Update On The West Virginia Derailment -- No Serious Injuries, No Oil In Water, Newer Tank Cars -- February 18, 2015

The Dickinson Press updates the West Virginia derailment on February 16:

• none of the 25 tank cars that derailed fell into the nearby Kanawha River, CSX said. On Monday, officials said at least one car had entered the river.
• water tests along the Kanawha River have so far come up negative for traces of oil
• the train was hauling newer model tank cars
• the CPC 1232 is the newer, supposedly tougher version of the DOT-111 car manufactured before 2011, which was faulted by regulators and operators for a number of years

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The JV Team

Faster Than A Speeding Bullet, More Powerful Than A Locomotive, 

Able To Leap Tall Camels In A Single Bound -- Yahoo News

Yahoo!News is reporting:

It’s been less than a year since IS burst onto the stage, seizing large amounts of territory and shocking the world with its brutally violent tactics. During that time, the group has evolved into a highly sophisticated multimedia organization, boasting slick social media strategies that could give major corporate marketing teams a run for their money.

IS knows how to package its extremist ideology in the form of well-produced videos, attractive graphics, polished magazines and strategic online posts. It’s also strikingly savvy at spreading them online, tailoring their presentation and message to media sites like Twitter, YouTube and Vine. The messages are hypercustomized in language, tone and content to reach as many people possible and ultimately go viral. As Marshall Sella recently wrote in Matter, IS is “an entire brand family, the equivalents of the Apple logo’s glow ... terrorism’s Coca-Cola.” There’s no need to hold an IS-stamped watch or baseball hat in your hands to face the truth: IS is a powerful and terrifying brand that we were not prepared to reckon with.

The writer asks how this could happen ... literally overnight. 

It helps to be labeled the "JV Team" when just getting started. Fathomless ignorance never seems to go out of style.

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Global Warming Update

The Sun Has Gone Quiet Again During The Weakest Solar Cycle In More Than A Century

VenCoreWeather is reporting:

The main driver of all weather and climate, the entity which occupies 99.86% of all of the mass in our solar system, the great ball of fire in the sky – has gone quiet again during what is likely to be the weakest sunspot cycle in more than a century.

For the past 5 days, solar activity has been very low and one measure of solar activity – its X-ray output – has basically flatlined in recent days.

Not since cycle 14 peaked in February 1906 has there been a solar cycle with fewer sunspots.

We are currently more than six years into Solar Cycle 24 and today the sun is virtually spotless despite the fact that we are still in what is considered to be its solar maximum phase. Solar cycle 24 began after an unusually deep solar minimum that lasted from 2007 to 2009 which included more spotless days on the sun compared to any minimum in almost a century.

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Contraction Of US Demand For Goods And Services

No Wonder The President Goes Golfing So Much

With Numbers Like These, I Would Want To Escape Also

From the US government -- a look at "final demand for goods and services." This is something I would never pay attention to but Don certainly picks up on some interesting graphics. This is one of them. From the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

The Final Demand-Intermediate Demand system replaced the Producer Price Index  Stage-of-Processing system as the  primary aggregation system with the release of data for January 2014.

The [new] system expands coverage beyond that of the [previoius] system through the addition of services, construction, exports, and government purchases.

Final demand measures price change for commodities sold for personal consumption, capital investment, government, and export.

The final demand goods index measures price change for both unprocessed and processed goods sold to final demand.

Final demand services includes trade services; transportation and warehousing services; and services other than trade, transportation, and warehousing sold to final demand. 

So, what does the graph look like: Pretty striking, to say the least:

And this is after a gazillion dollars of stimulus.

They say the US economy is the best on earth. Scary, isn't it?

This is four years of data and all I've heard from business sources (predominately Bloomberg, Reuters, and the AP) is that the economy continues to recover. My hunch is that Janet Yellen looks at this graph before deciding whether to raise interest rates.

It would be bad enough if the trend were flat, or slightly negative, but the trend literally shows the demand for goods falling off a cliff. And yet, investors have done incredibly well over this same period of time.

I wonder what an overlay of an ObamaCare Graph would look like on top of this graph: a graph of number of folks enrolled in ObamaCare. Remember: all those folks paying their premiums for high-cost catastrophic health insurance.

Update, 1:44 p.m., later same day: yup, here it is. Janet Yellen appears NOT eager to raise rates. 

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Privileged Planet

One of my favorite books is The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery, Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards, c. 2004.

I was reminded of that after seeing the stories on the "newest planet" discovered in our solar system: Ceres. The "planet" is covered with craters from meteorites hitting it. (And actually Ceres wasn't recently discovered; I think it's been around for a long time and scientists have known about it, but it has only recently been designated a "planet" or "planetoid." I'm probably wrong the the specifics, but it's the thought that counts.)

The authors of The Privileged Planet note that without the other planets in the solar system -- Mars, Jupiter, ... and now Ceres, the earth likely would have been clobbered with meteors. The other solar  system planets literally provide a shield for the Earth from incoming asteroids. The solar system planets collectively missed a big meteor 65 million years ago, but other than that, they've done a pretty good job. The mammals aren't complaining; that meteor finally got rid of those pesky dinosaurs.

For the granddaughters: asteroids (out of harm's way); meteors (penetrating the planet's atmosphere); meteorites (impact).  

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Privileged City

Chicago gets the headline today: setting cold records. ABC7Chicago is reporting:

Record-breaking cold could be on the way Thursday, Butler said. The Chicago area reached a record-low temperature of -7 degrees in 1936. Temperatures are expected to reach -8 or -9 degrees on Thursday. High temperatures will hover around 2 degrees.

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Interest Rates Are So Low, So, Why Not?

Bloomberg is reporting:

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, facing a $283 million deficit that needs to be closed by the end of June, will skip more than $100 million in debt payments to balance the books thrown into disarray by his tax cuts.

Delaying the $108 million principal payment due in May on short-term debt would free funds. The move doesn’t require legislative approval, the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau said in a Feb. 13 memorandum. The terms of the debt sale allow Wisconsin to defer the payment in any given year, a procedure known as a restructuring, without defaulting. 

Walker’s plan would increase debt-service bills by $545,000 in the next budget year, which starts July 1, and by $18.7 million in the one after that.

Since taking office in 2011, Walker has steered more than $2 billion in tax cuts through the Republican-controlled legislature. The state reported a $759 million surplus on June 30, 2013. 

I don't understand the numbers: restructuring results in an increased debt-service by about one-half million dollars this coming year, but then in the next year the debt-service jumps to almost $20 million. In one year? Not to worry; if he's president by then, it's all moot. LOL.

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Speaking Of ObamaCare

Did you all see this in today's WSJ? A hospital collected about $40,000 from the government to pay for knee infection following surgery. The individual was discharged on the day the hospital maxed out its reimbursement. Any further days in hospital would not lead to further government reimbursement.

But this is the real cool part: had the hospital discharged the patient one day earlier, total reimbursement would have $20,000.

So that one extra day of in-hospital care doubled the reimbursement, and one more day would have been a "negative" in the CFO's bookkeeping ledger.

In the emotional arena, one can get upset.

In the investing arena, it emphasizes what I've been saying for quite some time: Big Health wrote the ObamaCare bill; Big Health guides Medicare's reimbursements. This is not rocket science.

This may not be rocket science but this is the disclaimer: I spent most of my entire adult life in medicine, but I am not a professional investor, and this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, or relationship decisions based on anything you read here or think you may have read here. I am not directly invested in any ObamaCare health insurers and have no plans to start now. I assume my managed portfolios (mutual funds, IRAs, pensions, etc) are invested in ObamaCare health insurers. Hopefully the big ones.