$8.80 . . . 2030 . . . 1941

BORING ALICE

Someone sold Borealis for $8.76 yesterday, a new near-term low.  This was likely not the result of analysis or inside information; rather, the seller presumably just got bored.  Or died and it was his or her estate selling.  Or needed $19,000 to put on a new roof.  Or had recently paid $16 and wanted to salvage something.  Or had paid $3 and, figuring someone else may know something, preferred to take a triple than watch the gain evaporate.  All of which is understandable — and perhaps an opportunity for whoever bought those shares — but in no way affects the chances that commercial airliners will one day taxi to and from their gates without the main engines being on . . . powered by WheelTug.

For a great long time now — and especially once WheelTug was demonstrated actually to work — BOREF has seemed to me to be a terrific lottery ticket.   A better buy at $2.50 three years ago than at $22 last October (here‘s where the stock has been the last few years) but so what?  If things go our way, we’ll do very nicely even if we paid $22.  And if it goes to zero, that would be a 100% loss regardless of the price we paid.

Some of my smartest friends are all but certain WheelTug will fail.  I think there’s quite a good chance it will succeed, worth many times what it’s selling for today.  But not such a good chance I’d buy BOREF with money I can’t truly afford to lose.

OH – AND BY THE WAY?

It got a lot less play on ABC World News than the bouncy houses that have been flying off their moorings or the new craze in pets (“They are tiny animals with cute faces. They’re covered in quills. They roll into prickly balls when they are scared. The ideal pet?  Hedgehogs are steadily growing in popularity . . .), but the Obama Administration set out to cut greenhouse gas emissions from power plants 30% from their 2005 levels by 2030.  This is “a huge deal,” as they say, a major step in the direction of less acutely catastrophic climate change.  (And not a bad deal for people, especially asthmatics, who like to breathe clean air.)

Of course, Republicans are likely to oppose it, as they oppose most progress — even their own proposals, once the President signs on to them.

Is the following, though oddly worded, not apt?

A failure on the part of the Republican party to give the national policy wholehearted support, which, of course, includes outspoken criticism of  incompetence, unwisdom and inefficiency, will have to be construed as meaning only one thing:  that the party is gambling on the defeat of the United States and that it is staking its political future on a national disaster.  If the Republican party in Congress merely sulks and opposes, waiting for trouble, and appearing to hope for trouble . . . the Republican party will have placed itself in the intolerable position of having a vested interest in the humiliation and defeat of the United States.

That was Walter Lippmann writing in 1941, days before Pearl Harbor.*  (Per Craig Shirley’s book, December 1941.)  Plus ça change . . . 

*Long-time readers may recall that I own a signed copy of the 1941 federal budget.  It was a simpler time, when wars were paid for by raising taxes, not cutting them, and those higher taxes were levied on those who could best afford them.  What a concept.