Wall Street Gets Climate Savvy

It's the money, Honey.

It has finally dawned on Wall Street that climate change comes with a price tag.

From IBM and AccuWeather Inc. to outfits like Riskpulse, Jupiter and DTN, companies that track weather have created an intensely competitive new industry in just the last five years. Their client lists have grown to include insurers, banks and commodity traders, engineers and architects, shippers, retailers and the travel industry. And little is done without their input. 

As global warming makes extreme weather more common, meteorologists have become the high priests of finance, mitigating uncertainty and boosting risk-related profits. “There’s kind of a wave building," said Tory Grieves, membership manager at The Collider, a North Carolina nonprofit that helps climate entrepreneurs train and network.

Wall Street has arrived late to the party.  The global insurance industry has been alive to the climate factor for years. It's a costly threat.  In March, the giant German re-insurer, Munich Re, warned that climate change losses could drive the price of insurance premiums beyond the reach of many homeowners.

Ernst Rauch, Munich Re's chief climatologist put it this way: “If the risk from wildfires, flooding, storms or hail is increasing then the only sustainable option we have is to adjust our risk prices accordingly. In the long run it might become a social issue,” he said after Munich Re published a report into climate change’s impact on wildfires. 

“Affordability is so critical [because] some people on low and average incomes in some regions will no longer be able to buy insurance.”
Nicolas Jeanmart, the head of personal insurance, general insurance and macroeconomics at Insurance Europe, which speaks for 34 national insurance associations, said the knock-on effects from rising premiums could pose a threat to social order. 

“The sector is concerned that continuing global increases in temperature could make it increasingly difficult to offer the affordable financial protection that people deserve, and that modern society requires to function properly,” he said.

The smart money, or the experts who advise the smart money, also know that climate change is not a linear process. It can and will see major seismic impacts. For example, attention is now focusing on "ice cliffs" of Greenland and the Antarctic that are slumping and will possibly lead to abrupt (a decade or two) sea level rise of up to three metres. No one is prepared for that, certainly not "sea to sea to sea" Canada.  An event such as that could be devastating to the global economy. It would overwhelm many coastal cities and ports and cause massive displacement of coastal populations.

It doesn't help that many important countries are now run on the "never, never" of perpetual borrowing. The Pharaohs knew to keep the Nile granaries full for those years that the river didn't flood the farmland, triggering crop failures. I guess we're smarter than those ancient Pharaohs. Their granaries were kept full. Our treasuries are empty. Oh dear.

If Trump Wants a Swamp to Drain

Forget Hillary Clinton's emails. That was all nonsense anyway.

If Trump wants to "drain the swamp" the only way he'll do it, the only thing that will do his people any good, is to get money out of politics.

First thing would be to dismantle the collusion between government and Wall Street by which not one of those responsible for the '08 meltdown was ever prosecuted. Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has done a ton of research that pretty much lays it all out.

Take it apart. Investigate it. Expose it to the light of day. Show the American public who perpetrated their economic nightmare, where the bailout money really went, how those responsible flourished in the wake of their perfidy, in the process driving wealth and income inequality to unparalleled heights.

That 9/11 Commission? Do the same thing to investigate, analyze and explain to the American people how their country got sucked into a ruinous debacle in the Middle East starting with the illegal conquest of Iraq. Lots of suspects there - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz, Perle, Scooter - dust'em off.

And then force Congress into accepting campaign finance reform. Get big money out of the game. It should never have been allowed to become the lifeblood of Congressional politics. It's the vehicle by which Congress has become a "bought and sold" entity in service to special interests.

These are all things that Obama should have at least attempted and didn't. His failures rightly convinced many voters that the political apparatus in Washington is rigged, corrupt. That's not to say that he would have succeeded but at least he could have shown who was standing in the way.

Washington was always a malarial bog. There's no shortage of swamps at hand if Trump is in the mood for some draining. Only he's not. That was just electoral horseshit he used to feed the Gullibillies.

Oh, the Horror! Al Qaeda Targeting Wall Street Moguls?

The Global Security Newswire, picking up on a story from NBC earlier this week, reports that US intelligence officials fear Islamist extremists intend to target Wall Street banks or their top managers.

