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Added Aqua in response to a comment on the Trump Tower. Obviously I took that photo in the summer because we haven’t had a nice sunny day like that for a while.

One good thing that came out of the Chicago real estate bubble…

Cross posted at LITGM

Our energy situation broadly cleaves into two main functions – natural gas, and electricity. Natural gas is used for industry, heating homes and powering stoves, and is taking a greater portion of the electrical generation load. Electricity also overlaps with gas when it comes to home heating and cooling, and is obviously a large component for industrial uses. However, the natural gas and electricity energy industries in the United States have moved in profoundly different directions over the last few decades. The purpose of this post is to describe where we are, as a country, with regards to natural gas. In short – we got it half right.

Natural gas has three main components, broadly speaking – 1) exploration / extraction 2) transportation 3) distribution. In general, natural gas is lightly regulated for exploration / extraction, has general principles for transportation (open access) and is pretty heavily regulated for distribution (local monopolies).

One critical difference between electricity and natural gas is that natural gas can be stored while electricity must be available at the specific time it is needed. Thus users and utilities can store natural gas and have it available for peak times, while the only way to meet peak load demand for electric utilities is to have units on line generating electricity during the hottest parts of the day or to “shed load” by pushing customers off-line to reduce demand.

Both electricity and natural gas are mostly consumed using North American (including Canadian) resources. While OPEC maintains an oil cartel, the fuel used to generate electricity (coal, nuclear fuel, gas) mostly comes from North America. While these resources can be transported across the ocean (for instance Japan imports virtually all of what it needs to fuel electricity) in the USA (and Canada) we have most of what we need for these industries. Until recently there wasn’t a practical way to bring in natural gas from regions that weren’t connected by pipeline, so we were bound to use North American resources.

Exploration & Extraction

The exploration and extraction of natural gas is a mostly unregulated industry (compared to electrical utilities, at least). The biggest constraint was that vast swathes of the US were placed off-limits for natural gas drilling due to environmental concerns. In the 1970’s, a moratorium was placed on new natural gas connections because it appeared that the US would run out of natural gas. However, improvements in extraction capabilities resolved that situation and wildcatters responded to higher prices by finding additional supplies.

Recently it looked as if we were going to run out of natural gas again. Futures prices on natural gas, which were around $2 / unit in the 1990’s, spiked to as high as $14 / unit in the winters of 2006-8 (prices are seasonal and typically move with the weather) but now are below $4 / unit due to the fact that massive supplies of natural gas have been located in shale formations as drillers redoubled their efforts in light of these high prices.

The natural gas industry, as we can see above, is able to use market forces to respond to price signals. Drillers used innovation and new technology to find new supplies which in turn brought down the high prices. If the extraction / exploration industries were heavily regulated and monopolized (like power generation), it is likely that they would just have utilized the high prices as an opportunity to reap large profits rather than to expand supply.
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Like the famous Seinfeld episode where Kramer struggles to figure out how to profit from the fact that Michigan offers a 10 cent return on recycled bottles, I have been starting at this ad from Interactive Brokers for some time now. This had has been run in myriad financial papers and I have seen it all over the place. It is notable for the fact that it looks like it was drawn “on the back of a napkin” like the fabled dot-com business plans.

The specific elements of the investing plan are as follows:
- Interactive brokers can make margin loans at 1.25% annual interest. This LOW rate of interest is made possible by the country’s current super-low rate policy
- Some stocks are offering dividends as high as 5%. In the current low interest rate environment (you are likely to get 2% on CD’s & government paper, and almost nothing on your money market and bank deposits), that 5% rate seems very enticing, especially since dividends are taxed more favorably on individuals than interest income (dividends are as low as a 15% rate, while interest income is as high as 35%+)
- Interactive brokers will offer you LEVERAGE. By leverage, this means that they will LOAN you more money than you have in your brokerage account so that you can invest and magnify your returns, either UP or DOWN
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I knew it must be time for the annual “dance” regarding the Chicago Transit Authority budgets when I saw this sign up on a bus stop near the Merchandise Mart. The sign detailed the threatened cuts to bus routes if 1) the CTA doesn’t get more money 2) the unions don’t give back their recently negotiated pay raises.

