately and do not bear on his policy advocacy.
Here is Table 5.3:
Of course, that wasn’t the end.
It seems that if one ever needs to start a fire in the woods, simply rub two climatologists together. So, in the wee hours of February 1, a response to the Journal article, signed now by 38 scientists, was published.
For clarity, let’s call this one “Trenberth et al.”, for its senior author, Kevin Trenberth of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Summarizing Trenberth et al.:
• The authors of the original Journal article were largely not climate scientists, and those that were, held “extreme views.”
• Warming has not “abated” in the last decade.
• Scientific societies worldwide concur that “the earth is heating up and humans are primarily responsible”. More than 97% of all actively publishing climate scientists “agree that climate change is real and human caused”.
• ”… The transition to a low-carbon economy will not only allow the world to avoid the worst risks of climate change, but could also drive decades of economic growth.”
Trenberth et al. is surprisingly weak and incomplete. The 16 original authors are all individuals that are highly competent in their fields, most are physicists of one stripe or another, and all can read and summarize a scientific literature. In fact, most would hold that climate science is nothing more than applied physics.
“Extreme views” lie in the eye of the beholder, and science only grudgingly backs away from established paradigms. For example, despite the obvious jigsaw-puzzle fit of the earth’s continents, it took 100 years of bickering before continental drift was accepted over geological stasis. And, in this case, the “extreme view” of the most prominent climate scientist of the 16, MIT’s Richard Lindzen, is hardly an outrage.
Lindzen holds that the “sensitivity” of surface temperature to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide has been overestimated because of an inaccuracy in the way that computer models magnify warming. In and of itself, it is mainstream, not extreme, to entertain the hypothesis that doubling carbon dioxide on its own would only cause a bit more than 1 degree (C) of global surface warming. Computer models arrive at much higher values, around 3.5°C, by amplifying the carbon dioxide effect because a slightly warmer atmosphere contains more water vapor, which itself is a potent greenhouse gas. Clouds are also changed in a way that enhances warming. There is evidence from the outgoing radiation signal of the earth that the effects of water vapor and clouds have been overestimated.
The 38 must somehow disagree with Susan Solomon, whose 2010 article in Science attributing the lack of recent warming—that the 39 deny—to unanticipated changes in stratospheric water vapor with no known cause.
The 38 must somehow disagree with the global temperature sensing from satellites, which also shows no net warming for the last 14 years. Now, one could argue that the satellites are measuring temperatures above the surface in the lower atmosphere, but the computer models that the 38 find so accurate, predict that the lower atmosphere should be warming faster than the surface over most of the planet.
Finally “more than 97% of all actively publishing* climate scientists agree that climate change is real and human caused” is probably an underestimate, as virtually everyone acknowledges that the surface temperature is warmer than it was, and that multifarious human activities have some influence on climate. Rather, he misses the point well-made by the original Journal article, which is that the rise in surface temperature is clearly below the values first forecast by the UN in 1990. The core—unsettled—issue in climate science is the “sensitivity” of temperature to carbon dioxide, and there are several independent lines of evidence, including the surface temperature history and the water vapor problems, that argue that it has been substantially overestimated.
In global warming, it’s not the heat, it’s the sensitivity. But don’t expect much sensitivity and expect a lot of heat when climatologists voice their opinions.
* The part about “actively publishing” is saved for another day. The climategate emails—and there are plenty by, to, or about these 39 scientists, detail how difficult it is to publish anything they disagree with, thanks to intimidation and manipulation of editors, blackballing of those who disagree with them, and other blood sports.
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Comments »Senate Passes STOCK Act, Applies It to Executive Branch
By Alexander Bolton and Josiah Ryan
The Senate voted 96 to 3 Thursday to prohibit members of Congress from using non-public information for personal financial gain but beat back a slew of amendments to further limit congressional perks.
The Senate action puts pressure on House Republicans to pass similar legislation to quell allegations of congressional self-dealing at a time when Congress’s approval rating is at an all-time low.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) on Tuesday criticized the Senate legislation as weak. His staff said he would move a strengthened version of the bill to the House floor at the end of the month.
Senators voted for an amendment Thursday to expand the legislation’s reporting requirements to members of the executive branch.
The legislation would mandate that lawmakers report all major transactions within 30 days and file financial disclosure reports electronically.
But lawmakers defeated several proposals to significantly reform the perks and powers critics charge have a corrupting influence on Capitol Hill.
Senators voted down a bipartisan proposal to permanently ban earmarks as well as an amendment to require lawmakers and senior staff to divest of stocks or put their stock holdings in blind trusts.
The amendment sponsored by Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) to permanently ban earmarks failed by a vote of 40-59.
A solid block of Republicans, including Sens. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), Roy Blunt (Mo.), Thad Cochran (Miss.), Susan Collins (Maine), John Hoeven (N.D.), Kay Bailey Hutchison (Texas), James Inhofe (Okla.), Dick Lugar (Ind.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Pat Roberts (Kan.), Jeff Sessions (Ala.), Richard Shelby (Ala.) and Roger Wicker (Miss.), voted to preserve Congress’s future power to earmark federal funds.
The amendment sponsored by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) requiring lawmakers and senior staff to divest of stocks lost 26 to 73.
Senate leaders denied Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) a vote on an amendment to deny federal pensions to lawmakers who become lobbyists.
The anti-lobbying amendment raised the hackles of some senior lawmakers, including those planning to retire at the end of this year.
Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), who will leave the Senate at the end of the 112th Congress, called the proposal “foolish.”
“Why should someone who has worked and accumulated some equity and is investing that in American businesses no longer be able to do that when they’re elected to public office?” he said Wednesday.
Leaders also denied a vote on an amendment sponsored by Sens. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and Jon Tester (D-Mo.) to permanently bar lawmakers from becoming lobbyists and restrict former staff from lobbying their old bosses in Congress for a period of six years.
Senators defeated another amendment sponsored by Paul to prohibit executive branch appointees and staff from having oversight, rule-making, and loan- or grant-making authority over companies in which they or their spouses have significant financial interest.
The amendment was designed to guard against the alleged improprieties stemming from the bankruptcy of Solyndra, a solar-panel manufacturer that received more than $500 million in federal loan guarantees.
A senior Senate Republican aide said GOP candidates would attack Democratic incumbents who voted against the so-called Solyndra amendment.
“Any Democrats who vote against this will face a bomb in the fall,” said the aide.
Brown, Tester and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) voted against the amendment.
The Senate also rejected a resolution sponsored by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) calling for a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on members of Congress.
But the underlying proposal to ban lawmakers from using private information they learn in the course of their duties to profit from stock trades or other transactions received broad bipartisan support.
“We tried to focus at the specific task at hand, closing loopholes to ensure that members of Congress play by the exact same rules as everyone else,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), a sponsor of the legislation.
“This sorely-needed bill will establish for the first time a clear fiduciary responsibility to the people we serve, removing any doubt that the [Securities and Exchange Commission] and [Commodities Futures Trading Commission] are empowered to investigate and prosecute cases involving insider trading of non-public information that we have access to through our jobs,” she said.
Only three senators voted against final passage: Sens. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.).
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