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ScienceDaily:   "will the message we need to hear be coming from the leaves,coming from the leaves"

"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: You liberate a city by destroying it. Words are used to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests."
—Gore Vidal, Imperial America, 2004

Erie Resemblance to atomic bomb.

Jellyfish-Like Organisms Shut Down California Power Plant
By Alexandra Ludka | ABC News – 8 hrs ago
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Jellyfish-Like Organisms Shut Down …
                                                                                                 Image credit: Getty Images
The workers of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant received a very slimy surprise this week when they discovered hoards of jellyfish-like creatures clinging to the structure, leading to the shutdown of the plant.
The organisms, called salp, are small sea creatures with a consistency  similar to jellyfish.
The influx of salp was discovered as part of the plant's routine monitoring system, according to Tom Cuddy, the senior manager of external and nuclear communications for the plant's operator, Pacific Gas & Electric.
"We then made the conservative decision to ramp down the affected unit to 20 percent and continued to monitor the situation," Cuddy said. "When the problem continued, we made another conservative decision that it would be safest to curtail the power of the unit."
The salp were clogging the traveling screens in the intake structure, which are meant to keep marine life out and to keep the unit cool.
"Safety is the highest priority," Cuddy said. "We will not restart the unit until the salp moves on and conditions improve. No priority is more important than the safe operation of our facility."
The plant consists of two units. Unit 1 was shut down previously because of refueling and maintenance work and will not be functional for several weeks. Now that Unit 2 has been shut down because of the influx of salp, the plant has ceased all production.
Even with the Diablo Canyon plant out of commission, PG&E has pledged to continue production using other sources of power so that customers are unaffected by the closure.
"We've had salp cling to the intake structure before, but nothing to this extent," Cuddy said.
The plant's strategy? Simply wait until the salp move on and resume production once the filters are clear.

Farmer's Almanac

28th-30th Grub Out Weeds, Briars, And Other Plant Pests.

May 2012
1st-2nd A Barren Period. Good For Killing Plant Pests, Cultivating, Or Taking A Short Vacation.
3rd-4th Excellent Time For Planting Corn, Beans, Peppers, And Other Aboveground Crops. Favorable For Sowing Hay, Fodder Crops, And Grains. Plant Flowers.
5th-7th Plant Carrots, Beets, Onions, Turnips, And Other Root Crops At This Time. Cabbage, Lettuce, And Other Leafy Vegetables Will Do Well. Planting Seedbeds. Good For Transplanting.
8th-9th Do No Planting.
10th-12th Plant Late Beets, Potatoes, Onions, Carrots, And Other Root Crops.
13th-14th Kill Plant Pests On These Barren Days.
15th-16th Favorable Time For Planting Late Root Crops. Also Good For Vine Crops That Can Be Planted Now. Set Strawberry Plants. Good Days For Transplanting.
17th-18th Poor Planting, Fine For Cultivating Or Spraying.
19th-20th Favorable Planting Days: First Day For Root Crops. Good Day For Transplanting. Last Day For Beans, Corn, Cotton, Tomatoes, Peppers, And Other Aboveground Crops.
21st-22nd Any Seed Planted Now Will Tend To Rot.
23rd-24th Most Favorable For Planting Corn, Cotton, Okra, Beans, Peppers, Eggplant, And Other Aboveground Crops. Plant Seedbeds And Flower Gardens.
25th-29th A Barren Period. Good For Killing Plant Pests, Cultivating, Or Taking A Short Vacation.
30th-31st Excellent Time For Planting Corn, Beans, Peppers, And Other Aboveground Crops. Favorable For Sowing Hay, Fodder Crops, And Grains. Good For Planting Flowers.

Well said Greg!

Chairman Bernanke and Sheila Bair are talking about the cycle of banks and lending and balance sheets and hiring and how lending is contingent on small business balance sheets. Banks don’t want to lead for fear the business will not be there tomorrow. Small businesses cannot grow because they don’t have the cash to invest in their business.  Hence nothing is being done. Growth is not happening.  Commericial real estate is depressed. Look at your local strip mall for the clues.

It is my thought that the focus should now be squarely on the larger corporations who have had access to capital markets, whose balance sheets are flush with cash, who have done the employee cutting which has had a trickle down effect on main street.  It is time for them, to start to take some of the cash and hire again. 

Employees are cheap(er). Efficiency earning growth to higher stock prices are over.  Earnings will not come from the expense side but from the revenue side.  Growth has to come from growth in the economy, not cost cutting.  

Jobs stimulate spending.  Spending stimulates more spending.  Look to create jobs. Creating jobs will ease the burden on over-worked employees and start the trickle up that ends on main street.  Then the small businesses can start to find stimulus from the banks again.

