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Here’s Who Profits If the Government Defaults

by Alexander Wood Posted on October 11, 2013

Mother Jones

If House Republicans don’t agree to raise the nation’s debt ceiling and a default ensues, the economic effects would be “catastrophic,” in the words of Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. The nation’s borrowing costs would spike, as would interest rates for average Americans, and the stock market would plummet. But not everyone will lose if a default causes an economic catastrophe. Here’s who could profit from a financial calamity:

1. Short sellers: Most folks invest in stocks and bonds hoping the value of their investments will increase. But there’s also money to be made by short selling—betting that the value of a stock or bond will drop. Short selling is an investment strategy that’s typically employed by sophisticated investors and financial firms, but technically anyone can do it. Investors who bet that the value of US Treasury securities will dip would likely profit. Because a default could cause the US stock market to crash, shorting almost any US stock could make you money. In fact, you can even invest in specific mutual funds that specialize in short selling. “It’s a very powerful and disillusioning feeling to know that smart rich people can make money even when America goes over Niagara Falls in a barrel,” says Jeff Connaughton, a former investment banker and White House lawyer during the Clinton administration.

2. Investors in gold and silver: Gold and silver typically rise in value when when the stock market is volatile, because they hold their value better than paper money or other assets. The price of both metals rose this week as default fears heightened.

3. Bitcoin investors (maybe): The value of this untraceable virtual currency has tracked closely with gold over the past year, suggesting that it could serve as a more stable investment during a financial crisis.

4. Currency traders: Traders who bet that the US dollar will decrease in value relative to foreign currencies stand to profit off of a US government default.

5. Pawn shops: If the effects of a default are catastrophic, stocks will plummet, pension funds could dry up, credit card interest rates will rise, and jobs will be lost. Though credit markets may freeze up, as they did in the wake of the 2008 meltdown, pawn shops ought to do well, as they did following the last crisis.

6. Bankruptcy lawyers: See above.

7. Mortgage servicers: Mortgage rates typically rise and fall along with Treasury rates. If a default causes a spike in interest rates, home owners could see their monthly mortgage bills soar, causing some homeowners to default on their loans and wind up in foreclosure. You’d think this would be bad news for all parties involved—families, lenders, investors, mortgage servicers. But the latter actually turn a good profit by foreclosing on people; investors take the losses, while servicers make back all the money they’re owed in a foreclosure sale, plus all sorts of fees borrowers have to pay on their delinquent loans.

8. The canned and freeze-dried food industries: Doomsday preppers are already getting ready for the collapse of civilization that could result from a financial meltdown by stocking up on pork and beans and freeze-dried meals.

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Here’s Who Profits If the Government Defaults

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Army going green to cut back on dangerous fuel convoys

by HJMRebecca Posted on October 2, 2013

Army going green to cut back on dangerous fuel convoys

By

isafmedia

A Marine pours fuel into cans delivered by a convoy in Afghanistan.

We’ve written at length about the American military’s push to go green, and how that’s helping to turn the world’s most powerful defense force into a leaner and meaner fighting machine.

But here’s another reason for the guys and gals in green to ditch dirty fossil fuels: Shifting to solar or wind power can spare soldiers from the dangerous task of hauling massive amounts of incendiary fluids across battlefields — becoming prime targets for anti-American forces.

In Afghanistan, one life is lost for every 24 deliveries that are attempted, according to a new article in Bloomberg:

With renewable energy, “there is no supply chain vulnerability, there are no commodity costs and there’s a lower chance of disruption,” Richard Kidd, the deputy assistant secretary of the Army in charge of energy security, said in an interview. “A fuel tanker can be shot at and blown up. The sun’s rays will still be there.”

The new green revolution, which is in progress at military bases stateside as well, isn’t just good for our fighting forces — it’s good for business, too. Well, some business.

The transition is a sales opportunity for companies including Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT), which is installing small-scale power systems at U.S. bases, along with Alta Devices Inc. and Sundial Capital Partners, which make sun-powered systems. The moves threaten U.S. utilities, which stand to lose revenue when the Army shifts to photovoltaic panels from traditional power sources.

It also threatens oil companies’ bottom line, of course. Maybe that’s why, despite the overwhelming reasons for the military to go green, meddling members of Congress have tried — unsuccessfully, fortunately — to force America’s commanders to continue to rely on antiquated fossil fuels. After all, if it wasn’t for fossil fuels, what would we have to fight about? And who would fund those expensive congressional campaigns?

