If At First . . . June 30, 2008March 25, 2012 Friday, at some personal sacrifice, I wrote no column, hoping that by canceling the day, I could keep the market from dropping any further. (What was the personal sacrifice? Well, I forewent the opportunity to brag about this great New York Times photo from Charles’s upcoming ‘resort’ line. As you know, this site makes its money through your purchases of Charles Nolan apparel and Honest Tea.) It did not work. The market fell. And I’m not sure how to get it to go back up any time soon, so – for lack of a better plan — I’m going to try it again.
Today . . . June 27, 2008March 25, 2012 . . . has been canceled. As an experiment. To see if it will keep the market from going down any further. However that works out today, I doubt we’ve hit bottom. Don’t sell your RSW double-inverse S&P EFTs (if you bought them with MYCTATL*). Enjoy the long weekend. *Money you can truly afford to lose.
Pediatrics and Politics But first . . . June 26, 2008March 11, 2017 BOLT FOR NAKED So this is awkward. A few months ago, I plugged juices from a company called Bolthouse. They are so good. Yet it turns out the private company that sells them is a key backer of the fight to overturn marriage in California – the Court and Legislature be damned. (Except they likely wouldn’t use a word like damned, because their motivation – which I have no doubt is well intentioned – is religious, and they are likely very polite.) But did I mention that their juices are really, really good? And, I assume, good for you? What to do? What to do? It brings to mind the episode where Kramer is blinded by the new red Kenny Rogers Roaster all-night neon sign, can’t sleep, switches apartments with Jerry, who tries to put them out of business – but ultimately catches Kramer eating the chicken, because it’s so good, he just can’t quit it. Or something like that. The good news is that there are alternatives. Odwalla, for one (carrot juice really grows on you – and I don’t need glasses anymore!). And Naked, for another. The best news would be if the folks at Bolthouse thought about it a little more and concluded that Jesus, had he been a maker of pomegranate-with-mangosteen, would have used His profits to aid the world’s poor and suffering rather than to deprive loving couples of their equal rights. IN THE FIELD FOR OBAMA My friend Alex Blum is a pediatrics resident at UCLA. He writes: A few days ago I drove out to a small town in a rural community in Colorado where I am the Obama community organizer. That morning, I met with a Mormon woman in her mid sixties. She lives in a humble home, next to her red barn in the middle of a corn field. She has a big ‘proud to be a Democrat’ sticker by the door to ‘warn them when they knock.’ I sat down at her kitchen table and while sipping apple juice in a plastic cup I shared with her why I decided to put off starting my job and, with my wife’s blessing, left her in LA for the summer to go to where the Obama campaign needed me. I explained that I am tired of being unable, as a physician, to address the underlying causes of most of the health care problems of my patients: poor urban design with limited access to parks, impoverished neighborhoods with little access to fresh produce, schools where the government stresses test scores and not relationships between students and adults (where are the mentoring programs?). And why are there kids in this wealthy country without insurance? These are political and policy issues I can’t change while working in my clinic; they didn’t give us the answer to these questions in med school. And then I listened to her life story. Her parents were Roosevelt Democrats. She was instilled with the notion of the importance of community. Her husband, now in his 70s, had been a farmer. She was a housewife and raised three children who all then moved away to big cities (Denver and Santa Fe). Both her son and daughter struggle to put their own children through college – her son has 10 children. [Perhaps family planning would be a good thing to teach in school? – A.T.] She invested all of their retirement savings in what she thought where low risk mutual funds. Over a nine-month period, their mutual funds hemorrhaged nearly to nothing. Her husband and she faced the reality of no retirement to live off of. At 68, he returned to work, on a farm working as a laborer. They now live off of very little money and hope they don’t get sick. They have no income to upkeep their home and none to move and start over. They can’t sell the home because no one is moving into this rural, poor community. All this is why, she explained, she is going to help change the direction of our country. She agreed to have a group of her friends over to her house, next weekend, and we will all discuss establishing an infrastructure to run local voter registration drives. This was my first meeting with a community member as an Obama Organizing Fellow. ☞ The truth is, there are no easy or quick fixes to problems like hers. But we have to start somewhere. And (it will surprise no one) I agree with Susan Eisenhower – and Alex Blum: electing Barack Obama is the right place to start. Tomorrow (or as soon as I get some): Ideas About Your Money