This is no way to run a state. This article in the Chicago Tribune describes the annual ritual:

The CTA made an offer today that its labor unions could refuse, and they quickly did: Give back a 3.5 percent pay raise this year in return for reducing employee layoffs and major cuts in bus and rail service that are set to begin Feb. 7.
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Oh no… the ice is breaking up… these non-native Canadian Geese, which don’t even bother to migrate but just hang out fat and happy… they could maybe be extinct in our lifetime (uh, probably not by a long shot).

In this article titled “Why Many Investors Keep Fooling Themselves” by Jason Zweig from the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Zweig does an excellent job of explaining why individuals assume that they will receive a rate of return that is too high, which means that either they are not saving enough to meet their goals or that they are taking too much risk of running out of money.

This post describes what the rate of return means in practical terms, and why it is important.

One of the core elements of investing is the assumed “rate of return”. Along with your base investment (or amount that you are periodically adding, say annually), your time frame (number of years out you want to go), the “rate of return” is the percentage variable used to determine whether you will have enough to retire and / or meet your needs for a specific goal (such as will you have enough funded to send your child to college).

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Check out this photo from BBC news of a “Frozen Britain”. It is damn cold in the states here, too. Al Gore – maybe I am missing something? Or should I go through the emails from those researchers trying to hide all of their data again…

Recently I covered iBonds, which are a government bond that you can purchase online that provides assurance against increases in inflation and other tax benefits. The amount you can purchase is limited, however, to $5000 / year, and you can’t redeem them for 12 months, which makes them unsuitable as a short-term cash vehicle.

Certificates of Deposit (CDs) Through a Brokerage:

If you are looking for a practical way to earn interest income with the minimum risk possible than certificates of deposit are a good alternative. When I was growing up you had to physically go to a bank and set up a CD, and then you had to retain paperwork for each instrument. In addition, you wanted to disburse your funds among a number of banks to get around FDIC limits, as well. Finally, the CDs were not easily redeemed, although you could redeem them in some circumstances depending on the issue with a penalty on interest.

Today – all of above disadvantages and inconveniences with certificates of deposits have been eliminated. You can buy CDs online (I used to go through a voice broker, but last time the guy showed me how to do it myself, online, so now I will just purchase them that way), they are integrated with your brokerage statement so there is no additional paperwork (on issuance, or at year end for taxes) beyond what you already receive, and also there is a “secondary” market when you can re-sell your CD if you need the proceeds sooner. There is no “guarantee” that you will be able to sell your CD at the price you want, but since a CD is a simple commodity with a rate, timing payment frequency, and a duration, I’d expect that you’d be able to sell it for something very close to the market price and receive not only your cash back but essentially be made whole on your interest. However, the overall interest rate market may have changed which would mean that your CD would be worth “more” or “less” if you had to sell it – longer dated CDs that I purchased a couple of years ago are now selling for more than 100 cents on the dollar (say 102) but that would only come into play if I decided to sell them prior to their redemption date, which I don’t plan to do.

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In Chicago we don’t have In-N-Out Burger franchises. Thus recently when I was in Arizona I saw a big sign for one and then when I was returning back from the airport I got off the highway and drove around until we located the franchise (which turned out to be right by an exit, but I had already passed it, so next time it would be done in a flash).

I generally didn’t know much about the franchise except that 1) the menu was very simple 2) the place was always packed. We got there a bit after 11 in the morning so the lunch hour rush hadn’t started yet. By the time we were done eating, the line was starting to get very long.

The food was great. To some extent they turn the “fast food” label on its head – the food is cooked while you wait and seemed very fresh. People have expectations of long lines, waiting for their food, and they are OK with it taking longer. There is obviously a trade-off here when compared against the other fast food chains, since I wouldn’t stand in a long line and wait to eat the typical fare. This is the “double double” with fries, and they had a nice catalog because apparently a lot of people like to show their In-N-Out pride by wearing shirts and picking up other paraphernalia.