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

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Army going green to cut back on dangerous fuel convoys

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Investors Probably Aren’t Very Worried That America Will Default on its Bonds

by Alexandra Smith Posted on September 24, 2013

Mother Jones

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Have you noticed that I’m desperately trying today not to write about the idiotic budget theater currently playing an unlimited engagement at the Capitol Hill Vaudeville Palace? You haven’t? Well, I am. It’s just too childish and depressing and monotonous to bear.

I’m sure I’ll buckle under the strain eventually and write about it again. But not today. I. Will. Be. Strong. In the meantime, Jim Tankersley draws our attention to the chart on the right. I used to hate blog posts called “_____ in One Chart,” but ever since ” _____ in 13 Charts” became the new normal, I actively look forward to posts with only a single chart in them. This one shows the trajectory of the US sovereign CDS spread, which is theoretically a measure of how likely it is that treasury bonds will default. On Monday, it shot up from about 22 basis points to 32 bps.

So what does it mean? Probably nothing. For a variety of reasons, the US sovereign CDS market is very thin, which means this spike could have been the result of just two or three trades. And historically, even 32 bps is pretty low. We’ve seen spikes well above 50 bps several times in the past few years.

Beyond that, of course, it just doesn’t make sense. Even if we have a debt limit crisis, there’s zero chance that holders of treasurys will miss any payments. So what this spike really tells us is probably two things. First, a few people have decided to take out a bet that some other people will panic, allowing them to make some money selling their positions for a quick profit. Second, the CDS markets often don’t tell us much of anything useful. After all, nothing happened on Monday that we didn’t already know on Friday.

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Investors Probably Aren’t Very Worried That America Will Default on its Bonds

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Can You be Denied a Loan Because You’re Unpopular on Facebook?

by euro9 Posted on September 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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It’s already well known that Facebook and other social media networks harvest user data and sell it to companies that use that info to peddle their products to consumers. But some lenders have begun to find a new use for this information, scrutinizing Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn data to determine the credit-worthiness of loan applicants. It’s an unprecedented practice that consumer advocates say can be unfair or discriminatory—and one that is poised to only become more prevalent in the years ahead.

Among the US-based online lenders that factor in social media to their lending decisions is San Francisco-based LendUp, which checks out the Facebook and Twitter profiles of potential borrowers to see how many friends they have and how often they interact; the company views an active social media life as an indicator of stability. The lender Neo, a Silicon Valley start-up, looks at the quality and quantity of an applicant’s LinkedIn contacts for clues to how quickly laid-off borrowers will be rehired. Moven, which is based in New York, also uses information from Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites in their loan underwriting process.

Several international lenders have been using similar tactics for a while. Lenddo, for example, which makes loans to folks in developing countries, denies credit to applicants who are Facebook friends with someone who was late repaying a Lenddo loan. Big banks have not yet jumped on board with this controversial credit-vetting method, but consumer advocates and financial industry experts say it’s probably only a matter of time.

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Can You be Denied a Loan Because You’re Unpopular on Facebook?

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Let’s fight the 1 percent — of power plants

by w0ujpysd Posted on September 12, 2013

Let’s fight the 1 percent — of power plants

By

EPA

One of the dirtiest power plants in America.

It’s time to target the 1 percent.

But we’re not talking about bankers or CEOs this time. We’re talking about the nearly 1 percent of American power plants — 50 of them, all fueled by coal — that produce 30 percent of the U.S. power sector’s climate-changing pollution.

A new report by Environment America Research & Policy Center says America’s 6,000 power plants, which collectively produce 41 percent of the country’s carbon emissions, are the world’s single greatest contributor to climate change. To address that problem, the authors recommend targeting the dirtiest facilities:

Dirty power plants produce a disproportionate share of the nation’s global warming pollution – especially given the relatively small share of total electricity they produce. For example, despite producing 30 percent of all power-sector carbon dioxide emissions, the 50 dirtiest power plants only produced 16 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2011.

If the 50 most-polluting U.S. power plants were an independent nation, they would be the seventh-largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, behind Germany and ahead of South Korea. These power plants emitted carbon dioxide pollution equivalent to more than half the emissions of all passenger vehicles in the United States in 2010.

Environment America Research & Policy CenterCO2 emissions from America’s power plants compared with CO2 from entire countries, measured in millions of metric tons per year. (Click to embiggen.)