Eisenhowers for Obama June 25, 2008January 3, 2017 Julie Nixon Eisenhower – who backed Bush in 2004 – is for Obama. Read the story here. And Susan Eisenhower – Ike’s granddaughter and lifelong Republican – is for Obama. I met her last week in Jacksonville at an Obama fundraiser organized in large part by a seriously wealthy Republican businessman who voted for Bush . . . twice . . . but is now persuading his Republican friends to support Obama. As Ms. Eisenhower wrote in the Washington Post this past winter: I am convinced that Barack Obama is the one presidential candidate today who can encourage ordinary Americans to stand straight again; he is a man who can salve our national wounds and both inspire and pursue genuine bipartisan cooperation. Just as important, Obama can assure the world and Americans that this great nation’s impulses are still free, open, fair and broad-minded. . . . . . . If the Democratic Party chooses Obama as its candidate, this lifelong Republican will work to get him elected and encourage him to seek strategic solutions to meet America’s greatest challenges. To be successful, our president will need bipartisan help. Given Obama’s support among young people, I believe that he will be most invested in defending the interests of these rising generations and, therefore, the long-term interests of this nation as a whole. Without his leadership, our children and grandchildren are at risk of growing older in a marginalized country that is left to its anger and divisions. Such an outcome would be an unacceptable legacy for any great nation. Susan Eisenhower, a business consultant, is the author of four books, most recently “Partners in Space: US-Russian Cooperation After the Cold War.” ☞ I’ve been making the case that your Republican friends only think they’re Republican. The whole political landscape, I argue, has shifted so far right that they are now moderate Democrats. The Harvard Business School Alumni Bulletin allowed me to make that case here. Yes, the hard right – the Karl Roves and the James Dobsons and the Rush Limbaughs – will do their best to destroy Obama and make him out to be something he’s not. But if the liberals and the moderates and the Eisenhower Republicans – and even some 2004 Bush Republicans like the ones I met in Jacksonville – come out and vote November 4, the country could be reborn.
Yankee Ingenuity June 24, 2008March 11, 2017 Yesterday, I linked to an engaging but depressing story about how maybe we’re poisoning ourselves – and/or gradually degrading our species’ gene pool – just by being alive in this modern world. Last week, I linked to a screed noting that the U.S. is rapidly going broke, as our wealth is siphoned off to the oil-producing nations. Last month, I had space rocks crashing into the planet and sending 600-foot tidal waves across the globe. Last year – well, no (time flies), the year before – I did my best, along with many of you, to help Al Gore spread the Inconvenient Truth about the global climate change destabilizing the ecosphere. And what about even just a plain old vicious cycle of falling housing prices leading to less consumption leading to recession leading to job loss leading to more foreclosures and bigger government deficits leading to even less faith in the dollar leading to inflation and higher long-term interest rates leading to higher mortgage rates leading to yet lower home prices leading to . . . And yet . . . And yet . . . It is also a time of spectacular possibility. Technological progress that, Ray Kurzweil predicts, will be 32 times as fast in the next 50 years as it was in the past 50 (did I mention that the $600 iPhone, released just a year ago, will shortly be the faster, more powerful $200 iPhone?) – with the prospect of such astounding bio-tech breakthroughs that average life expectancy may soon be increasing by more than one year per year (so, if we don’t get hit by a bus or poison ourselves with the fumes from vinyl shower curtains, we may actually, on average, be getting a little further from the end each year rather than closer to it) (and so I’m really serious about this: floss) – a prospect so pregnant with implication (to me, at least), that you may want to go and reread it. And now comes this wonderful New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell (Tipping Point, Blink), about an idea factory, which leaves you with the sense that (a) Ray Kurzweil may well be right in his predictions (as he usually is), and that (b) much of the technological progress will spring from the creativity and genius of American minds, which – in the long run – may mean quite a decent competitive future ahead for our country, just as it was when we entered the 21st Century, before we got so badly off track. So (as is often the case with greed and fear, crisis and opportunity, bulls and bears) ‘it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ The technological progress will bring unprecedented challenges – how do we keep a 17-year-old Uzbek from crashing the global financial system without also impinging on everyone’s personal liberties? It may be that the technological progress, while dazzling, will send us careening out of control. But has there ever been a more amazing time to be alive? With more of a responsibility on the citizenry to make informed choices and help Spaceship Earth lean into the (cosmic) wind? So let me conclude by reprising – but also giving an ending to – the ‘vicious cycle’ paragraph above: And what about even just a plain old vicious cycle of falling housing prices leading to less consumption leading to recession leading to job loss leading to more foreclosures and bigger government deficits leading to even less faith in the dollar leading to inflation and higher long-term interest rates leading to higher mortgage rates leading to yet lower home prices leading to . . . a new, youthful Administration, swept into office with a huge mandate to redirect our deficits away from Iraq and tax-cuts-for-the-wealthy, toward rebuilding America’s infrastructure; setting bold goals; and inspiring and empowering our estimable citizenry to rise to the very real challenges we face. ☞ It is a uniquely American mantra: Yes, we can.
