Electric trucks at LA ports
Bob Morris @ Jun 20th 2008 19:19 - Category: Unfiled ;
Archive for June 20th, 2008
To Obama supporters
Bob Morris @ Jun 20th 2008 14:47 - Category: Election 2008 ;
Now that the primary is over, Obama will move to the center, maybe even to the right. All politicians do this. They go for the hardcore supporters during the primary which means appealing to those more on the edges. Then, during the general election, they move back to the center.
Obama is a centrist liberal, not a progressive. Deal with it. Having said that, IMO, he’s still by far the best of all those who ran in the primaries.
Profit from the Peak: The End of Oil and the Greatest Investment Event of the Century
Bob Morris @ Jun 20th 2008 10:00 - Category: Peak oil Tags: investing;
Profit from the Peak: The End of Oil and the Greatest Investment Event of the Century, by Brian Hicks and Chris Nelder
The title here is maybe a little misleading. This isn’t a get rich quick book nor is it about profiting from the misery of others. In fact, you don’t get get to investment ideas until way into the book and even then, each idea is just a paragraph or two.
It’s the getting there that makes the ideas so valuable. The authors spend considerable time explaining peak oil, the various types of renewable energy and how they work, and scenarios for dealing with global warming and peak oil. So, when they say that Valero Oil (VLO) might be a long-term stock to buy, it’s after they’ve explained that most of the sweet light crude is gone, leaving only the more difficult sour crude, and that Valero is one of the only refineries in the US that can process sour crude.
There’s some fascinating stuff here. Did you know there are “green hawks” in the Pentagon? Yes, they may be hardcore neocons but they also believe peak oil and global warming are quite real and are trying to get the rest of the Pentagon to realize it too.
You can read Profit From The Peak for its excellent investment ideas but also because it one of the best explanations of peak oil and renewable energy I’ve seen.
Something new to worry about
Bob Morris @ Jun 20th 2008 09:21 - Category: Climate change ;
More pain for the financials
Bob Morris @ Jun 20th 2008 08:14 - Category: Credit crisis ;
Moody’s downgraded two bond insurers yesterday, Ambac and MBI. In the bizarro world that is bonds, a bond rating is dependent not on its own financial strength, but on the rating of the insurer. So, a downgrade on the insurer means all the bonds they insure get downgraded too.
Thus, all the billions of dollars of swaps and agreements the insurers have with other financial companies now are assumed to be riskier. It’s this counterparty risk that has Wall Street nervous today.
Why should you care? Because, among other things, this will increase interest rates.
Web site weirdness
Bob Morris @ Jun 20th 2008 08:07 - Category: Unfiled ;
Since our hosting company restored us to a previous copy because of server problems, some things have been acting weird, like I can’t do a scheduled post and plugins won’t deactivate. (We’re working on it…) We’ll be traveling for a week, so posts will be in batches rather than posted in advance to appear every few hours.
We’ll be moving to another host when I get back, a place where I know and am friends with the people involved. Onward!