The 10 dirtiest plants alone produce 0.5 percent of the worldwide energy industry’s carbon dioxide emissions, the report says:

Environment America Research & Policy CenterAmerica’s dirtiest 10 power plants. Click to embiggen.

Still, power plant operators do not face any federal restrictions on their CO2 emissions — although those operating in California and New England participate in regional carbon-trading programs. The Obama administration is working on rules that would impose CO2 limits on power plants, but they’re still years off from implementation — and already under fierce attack from industry.

Environment America Research & Policy Center


Source
America’s Dirtiest Power Plants, Environment America Research & Policy Center

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Let’s fight the 1 percent — of power plants

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Conservatives Are Finally Admitting What Voter Suppression Laws Are All About

by Jay Walker Posted on August 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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North Carolina’s new voter ID law is ostensibly designed to reduce voter fraud. That’s the official story, anyway. But if that’s the case, why did North Carolina also pass a whole bunch of other voting restrictions, including limits on early voting? Phyllis Schlafly, the doyen of right-wing crankery, explains that the reason was simple: “Early voting plays a major role in Obama’s ground game….It is an essential component of the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote campaign.” Steve Benen comments:

Have you ever heard a political figure accidentally read stage direction, unaware that it’s not supposed to repeated out loud? This is what Schlafly’s published column reminds me of.

For North Carolina Republicans, the state’s new voter-suppression measures are ostensibly legitimate — GOP officials are simply worried about non-existent fraud. The response from Democrats and voting-rights advocates is multi-faceted, but emphasizes that some of these measures, including restrictions on early voting, have nothing whatsoever to do with fraud prevention and everything to do with a partisan agenda.

And then there’s Phyllis Schlafly, writing a piece for publication effectively saying Democrats are entirely right — North Carolina had to dramatically cut early voting because it’s not good for Republicans.

Remember, Schlafly’s piece wasn’t intended as criticism; this is her defense of voter suppression in North Carolina. Proponents of voting rights are arguing, “This is a blatantly partisan scheme intended to rig elections,” to which Schlafly is effectively responding, “I know, isn’t it great?”

Actually, I doubt that Schlafly was very far off the reservation here. Generally speaking, I think conservatives have gotten tired of keeping up the pretense on the purpose of their voter suppression laws. Why bother, after all? It might make sense if they needed to convince a few Democrats to join their cause, but that’s obviously hopeless. Alternatively, it might be necessary if they needed to maintain a legal fig leaf for future court cases, but the Supreme Court has ruled that purely partisan motivations for voting laws are A-OK. Finally, they might care about public opinion. And they probably do. But not much.

At this point, the jig is up. Everyone knows what these laws are about, and there’s hardly any use in pretending anymore. In fact, the only real goal of the voter suppression crowd now is to provide a plausible legal argument that what they’re doing isn’t intentionally racist. That’s really the only thing that can derail them at this point, and the best way to fight back is to shrug their shoulders and just admit that they’re being brazenly partisan. That’s what Texas attorney general Greg Abbott did in his brief supporting his state’s voter suppression laws, and he did it with gusto. But if that’s the official argument that you have to make in your legal briefs, there’s not much point in denying it in other forums. You might as well just go with it.

Schlafly wasn’t reading stage directions. She was reading from the script. It’s just a new script, that’s all.

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Conservatives Are Finally Admitting What Voter Suppression Laws Are All About

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Photos From the Massive Yosemite Wildfire

by Dean Golan Posted on August 23, 2013

Mother Jones

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Northern California’s ferocious Rim Fire exploded to more than 106,000 acres Friday. According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, it is threatening roughly 4,500 structures, has entered Yosemite National Park, and is just 2 percent contained. These images will give you an idea of what it looks like:

Map of the fire from Friday, August 23. Updates can be found here. National Wildfire Coordinating Group

A DC 10 air tanker drops flame retardants just east of the town of Groveland. Hundreds of campers have been evacuated. Al Golub/ZUMA

A firefighting bulldozer from Barstow, California, behind San Jose Family Camp, near Yosemite National Park. Al Golub/ZUMA

A crew from the 146th Airlift Wing of the California Air National Guard flies over the Rim Fire on Thursday afternoon. The best shot of the fire comes around the six-minute mark.