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I have written about iBonds on this site in the past and wanted to re-visit them (due to deflation the interest return on all iBonds went NEGATIVE recently which was interesting news).
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As a “solution” to our economic problems, the government has been spending money on stimulus programs. Since the government can’t directly incent business development, this type of money ends up going to 1) minor infrastructure projects and 2) funds for local governments and states to spend on salaries, programs.

As we know, the government has to raise revenues to pay for these programs in the form of taxes. Then the taxes, which distort business activities in myriad ways, are paid out in the form of salaries and grants in a relatively inefficient manner through a variety of poorly managed government programs.

While it isn’t popularly known, the US has among the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world and it isn’t just a co-incidence that other venues such as Hong Kong and Brazil are seeing an upsurge in IPOs and stock listings. The US today is not a competitive place to start a business, all else being equal.

The current government is not only taxing the US at an unsustainable rate as far as competitiveness, it is spending money that it doesn’t have (deficit spending), which will burden the US and future generations with high interest payments. The current deficit for 2009 is estimated to be about $1.6 trillion dollars, which will add about $100 billion / year in interest payments (fluctuates depending on rates).

All of these taxes don’t help put people in meaningful (non-government) jobs. In fact, they hurt our competitiveness and hurt the businesses most likely to grow and create jobs. Since unemployment is important even to our elected officials (unlike debt, competitiveness and future interest burdens, apparently) because an unemployed electorate is an angry electorate, institutions like the NY Times have to start thinking about tax cuts as a way to spur job creation.

From the article, titled “Tax Cuts Might Accomplish What Spending Hasn’t“,

When devising its fiscal package, the administration relied on conventional ideas based in part on ideas of John Maynard Keynes. Keynesian theory says that government spending is more potent than tax policy for jump-starting a stalled economy. (Per the administration) it says that an extra dollar of government spending raises GDP by $1.57, while a dollar of tax cuts raises GDP by only 99 cents.
 
According to the Romers (on the President’s Council of Economic Advisors), each dollar of tax cuts has historically raised GDP by about $3 – three times the figure used in the administrations’ report. That is also far greater than most estimates of the effects of government spending.

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One of the long-time major public utilities was known as TXU and was based out of Dallas, Texas. TXU was a large utility and expanded to include overseas assets; after the energy bust in the early 2000s TXU shed their overseas assets and participated in the deregulation schemes for the state of Texas.

A bit of background is that utilities are pretty much regulated on a state-by-state basis. In addition, Texas (with the exception of El Paso, which is really almost more a part of New Mexico; I used to consult there) is on their own transmission grid known as ERCOT, that has its own voltage different from the rest of the country, meaning that power in Texas can’t generally cross state lines. This means that you can’t bring power into Texas that isn’t generated in Texas and you can’t sell Texas power outside of state lines. The subtle side effect is that, for power at least, Texas is like a “whole separate country” – if there is a surplus of generation in the state, rates stay low – but if they are short on generating capacity – prices will soar. Surplus or deficit power in neighboring states can’t help or harm Texas.

Here is an instant tip for you – any deal done in 2007, at the height of the bubble, is generally in trouble. The 2007 mortgage “vintage” is the stinkiest year, and the same type of damage spilled over to the deal arena. Generally if you are looking at a 2007 deal, when equity values were at their highest and “easy money” for debt was readily available (meaning that you could “leverage up” higher), those are the deals with the characteristics likeliest to make them go South.

So now that we have gone through a bit of background on the unique nature of the Texas electricity market, and gone through the general background of deals that were executed in 2007, now we move on to the current status of TXU, which became “Energy Futures Holdings” when a leveraged buy out of equity owners occurred during that year for $45 billion, led by KKR, Texas Pacific Group, and Goldman Sachs (see brief wikipedia article).