Better Things for Better Living…Through Chemistry June 23, 2008March 11, 2017 IS YOUR SHOWER CURTAIN KILLING YOU? Maybe not, but this engaging article charges that we produce or import 140 pounds of synthetic chemicals a day per capita (could that be true?) and that our bodies – even if we don’t smoke – now contain traces of about 700 of them. And there are a lot of transsexual fish near waste-water treatment facilities. From 1979 to 2004, the EPA received more than 32,000 chemical applications, but agency personnel performed some level of review on fewer than one in eight cases. Eight out of every 10 applications are approved with no restrictions, often in less than three weeks. The agency has implemented restrictions on only five chemical classes, even though in the 1990s it reported that 16,000 compounds warranted concern because of their chemical structure or volume of use. ☞ We don’t want restrictions, let alone mindless, bureaucratic ones. Then again, we are probably not as good at heading off foreseeable problems as we should be. Could 6.5 billion humans – soon to be 9 billion – foul our nest (or pollute our gene pool) so badly in the next few decades as to render this whole uber-miraculous human experiment unsustainable? My own view is that ‘living lighter on the land’ can’t hurt – and saves money. (Tomorrow: a link to a much cheerier article.) But speaking of transsexual fish . . . YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE STRAIGHT TO GET MARRIED John Kasley: ‘This magazine is on sale at Barnes & Noble and Borders, etc. It is lovingly produced by two charming ladies in North Carolina who have adopted a gorgeous little daughter. It keeps current with GLBT weddings and trends and vendors who are helpful in making it a successful celebration of love. The magazine has been around for about two years now, and it deserves wider distribution.’ ☞ LA Times columnist Dana Parsons is not particularly concerned about California’s new marriage ruling. ‘As a formerly married man,’ he writes, ‘I probably did more harm to the institution than any gay couple ever could.’ The San Francisco Chronicle reported the results of a recent poll: In a dramatic reversal of decades of public opinion, California voters agree by a slim majority that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry, according to a Field Poll released today. By 51-42 percent, registered voters said they believed same-sex marriage should be legal in California. Only 28 percent favored gay marriage in 1977, when the Field Poll first asked that question, said Mark DiCamillo, the poll’s director. “This is a milestone in California,” he said. “You can’t downplay the importance of a change in an issue we’ve been tracking for 30 years.” . . . ☞ MACY’S is on board, too. Here’s the nub of what the Court decided: . . . [I]n contrast to earlier times, our state now recognizes that an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual’s sexual orientation, and, more generally, that an individual’s sexual orientation – like a person’s race or gender – does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights. – California Supreme Court
96 Barrels of Beer on the Wall 96 Barrels of Beer . . . June 20, 2008March 11, 2017 Yesterday was about barrels of oil. ‘Houston’ (as they say),’we have a problem.’ (Except that of course it’s been a bonanza for Houston.) Today, I received a report from Dick Thoreson, who managed my farm when I had one in Iowa – ‘Was he okay,’ I had written to ask? Yes, he wrote back, he and his wife were fine. But, boy, had it ever rained. Leading his neighbor, John, to calculate just how many gallons of water had fallen on Iowa in the past 30 days: 1) There are 640 acres in a square mile 2) And 43,560 square feet in an acre 3) And 231 cubic inches in a gallon 4) An average of 9 inches fell in Iowa over the last 30 days 5) Every 25.6667 square inches equaled a gallon 6) There are 144 square inches in a square foot 7) Thus, every square foot equaled 5.61 gallons of water 8) Every acre = 244,388 gallons of water 9) Every square mile = 156,408,685 gallons 10) Iowa is 56,276 square miles, so 8,802,055,197,257 gallons of water fell on Iowa John goes on: ‘It would take 375 times that amount to fill lake Superior . . . which is 10% of the world’s fresh water. So .027% of the world’s fresh water fell on Iowa in the past 30 days.’ It is heartbreaking to see what’s happened, and continues to happen, to so many fine Midwesterners; sobering to think of the short-term economic impact and potential long-term environmental damage (what’s in that water?). One more reason to fear that our RSW double-inverse S&P shares may have further to rise. And one more reason to be sure your flood insurance is up to date. BACK TO OIL Farmer John got me thinking. Saudi Arabia is now pumping 10 million barrels of oil a day out from under the desert. Hmmm. There are 42 gallons in a barrel, so that’s 420 million gallons. (With vaguely a quarter of a billion passenger vehicles on the road in the U.S., not to mention commercial trucks and buses, that would be less than two gallons a day for each.) There are 231 cubic inches in a gallon, so 97 billion cubic inches of oil pumped out of the Saudi desert each day, or just over 56 million cubic feet (am I doing this right?). Which means that each day, a layer of oil one foot deep across 56 million square feet is pumped out of the desert. One foot deep over 2 square miles. Every day. Saudi Arabia is a big place (756,985 square miles), so maybe that’s not a problem. World oil reserves are estimated on the order of a trillion barrels, of which Saudi Arabia has perhaps 10% – 27 years’ worth at the current extraction rate. I’m not sure what to make of this, except to say I wish more of the world’s oil were in Iowa – and less of its water.
