tfl: The Flatiron Life

Looks like it is time to buy Mercury futures. (Can one do that, Jos?)

Stockpiles of toxic mercury kept by industry soon will be stored safely in the United States instead of ending up on the world market where it might pollute the environment.

Under bipartisan legislation Congress sent to President George W. Bush Monday for his expected signature, mercury exports would be banned in 2013 and the Energy Department would be required to store the heavy metal permanently.

Doesn’t that sound so gentle? The federal government is just going to hold onto companies mercury for them, by executing one if the clearly defined powers in the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Paragraph 20. I wonder what will happen if someone wants to keep a hold of their mercury?

Take a deep breath, read about how the sky is not falling, and call and write your congressman reminding them it is an election year and you are not sheep.

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‘look, here’s what happened.’

Joe Biden told Katie Couric this yesterday as part of a longer interview. In case the two big errors are not obvious for you let me quote Jesse (not the weather man BTW) Walker’s reaction:

And if you owned an experimental TV set in 1929, you would have seen him. And you would have said to yourself, “Who is that guy? What happened to President Hoover?”

I don’t think a big deal should be made of this. It is an honest mistake and people make mistakes all the time. Unfortunately we have some to the point where we expect politicians to never make mistakes, especially Presidents. Also, Republican’s know how the liberal voices in the media would react if Pres Bush, VP Quayle, or any other Republican had made the same mistake.

In case you think I am exaggerating and surly this is being covered a lot. Here is a Google News search for the term “Franklin Roosevelt got on the television”. There are only 2 non-duplicate references. One is the CBS story linked to above, which does not call out the errors; all of the duplicates or of this. The other is the story Kristoffer, my brother-n-law, sent me.

I am Jacob Tomaw and I, also, support this message.

There has been a lot of talk about Toxic Debt and pols seem to have aligned to do something about it.

This got me thinking about Yucca Mountain and how pols don’t want to do anything about real toxic waste. You know, the nuclear waste managed by the Department of Energy. That is under loose security all over the country and can be used to make dirty bombs.

Maybe we should bundle it up and sell it to sovereign welt funds just like sub-prime mortgages. Wait, that might be the exact opposite of what we want to do.

Democracy in America highlights The Economist’s skepticism toward the Treasury taking large equity positions in the firms that it bails out:

If the Treasury’s big bag fills up with equity rather than debt, the government, acting as regulator/legislator/shareholder, may be tempted to become too protective and anti-competitive. Or, to put it more simply, Lehman Brothers remains more credit worthy than the congressional conscience.

First commenter:

My cat’s litter-box remains more credit worthy than the congressional conscience.

Taking a stand against the Man, thanks to McDonald’s. Down with “White People”!

I can think of a lot of things Madison and the gang were not likely have thought the Federal government would do when they signed the Constitution in 1787. Owning an insurance company (or any company, no matter how big) would have been really high on the list.

Can you point me to when the founders, or amendment writers, or Supreme Court used something like the phrase “too big to fail?”

Sorry Madison. “If men were angels,…”

How inconvenienced was I by the massive detour around flooded I65/I80/I94? I heard Peter Frampton’s Baby I Love Your Way three times. Thrice.

Here is a good explanation of exactly what happened last week when the market rather efficiently reacted to a story about UAL going bankrupt. Oh, I mean a 6 year old story.

There were several steps this story had to go through before it made it to the trading floor. Not all these steps were automated by soulless machines programmed by soulless engineers. (Hey that is one step to far, stop the self hate.)

At any point, clicking on and reading the article would have made it clear that the story was old. Of course, enough people didn’t click and check before starting a sell-off that snow-balled, evaporating UAL’s market capital before anyone realized what was actually going on. The president of the research firm, Richard Lehmann, said, “It says something about our capital markets that people make a buy-sell decision based on a headline that flashes across Bloomberg.”

This reminds me a lot of the sub-prime problem. At any point, someone could have looked at the value of this homes and the ability of the owners to pay, but no one did. It finally looks like the state is going to let the market punish some people for this.