I mentioned in my previous posts the planners and leaders who feel that it is normal to work overtime. They are the ones who, without having any authority over me, could drive me to work long hours. But they are also the ones who convinced me not to work so many, although I may forget Click Here to continue reading.
When Ape Man starts calling people stupid in print, it is best just to sit back and let him blow of some steam. In this rant he pours out scorn onto President Bush and the political leadership of China. Hopefully he will recover his sense of decorum soon.
This week’s essay of the week is not particularly profound. Nor is it particularly well written. Instead is just a story that some Newsweek reporters wrote. But it is a story that I think is well worth reading.
The emergency room is something that we all just assume will be there when we need it, but we rarely think about the people who have to work in those places. Or the cost to keep something like that going.
MERRILL, Wis. — A service station that offered discounted gas to senior citizens and people supporting youth sports has been ordered by the state to raise its prices.
Center City BP owner Raj Bhandari has been offering senior citizens a 2 cent per gallon price break and discount cards that let sports boosters pay 3 cents less per gallon
Well, the title might be overplaying it a little bit. But I have been thinking about a financial product that I think I ought to be able to buy, but can’t (at least to my knowledge).
To start off, let me explain the problem that this product needs to fix.
To put it succinctly, I think that Click Here to continue reading.
Is this a first, or is there more to come?
“The vast majority of the business lines performed fine,’’ Costas said in an interview. “The area that gave us some trouble was the one that’s been highlighted here in the reports by the bank and that was the sub-prime space.’’
The hedge fund that Costa worked for Click Here to continue reading.
There is a certain amount of irony in the fact that people in this world are burning perfectly good corn for heat and putting coal products into feed. From a New York times article….
For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly supplemented their feed with the substance, called melamine, a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests, even though it does not provide any nutritional benefits, according to melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.
“Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed,” said Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company, which sells melamine. “I don’t know if there’s a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says ‘don’t do it,’ so everyone’s doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren’t they? If there’s no accident, there won’t be any regulation.”
All I can say is that I hope none of my chicken feed comes from China.
This is taken from a Washington Post article…
Car valuations matter because an increasing number of consumers are “upside down” on their auto loans, meaning they owe more than the car is worth. In the first quarter of 2007, 29 percent of consumers were upside down on their vehicles, Kelley Blue Book reports. Additionally, on average, people traded in cars on which they still owed more than $3,600. And what do many of these buyers do with that loan balance when they want another car?
They roll that negative equity — the $3,600 and often much more — into yet another vehicle loan.
A lot of this insanity stems from the Big Three pushing their product. As the Washington Post article says in another place….
Increased pressure on automakers and dealerships to sell vehicles over the past few years has led to more car loans being made to riskier borrowers. Auto dealerships originated $50 billion in new-vehicle loans to subprime borrowers last year, according to retail data from the Power Information Network (PIN), a division of J.D. Power and Associates, a marketing research firm.
To make the loans work for many of these subprime borrowers, who typically have shaky credit, the lenders are offering longer payment periods. New car loans lasting more than five years in 2006 accounted for nearly 55 percent of loan originations, according to the Consumer Bankers Association.
Subprime vehicle buyers, those with credit scores below 650, have loans that last an average of 61 months, compared with 56 months for more creditworthy consumers, PIN found. Higher-risk buyers also tend to make lower down payments as a percentage of the purchase price, paying about 11.6 percent compared with 17.4 percent for other buyers.
Nobody is ever going to exploit me for money. I’m not going to work and work just to make a little more money to buy a few more things. I know, down to the core of my being, that life’s not about money.
I grew up knowing how to do without. My dad seldom worked overtime Click Here to continue reading.
This from Robert Rapier…..
The gasoline supply situation in the U.S. is just about unprecedented, and for April it is unprecedented. If I go back to 1991 (as far back, it appears, as the EIA maintains a statistic on “days of supply”) then this week’s inventory is the 7th lowest out of 842 weeks. The lowest 6 all happened at the end of summer driving season (late August and early September). In other words, 99.2% of the time we have been in a better inventory situation than we are in right now. More importantly – again going back to 1991 – we have never had inventories this low in the month of April; just when we need to be building supplies for summer.
Last week I went out on a limb and said this week or next week gasoline inventories would turn up. My limb is starting to crack. Something has to give soon. We could be headed for record high prices to reign in demand a bit. Just hope for a mild hurricane season this year
Read the rest of Rapier’s informative post here.