The Enron Connection to $135 Oil Watch the Video June 19, 2008March 11, 2017 The wealth in America’s tank is fast being siphoned off to our oil suppliers. We’ve been doing this to ourselves for decades, but it’s reaching a crescendo. We are getting poorer. My old pal Charles Biderman, of TrimTabs, writes: The US is now broke. The US uses about 21 million barrels per day, at $135 per barrel, annualized that’s $1 trillion, equal to 15.5% of total take-home of everyone who paid taxes of $6.8 trillion. A year ago oil cost 7.7% of take-home pay and didn’t pass 10% until March, after which the US economy really started to break down. At 15.5% – which doesn’t include the cost of coal or natural gas – the US is broke. Yet, believe it or not there’s still plenty of oil in the world. What there is a shortage of is those willing to sell oil futures. There are 2.7 million open interest contracts to buy 1,000 barrels of oil globally. One contract is worth $135,000. Yet it costs big investors less than $8,000 (6%) to buy one contract. Small investors need put up all of $10,000. There is about $2 billion per month going into commodity funds (CTAs). Another $750 million went into commodity ETFs over the past four weeks. If half that money was put to work buying oil (as opposed to other commodities), that would be enough to buy 173,000 contracts, or an amount equal to 6% of the existing open interest, every month. And that doesn’t include hedge or pension fund buying. Given how important oil prices are to the US economy, shouldn’t we know who’s buying oil futures? When anyone buys stock, the information is available to the company. Institutional owners have to report what stocks they own. Wouldn’t it be useful to know who the biggest oil futures buyers are? Shouldn’t there be a limit on how many contracts related parties can control? Then there’s the issue of margin. To buy a stock you have to put up 50%. To buy 1,000 barrels of oil ($135,000) a big investor need put up $8,000 (6%). If margin requirements were raised to 25% the oil market would crack. But margin requirements won’t be raised for one reason: income of the commodity exchanges and traders would plummet. This is true insanity, watching the world go broke while a handful of oil producing nations – and oil traders – make huge fortunes. Why don’t oil users fight back? The US has been shoving 70,000 barrels daily into the ground [the Strategic Petroleum Reserve], at $135 per barrel paying $280 million per month for the privilege. [That program will be suspended next month.] How about, instead, selling oil futures? Selling high what it bought low, for a change? How about if other oil users sold contracts short each month? How about if Japan, airlines, truckers, utilities and any other interested parties banded together to go short oil futures each month until the market went back to reality (covering their shorts at a profit, to boot)? ☞ I take from this a couple of points. First, that the oil market – like the housing market or tech stock market – could collapse even faster than it ballooned (oil has about doubled in the last year). If oil speculators owning all those futures contracts come to believe the market will turn, they’ll rush to sell – and the market will turn. Say hello to $70 oil. (Which until five minutes ago would have been considered crazy high, and at which level we are still allowing our wealth to be siphoned off . . . but only half as fast as now.) Second, that a competent Administration (and perhaps one whose leaders were not both oil men) could be doing far more about this – just as the Administration could easily have averted the manipulated California ‘energy crisis’ but chose not to. To understand the big picture – and its links to Enron and, yes, sorry, to John McCain and his top economic advisors – please watch last night’s eye-opener from MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. It takes a while to load, but it’s worth it. Even at $70 a barrel (or whatever), our oil stocks are worth holding for the long term, because, over the long term, oil prices likely will keep rising as demand from China and India, et al, keeps rising and the planet’s cheap reserves keep dwindling. But the good news is that, if Charles Biderman and others are right, we actually could see the price fall back significantly for a while, as we race – if we’re smart – to do all we can to become more fuel efficient and less fossil-fuel dependent.