Energy Futures Holdings incurred a large debt taking a utility public. Historically utilities have had substantial and steady free cash flow. Thus the plan typically is to leverage up with debt (which is cheaper than equity, because you can deduct interest on debt), cut expenses, and keep the cash flow. For a utility with large capital expenditures (investments), another obvious way to increase your cash flows is to pare back on new investments of items like power plants, transmission lines, and distribution networks.

The debt of Energy Future Holdings is trading at a substantial discount to “face” value, which is 100 cents on the dollar. For this bond issue (each one is valued differently, because they have different terms, maturities and rights, although they generally move in sync along with the overall enterprise’s health) the bonds were trading at 70 cents on the dollar for the 2017 maturity.

One item that is eye-popping is that this bond returns a coupon of 10.875%, almost 11% a year! The current treasury (risk free) rate today for bonds with a 7 year maturity (to be in synh with the 2017 bonds) is 2.74%, per this government bond yield table. Thus these bonds pay (10.875 – 2.74) = 8.131% HIGHER than the “risk free” rate, for a period of 7 years. Thus if risk was equivalent (which it clearly is NOT), then this bond would be trading for far above 100 cents on the dollar, maybe something like 150 (I will leave it up to Andrew from Aurora, the new guy on the blog, to figure it out if he feels like it).

So for a bond to be trading at 70 cents on the dollar with a high coupon rate basically means that investors are bracing for a serious fall. A quick look at their financials shows why (even though they are private and have no equity investors, they have debt investors with publicly traded debt so they still file SEC filings and have quarterly conference calls). EFH has huge amounts of debt coming due in 2014, and it currently doesn’t appear that they are generating enough cash to pay down this debt. To be fair, when deals like this were done at the height of the “easy money” boom, you not only had models showing growing cash flows, but you also figured that you could easily re-finance and push out the maturity of debt as it comes due. In general, those days are mostly over unless you have a heavy equity component (a lot of your own money at stake) or a sterling balance sheet.

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I thought a little bit of Alpaca fun would brighten everybody’s Friday a bit. I saw them a couple of months ago in Galena outside of the “Galena Log Cabin Gateway“. Funny I thought they were Llamas (went packing with them once) but turns out they are Alpacas.

Cross posted at LITGM

I recently braved the crowds which were surprisingly large for a recession on Saturday and went shopping for Christmas gifts. A few photos from my travels in downtown Chicago.

Upper left – an Agent Provocateur bag left in the trash. Someone probably purchased something for their girl and then realized that bringing the bag home is a dead giveaway. Or this is really saying “here is a gift which ostensibly is for you but is actually for me.”
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From time to time Dan from Madison writes about gambling and the hypocrisy of the NFL in their actions on this topic. In particular, the NFL was upset about legal wagering on sports in Delaware, when today it pretty much is only officially legal in Nevada and a couple other states (also Oregon and Montana, per this article).

Something strange happened in Russia this summer. Even though the economy was in a severe downturn and hundreds of thousands were employed in casinos throughout the country, the government (basically Putin) decreed that casinos were to be shut down on July 1, 2009. This article by the NY Times provides a good summary of the situation and its impact.

The gambling industry says the ban will leave more than 400,000 people without work in Russia, at a time when it has been hard hit by the economic downturn: the World Bank predicts the economy will contract by 7.9 percent this year. The government has put the figure at 60,000 people, though industry analysts say that is absurdly low.
 
After the law passed, federal officials and casino executives seemed certain that it would be watered down, which is apparently why neither the casinos nor the four regions did anything to prepare. “You know, in our country, the decisions are made by only one person,” said Samuil Binder, deputy executive director of the Russian Association for Gaming Business Development. He was referring to Mr. Putin.

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For the last couple of years there has been talk of a “renaissance” in nuclear power in the United States. The government has issued some loan guarantees to various parties and the greens are starting to come around to nuclear power because of greenhouse emissions. While I am a supporter of nuclear power and of investing in generating capacity in general, from the moment that this false hope started I have been steadfast in maintaining that virtually no new nuclear plants will be built in the US in the near term, meaning the next 5 or so years.

