The Pakistan stock market recently dropped off a cliff so the government banned short selling for a month then pumped $446 million into the market. They also decreed that prices could not fall more than 1% a day. This of course forced the market up.

Traders there no doubt were overjoyed by this gift of free money and immediately went long too, riding that money train up. Then, when the ban on shorting is lifted, they’ll go short again. What will the government have accomplished by this? Not much that I can tell. Instead they might have made things worse.

This is an instructive example of why clueless governments should probably not try to clumsily intervene in markets. Joe Lieberman, who wants to ban speculation in oil futures, are you listening?

Odd, isn’t it, that no one wanted to ban speculation during the dot com boom or when real estate prices were zooming up?

No Comments »

This NASA photo dramatically shows the amount of smoke from the hundreds of fires now burning, most of them started by lightning. Floods in the midwest, Omaha just got hit by a devastating storm with winds up to 115 mph. The weather, it seems, is changing.

No Comments »

Peak oil, peak food, peak water, global warming too. Is the root cause of all of these problems that there are just too many people on the planet?

The current world population is about 6.6 billion and growing fast. Yet suggesting that we need less people opens up all manner of ugly issues. Who gets to decide how to limit population growth? What will the rules be? Will it be voluntary? And in what countries?

Less Developed Countries are understandably highly suspicious of such proposals coming from the prosperous countries. There is also the undeniable problem of masked racism, with some using this as a pretext to get rid of Those People.

Malthusians say that limited resources on earth at some point will not be sufficient to feed the planet so that leaves us with what, that a good healthy die-off is what we need? This does present a teensy ethical dilemma, hoping for hundreds of millions to die so the rest may live better.

But the question remains: Are there too many people on the planet competing for too few resources?

4 Comments »

Their utilities will install a new digital electrical meter for homes with renewable power that tracks power used by the home separately from power generated into the grid. This is called “net billing” and allows the homeowner to be reimbursed for the power they create.

No Comments »

From Naked Capitalism.

I was recently on an NPR show on consumer debt, and a caller said his uncle, a former loan shark who did 15 years in prison, was mystified by payday lending, particularly since he had charged only 17%.

Tip: John Robb’s Weblog.

No Comments »