By the Power Vested in Me . . . June 18, 2008March 25, 2012 Did you know that – with the exception of George W. Bush and Mitt Romney – Harvard Business School grads are all Democrats now? Or so argues this lunatic in the current Harvard Business School Alumni Bulletin.
Bullish on America June 17, 2008March 11, 2017 THE (SURPRISINGLY UPBEAT) VIEW FROM CANADA I’m not sure this Toronto Star columnist’s assessment is justified, but it’s sharply observed: U.S. economy may dodge recession bullet Jun 15, 2008 04:30 AM David Olive BUSINESS COLUMNIST There are just 218 days to go until the end of the Bush Administration, and hope of a U.S. economic revival that will spill over into Canada. You wonder some days if the Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court that installed George W. Bush in the White House in 2000 sought to restore Herbert Hoover’s reputation. The hapless 31st U.S. president at least tried to soften the blow of the Great Depression, though his methods were not the radical prescription required to save capitalism from itself. The Bush administration seems not just powerless but not much interested in the current U.S. economic malaise. True, Bush went along with the demand of a Democratic-controlled Congress for a $168 billion (U.S.) emergency stimulus package. But the $600 cheques cut by the U.S. Treasury that began going out last month have mostly been swallowed up in credit-card paydowns and soaring fuel and food costs. Bush also buckled to Congress’ demand that he halt additions to the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which was intended to remove a source of demand and thus curb rising prices. Alas, pump prices are up 23 cents since the president acted. Bush famously doesn’t read the papers, so his sanguine aspect in delivering an economic pep talk June 6 did not surprise. Bush and his economic advisers seem oblivious to the 28-year low in U.S. consumer confidence, the 441,000 private-sector jobs lost over the past six months, and a financial sector still crippled by the housing crisis and that now denies loans even to the most credit-worthy individuals and companies. On that particular Friday of Bush’s “fundamentally sound” talk: The Dow Jones Industrial Index plunged nearly 400 points; Bush’s own Labor Department reported a fifth consecutive month of job losses and that the jobless rate had surged to 5.5 per cent in May, the biggest monthly increase in 22 years; And there was a double-digit increase in crude prices. Bush simply regurgitated old news, including the stimulus package of doubtful efficacy. He called for stepped-up U.S. domestic crude exploration, presumably off the California coast and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWAR), which Bush knows are political non-starters, and perhaps doesn’t know would add little to global reserves even at full production. And Bush sought for the umpteenth time to have his fiscally ruinous tax cuts skewed to the rich made permanent. The first Harvard MBA president, who most certainly didn’t attend that school on an academic scholarship, might someday in retirement make the connection between the near doubling in the U.S. national debt that resulted from America’s first wartime tax cuts and the steep fall in the greenback, helping drive up the price of U.S.-denominated commodities globally. Meanwhile, the third and ablest of Bush’s treasury secretaries, Hank Paulson, was characterizing America’s hollowed-out manufacturing economy, concentrated in the midwest states adjoining Central Canada’s own battered manufacturers, as healthy. Paulson is a Sinophile who in that same speech, to the Economic Club of Chicago, denounced as “protectionist” efforts to pressure China to stop manipulating its currency at the expense of metal-benders in Toledo. “With such apathy from the [Bush] administration and contempt expressed by Paulson for those who differ with him on appropriate tactics, it is small wonder that blue-collar workers and their unions question the efficacy of U.S. trade policy,” writes Forbes columnist Peter Morici, a professor at the University of Maryland and former chief economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission. The lack of economic stewardship in the capital of our largest trading partner has 57 per cent of Canadian voters expecting a recession of our own over the next six months, according to a poll released last week. The fretful might be somewhat reassured by selective encouraging data, and by the shift in U.S. political sentiment. On the data front, the latest Institute for Supply Management (ISM) manufacturing survey, a closely watched index that reliably reflects GDP performance, showed an uptick, from 48.6 to 49.6. More typical of a grand mal recession would be a number like 39.2 (in 1992) or 41 (in the post 9/11 slowdown). And over the past 12 months, U.S. average hourly wages have increased an impressive 3.5 per cent. While the latest unemployment numbers are discouraging, Corporate America has been laying off tens of thousands of workers, not the hundreds of thousands characteristic of postwar recessions since 1945. And the plungers who bet on economic-prediction futures