One other block against any sort of nuclear power investment is HISTORY. This article in today’s Wall Street Journal titled “Costs Cloud Texas Nuclear Plan” discusses the South Texas Project, a nuclear site in Texas that is owned today by municipal utilities in Austin and San Antonio, Texas and NRG, a public company that owns various generating assets around the USA.

The South Texas Project (STP) has 2 nuclear units today. NRG applied for federal financing to build 2 additional nuclear units at the site, as part of this “renaissance” of nuclear power.

The original STP project was subject to massive cost overruns. Per the article:

“skittishness about the cost of nuclear energy is understandable. The first two units at STP were supposed to cost less than $1 billion but ended up costing more than $5 billion. With that memory seared into its memory, San Antonio officials have been sensitive to anything suggesting that they could, again, get blindsided by escalating costs”

Note that the costs escalated by a FACTOR OF FIVE from the original estimate – $4B cost overrun in 1982 dollars translates into over $8B based on this “inflation calculator” I found on the web.

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One truism on Technology is that the initial media splash and the early adopters skew trends by making them seem to have more impact than they actually do. It is often the slower, longer “tail” of a trend that causes the most significant change, even if by then the media has passed the story by because it is no longer “hot”.

Two items happened last week that show a profound technology advancement that is by now ubiquitous and thus rarely commented on by the media. These two items are 1) the vast scope of online gaming and 2) Craigslist and its impact on retail.

While watching the Bears get killed on Sunday during half time, my nephew put on Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2 which just got released in November, 2009 for Xbox. Already, there were masses of individuals online playing the game – there were over 800,000 users online AT THAT MOMENT. He joined a game, which was simple, and the intelligence split up the team members based on their levels so that the two teams were balanced. It is just amazing how easy it is to join these games and play infinitely, against other human opponents – this used to be hard to do (Dan and I played online a long time ago) and now it is not only a snap but there are hundreds of thousands of opponents ready to play a huge variety of missions at any time day or night. Also, Xbox, which was viewed as behind Wii and PS3, is now a leader in online gaming which is a huge differentiator against the other consoles, while this wasn’t viewed as a critical factor at the time the consoles all emerged.
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Over the long term, electricity use has been closely correlated with the general growth in the economy. Due to the fact that building power stations, transmission lines and siting locations for distribution facilities has a long lead time (sometimes measured in decades), utilities have to plan ahead.

One of the major pillars of electricity demand is industry. Many facilities use large amounts of electricity, such as steel & aluminum, paper and pulp making, and manufacturing plants for autos. Some facilities use so much electricity that they build their own power plants, and / or locate their facilities near cheap power (which is why a lot of the aluminum industry and aircraft manufacturing is in the Northwest, where cheap hydro power was available).

This latest recession has caused industrial usage to plummet to an unprecedented degree. The article above was in the Wall Street Journal titled “Weak Power Demand Dims Outlook“. Per the article:

Electricity sales remained weak in the third quarter, prompting speculation that the sluggishness could persist even after the U.S. economy rebounds. Some utilities don’t expect power sales to recover to pre-recession levels until 2012 — if at all — because so many factories have closed.

Some of the major utilities, such as AEP out of the midwest and Southern Company in the Southeast are seeing demand reductions for industrial use in the 15-20% range. These types of reductions are out of the historical norm for a recession.
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A recent WSJ article about Tom Petty and how he is perceived relative to his rocking “peers” caused me to instantly grimace thinking about the time a couple of years ago when I saw The Strokes open for Tom Petty in Chicago at Northerly Island and The Strokes just blew Petty off the stage. We left after a couple of Petty’s songs… it was about as exciting as watching paint dry.

Well then the WSJ put together a matrix ranking Petty’s peers that made me almost throw up in my mouth a bit. Everyone on that list was ancient, and very few were even creating new music anymore (or at least music that anyone was listening to). Of the individuals on the grid I wouldn’t even cross the street to see 90% of them for free. And this is “rock”?
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