On the first day of the Rim Fire, firefighters in an aircraft worked until sunset to attempt to keep the fire from reaching the Tuolumne River. When this photo was taken the fire was only 200 acres, but the next morning it had made it to the bottom of the Tuolumne River. Al Golub/ZUMA

Cal Fire firefighters created a backfire to stop fire coming out of the Tuolumne River Canyon on Highway 120 Near Yosemite National Park. The Rim Fire jumped this road in several places. Al Golub/ZUMA

Members of the Horseshoe Meadow Hotshots—Chuck Ervin, left, and Ian White—prepare a fire break at the Rim Fire in the Stanislaus National Forest in California. Andy Alfaro/Modesto Bee/ZUMA

The Rim Fire jumps Highway 120 near Cherry Lake Road and San Jose Family Camp near Yosemite National Park. Al Golub/ZUMA

Cal Fire firefighters take a break from creating a backfire on Highway 120 near Yosemite National Park. Al Golub/ZUMA

A US Forest Service crew hikes down Harden Flat Road to support structures during the fire. Al Golub/ZUMA

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Photos From the Massive Yosemite Wildfire

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More People, More Problems: 4 Ways to Future-Proof Our Cities

by donseoo Posted on August 22, 2013

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More People, More Problems: 4 Ways to Future-Proof Our Cities

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Dems Defy Obama on Mortgage Protections

by torrie199 Posted on August 15, 2013

Mother Jones

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Last week, President Barack Obama laid out his new housing plan, emphasizing the importance of safe, simple, affordable mortgages. But lawmakers in his own party are working against him, trying to gut historic new safeguards on home loans.

A new mortgage rule issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) that takes effect January 1 limits fees on new home loans to three percent. The regulation is “one of the most direct and important responses to the mortgage crisis,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) argued in a recent editorial in American Banker. But 12 House Democrats and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) have joined with Republicans to cosponsor bills that would eviscerate the new cap and clear the way for lenders to steer Americans into riskier, higher-cost loans.

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Dems Defy Obama on Mortgage Protections

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Today’s Most Interesting Argument Against Larry Summers as Fed Chair

by OfeliaPPN Posted on August 14, 2013

Mother Jones

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It’s funny: I don’t actually care all that much about whether the next Fed chair is Janet Yellen or Larry Summers, but I do find the debate pretty fascinating. Today, Felix Salmon argues that Summers’ crisis management skills are vastly overrated. Not because Summers doesn’t have good crisis management skills—something I’m a little skeptical about myself—but for the far more interesting reason that he thinks crisis management skills just don’t matter:

The actions of the Fed chair during normal times are of paramount importance: they determine how much growth there is in the economy, how much unemployment there is in the economy, how much the country’s bonds and stocks are worth, and even how likely it is that we might encounter another crisis. The Fed chair is one of the two most important offices in the USA, the other one being the presidency.

That said, however, there’s one time that it doesn’t really matter who the Fed chair is — and that’s when you’re in the midst of a fully-blown financial crisis. At that point, the Fed just moves straight in to Global Firefighter mode….Look, indeed, at what happened in 2008-9: the world’s major central banks all responded in pretty much the same way, and indeed coordinated their actions very effectively. They easily agreed on a system of unlimited swap lines, which provided abundant liquidity, in any currency, in any affected country. Certainly there were stupid decisions made during the crisis, but those stupid decisions were made by finance ministers, not by central bankers.

….In other words, when there’s a crisis, it really doesn’t matter whether you’re Ben Bernanke or Mervyn King or Jean-Claude Trichet — or Janet Yellen or Larry Summers or pretty much anybody else bar Rand Paul. The central banker’s crisis playbook is a thin document, and easy enough for anyone to master. It’s what central bankers do when there isn’t a crisis that matters, since they’re all going to do exactly the same thing when there is one.

Salmon thinks the more important skill isn’t crisis management, but crisis prevention. And on that score, he’s firmly on Team Janet:

Summers has demonstrated essentially zero crisis-prevention skills: his deregulatory instincts helped make the financial crisis more likely and more severe when it happened….As a result, Obama should be bending over backwards to appoint not the candidate who can best manage a financial crisis, but rather the candidate who is most likely to stop a crisis from happening in the first place. That candidate is Janet Yellen.

I don’t really have a considered opinion about this. I certainly agree about Summers’ deregulatory instincts being a problem, but mainly I’m posting this to see what other people think. Is it a common view that when the shit hits the fan, pretty much every competent central banker will do the same thing? Or is Salmon stretching a wee bit too far to find anti-Larry talking points?

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Today’s Most Interesting Argument Against Larry Summers as Fed Chair

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