on Intrade collectively put the chances of a full-blown U.S. recession at just 30 per cent. That’s because many sectors, from technology to health care to tourism, have been adding jobs in recent months. And the stock market, while still worried about another big-bank implosion along the likes of Citigroup Inc. and Merrill Lynch Inc., is flirting with sustained recovery mode. All bets are off if oil hits $175 a barrel (U.S.) over the summer, eating further into household income, jacking up shipping costs for manufacturers and online retailers, and pretty much grounding the civilian airline industry. But a sense that the market has put most of the bad news behind it, including a housing market expected to finally bottom out sooner than later, means “the puke point has been reached” by traders, Barton Biggs, the former Morgan Stanley Co. chief economist who is more often a bear than a bull, told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month. While many economists would have preferred that central bankers continue the rate-cutting campaign begun last summer, Wall Street analysts take it as a good sign that the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, the European Central Bank, and, as of last week, the Bank of Canada, have put a freeze on further rate cuts. As a general rule, the stock market posts an average 5 per cent gain over the three months following an end in rate-cutting, and a 12 per cent jump over six months – the psychology being that central bankers have concluded the economy’s health has been sufficiently restored to require no further monetary stimulus. On the political front, a November win by Barack Obama, backed by a near-certain increase in Democratic numbers in Congress, will likely mark a return of Keynesian-light pump priming to the world’s biggest economy. Obama would be sure to disappoint traditional liberal Democrats who would open wide the spigots of federal spending. While he doesn’t much advertise it, Obama is a fiscal conservative, unlike the faux skinflints in the White House and Congressional GOP leadership, who’ve run three-digit deficits since Bush came to power. Still, Obama’s agenda of universal health care, an “Apollo-style” project to develop alternative fuels, and his education reform proposals alone will pump at least $300 billion into the U.S. economy, creating jobs and providing additional income to middle- and working-class Americans who, unlike the affluent beneficiaries of most of Bush’s tax cuts, actually stimulate the economy with their extra trips to Home Depot and Piggly Wiggly. Obama would also stop the $144 billion annual cash drain in Iraq. Then there’s the $350 billion “infrastructure deficit” in transportation alone that Obama has recently begun to address, last week proposing high-speed commuter rail networks in densely populated corridors where such trains would be commercially viable. Obama’s to-do list already includes replacing aging bridges, highways and airport terminals that either have exceeded their intended lifespan or are handling two and three times the capacity for which they were designed. Presidential rival John McCain might be preoccupied with a feckless 100-year effort to extract some kind of “victory” from the Iraq misadventure. But he shares Obama’s urgency on confronting climate change, which likely will generate thousands of new “green” jobs in technological research into fuel-efficient vehicles, homes, office buildings and factories. Again like Obama, McCain is calling for increased federal funding of technology R&D. And McCain has come round to the Congressional Democrats’ demand for more substantive assistance to the estimated 2 million Americans in danger of losing their homes to foreclosure. The homes that already have been foreclosed upon and pock-mark neighbourhoods in the Midwest, Florida and California have driven down the value of neighbouring homes – a loss of home equity that is one of the biggest drags on consumer confidence. John Authers, investment editor at the U.K. Financial Times, makes the useful point that avoiding an official recession – two or more back-to-back quarters of negative GDP growth – will be little to cheer about if we’re still made to endure a prolonged period of negligible growth. But it’s still reassuring to find in Authers’ recent assessment that “the chances of the `nightmare scenario’ of an acute [U.S.] recession have receded significantly.” LOST IN TRANSMISSION . . . NOT SO MUCH Jim Hayes: “Your reader is confusing total system efficiency (which includes everything – mainly heat loss form burning coal) with transmission efficiency, which is much less. Wind doesn’t have the heat loss inefficiency. High voltage transmission takes only 7.2% on average in the US. I tend to agree with Mr. Pickens [Boone Pickens’ $12 billion Texas wind farm]: the lack of any balanced energy policy is harming the country.” GO VIRAL – again If you missed it yesterday, how about sending fightthesmears.com to 10 friends and asking them to do likewise? Who runs the country – and thus, in no insignificant measure, the world – turns out to matter. It would be nice if the electorate made a well-informed decision.