Intelligence researchers said there is a nonspecific but increasing fear that extremists in Yemen could make another attempt at shipping hidden explosive devices or chemical and biological weapons materials to New York financial institutions. U.S. authorities think extremists operating from Yemen were responsible for the packaged bombs addressed to Chicago-based synagogues in late October. The explosive devices -- hidden inside printer cartridges -- were intercepted in the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom but officials think they could have been designed to detonate in midflight (see GSN, Nov. 3, 2010).

Al-Qaeda's official magazine, "  Inspire,"   in its most recent issue included a mention of attempting to deploy the biological pathogen anthrax in a terror strike, officials said.

Al-Qaeda member Abu Suleiman al-Nasser in a recent blog post exhorted, " "Rush"  my Muslim brothers to targeting financial sites and the program sites of financial institutions, stock markets and money markets."

GSN says intelligence officials are warning the heads of some of America's top financial institutions to beware Yemeni terrorists.

The more I mull this over, the less sense it makes.   al Qaeda's ambition is to bring down the United States.   The best al Qaeda has managed is to bring down two skyscrapers, bomb a ship and destroy a couple of foreign embassies.  By contrast, Wall Street has done far more to weaken and undermine America than al Qaeda could manage even in its wildest dreams.

America's Oh So Greasy CEO's Fight Back

The Barons of Wall Street, having just pocketed their 2009 bonuses filched out of taxpayer-funded bailout monies, are feeling the heat. They're also rankled that Obama plans to cap their salaries at $500,000. So, they're fighting back, impudently arguing that why should Obama get a better deal than he's allowing them?

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/CEOProfiles/Story?id=6806414&page=1

Here's an idea. Yes, he does get some neat perks but he's the friggin' President of the United States of America and you're a bunch of greedy, moronic sphincters who've plunged the world into a recession that's running straight up to the edge of a possible depression.

Surely there must be enough lamp posts to hang all these bastards.

Krugman Explains Meltdown - More Coming?

For years, the Right has treated Paul Krugman as though he was Satan's retarded child. What was his mortal sin? He outlined the inevitability of the very meltdown that's happening now. Ooopsie!

So here is the Princeton economist and New York Times' columnists insight into where this is heading:

"...banks are normally able to borrow from each other at rates just slightly above the interest rate on U.S. Treasury bills. But Thursday morning, the average interest rate on three-month interbank borrowing was 3.2 percent, while the interest rate on the corresponding Treasuries was 0.05 percent. No, that’s not a misprint.

This flight to safety has cut off credit to many businesses, including major players in the financial industry — and that, in turn, is setting us up for more big failures and further panic. It’s also depressing business spending, a bad thing as signs gather that the economic slump is deepening.

And the Federal Reserve, which normally takes the lead in fighting recessions, can’t do much this time because the standard tools of monetary policy have lost their grip. Usually the Fed responds to economic weakness by buying up Treasury bills, in order to drive interest rates down. But the interest rate on Treasuries is already zero, for all practical purposes; what more can the Fed do?

Well, it can lend money to the private sector — and it’s been doing that on an awesome scale. But this lending hasn’t kept the situation from deteriorating.

...government takeovers may be the only way to get the financial system working again.

Some people have been making that argument for some time. Most recently, Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman, and two other veterans of past financial crises published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal declaring that the only way to avoid “the mother of all credit contractions” is to create a new government agency to “buy up the troubled paper” — that is, to have taxpayers take over the bad assets created by the bursting of the housing and credit bubbles. Coming from Mr. Volcker, that proposal has serious credibility.

Thursday night Ben Bernanke and Mr. Paulson met with Congressional leaders to discuss a “comprehensive approach” to the problem.
We don’t know yet what that “comprehensive approach” will look like. There have been hopeful comparisons to the financial rescue the Swedish government carried out in the early 1990s, a rescue that involved a temporary public takeover of a large part of the country’s financial system. It’s not clear, however, whether policy makers in Washington are prepared to exert a comparable degree of control. And if they aren’t, this could turn into the wrong kind of rescue — a bailout of stockholders as well as the market, in effect rescuing the financial industry from the consequences of its own greed."

Now remember, it's the same clown car full of pols and regulators who allowed this to occur in the first place. And they're going to fix it? Remember back when we used to envy American taxpayers?

Hey, all you Right-Wingers out there. Remind us how great your free market economic theories are. I can't seem to remember how that goes.