Bring Back the Blimps

Or the dirigibles, at least.

A few years back, while sailing in the middle of the Atlantic aboard a tall ship, one of my watch-mates and I spun out an elaborate fantasy of bringing wind power back to the modern age. We imagined fleets of sail-powered supertankers on the sea, and a return of the dirigible in the sky. Staring out for hours at the midnight sea and stars, it seemed reasonable enough.

It's nice to think maybe it was.

JEK
Wind-powered romantic

I'm just speculating...

You may have noticed a lot of chatter this week about the Damned Oil Speculator, a cruel beast whose malicious drive for Profit has no heart for the Plight of the Innocent SUV-Driving Suburbanite. There were commentaries. There were complaints. And, in the end, there were Congressional Hearings, with much associated Preening.

What there didn't seem to be was a lot of Common Sense. I'm no financier, but here's my limited understanding of how the market works: oil is a commodity. That means it can be bought and sold based on anticipation of its future price. This is good because it allows entities that buy a lot of fuel over time to anticipate, and to some degree control, their fuel expenses. And it allows energy companies to anticipate, and to some degree control, income. And it runs, naturally, on speculation -- anticipation by people of whether the price over time is going to go up or down. Which has to do with supply, and with demand, in the same way that all markets do. And since for every seller there is a buyer, this should be a self-policing process: for every person who thinks that prices will go up, another thinks that prices will go down. Speculation.

What seems to me to have happened is that the market has caught up with itself. It's not that oil costs twice as much because it's half as available today as it was six months ago, it's that the market consciousness has begun to acknowledge that oil is, incredibly, not an infinite resource dependent only on the the willingness of OPEC to create it from thin air. In other words, I think we've had $4 gasoline for years, and just haven't realized it. And now we do. Which is not all bad.

Like I said, I don't really know a thing about this stuff, so I've felt a little leery about jumping into a long discussion about it. But then I ran into this article in today's NYT, which says basically the same thing, and more.

JEK
Weekend economist

Yin and Dang

The full text of Obama's speech today on race and US race relations is worth reading in its entirety. Yet again, he's put a voice better than my own to thoughts I've had for a long time. Reading it gave me chills. Imagining those words coming from a sitting President made me want to cheer out loud, and imperil the pipetting of my colleagues.

I suppose it should come as no surprise that the soundbite of choice is the most mundane moment of all -- the part where he addresses his personal relationship to Wright, rather than the part where he puts the country front and center, and offers a prescription for faith and perseverance. But even that moment is pretty great, particularly if you watch it on the New York Times video website, and then let it fade into the next segment, which is GWB talking about the economic crisis and thanking his economic advisors for WORKING ON THE WEEKEND as the economy rains down around our heads.


JEK
Obaman(a)ut, believer in better things, under-invested in the Euro

Stern bears.

Here's what I know about investment banking:

- It's where all the jocks, insufferably congenial posers, and too-smart-by-half people from high school went to work.

- Putting jocks and insufferably congenial people in charge of large sectors of unregulated Economy has never seemed like a good idea to me.

- The poor ideation of the above has nothing on the not-a-good-ideaness of giving over the reins of modern capitalism to the same people who, when last we saw them, were explaining how they were just days away from convincing the federal government to send them the 40 acres + mule to which they were statutorily entitled. You know who you are, Hank.

What would happen if you did this? Well, I'm no economist. But I definitely did go to high school, and it seems like you'd get a lot of alpha males competing with each other to bring about the biggest deal involving the greatest number of other alpha males met at cocaine fueled parties, and you'd make that deal involve complex, unproved derivative instruments that are dependent on every American buying three homes and paying them off at 11% interest.

And then you'd get this.

The part of the story I love best is that the deal, which discounts BS's stock price from $30 to $2, includes the skyscraper that Bear Stearns is housed in. Which is certainly worth more than the purchase price. So Bear, the Great Bull's hit bottom.

-JEK
Ran his college newspaper and kept it very much in the black; sometimes thinks he should have been a management consultant, but less so now; triple varsity PE, favorite moment of any party is discovery of an uninhabited corner, raised to believe he owes the government at least 1/3 of any mule he ever owns.