Stop the freebies from the government.  Stop the “save everything/everyone mentality” that was required back then in 2008-2010, but not needed now.   Focus on solving the problems by using the cash on the balance sheets of those who have made it through - especially if those gains were from the government.  

Jamie Diamond from JP Morgan/Chase was on CNBC yesterday talking about paying out a dividend with all the cash they have accumulated - once the bank stress test is done that is.  Meredith Whitney, the ”Banking Analyst Guru”, suggested investing in banks overseas instead. 

Great (sarcastic “great”).  Take free money from the government, take guarantees on housing  and loans, and take that free money and give it to the people who likely have jobs in the form of a stock dividend.  Alternatively, if he were to do what Meredith Whitney suggests, he should use it to hire people outside the USA.  What will that do in the US other than raise the stock price possibly and provide a small stimulus from those stockholders who may spend the dividend (the dividend is likely to reinvested in stock anyway)? If it is used to buy an overseas financial institution, that is even worse.  Pay those workers with US free money. No wonder Meredith Whitney thinks municipalities will default on debt at an alarming rate. No jobs here, means no tax base, means no money to pay the bondholders. 

Mr Diamond, do the right thing and take the cash you have been given for FREE in the USA, and look to hire someone in the USA  instead who can somehow, someway grow your business.  I know… what job is there?

Maybe there is that extra teller at your branches. Maybe it is opening all day Saturday (with new workers involved).  Maybe it is increasing budgets instead of cutting budgets, and asking managers to put the extra money to work and while they are doing it, prove they used it to increase the bottom line of their department.  Maybe it is a technology product.  Maybe it is hiring the people to service the people who want a mortgage work-out so they can feel a little more better and stay in there house.

Will it maximize shareholder wealth?  Who knows.  If the economy grows and jobs are added, you can argue that burdens can be lifted, housing can be absorbed by new workers who save up and buy that house, and in the process the economy and the bank earnings rise in the process. Banks can start to make loans (like they are supposed to do) instead of buying US government bonds.

As long as the US focuses on saving the world, the opportunity of creating business and earnings will be lost.  Small businesses need big business stimulus to get them out of the rut.  IMHO.

Thank you Citigroup

NEW YORK, Dec 17 (IFR) -

   Citigroup has closed the largest wind-energy project in the world, a US$1.4bn deal that uses clever structured finance technology to "strip" a guarantee provided by the US Department of Energy into component parts, allowing the bank to tailor the transaction to a variety of investor bases.
   The bank acted as joint lead bookrunner (lead-left and structurer) and joint lead arranger on the innovative, 22-year amortizing package, which financed the Shepherds Flat Wind project in Oregon, the world's largest wind farm. The transaction, which closed yesterday, is the first broadly distributed offering of its kind supported with a partial US Department of Energy loan guarantee.
   Citi was engaged to structure and execute the transaction in November 2009, and also acted as DOE lender-applicant for a US$1.3bn semi-guaranteed loan. The project, an 845-megawatt wind generation facility located in eastern Oregon, is sponsored by Caithness Energy, LLC and GE Energy Financial Services, and will feature 338 new high-efficiency GE 2.5-megawatt wind turbines. The wind farm is the first in North America to deploy these turbines, which have been used in Europe and Asia.

    According to the DOE, the project will produce enough renewable energy to power more than 200,000 average California households and avoid over 1 million tons of carbon dioxide, and will directly and indirectly create hundreds of jobs for the local economy.

 

   An 80% guarantee from the DOE's loan-guarantee program ultimately allowed the project to access a wider pool of capital; for example, some investors said this was their first project-level investment in wind energy.

 

   At the outset, however, the 80% guaranteed structure presented Citigroup with a quandary. While a deep pool of buyside demand existed to buy government risk, and a separate pool existed to buy pure project-finance risk, there was not a significant investor base for transactions that are only partially guaranteed by a US agency. "Eighty-percent guaranteed paper is neither fish nor fowl," said Nasser Malik, a managing director at Citigroup. "It's a square peg in a round hole. Lenders and investors are not accustomed to buying or seeing it.

 

"So we recommended that the DOE permit a process whereby we 'strip' the guarantee into component parts through intermediary grantor trusts, using securitization technology. This way we were able to create true pieces of homogeneous risk (government risk and pure project risk), size demand more appropriately, and reduce extension risk for the client."

 

   In order to optimize the cost of funds for the large capital raise, Citi suggested accessing multiple markets including the bank market, private placement bond market, and ABCP conduits.

 

   But Citi had to employ some nifty structuring in order to appropriately tailor the offering to each of these specific markets.

 

   First, the transaction was split into fixed- and floating-rate pieces, mainly to minimize negative carry (when cost of financing is greater than income generated) over the course of the two-year construction period. Then each of those pieces was further split into two: 80% of the fixed-rate piece would benefit from a 100% government guarantee, while 20% would be completely unguaranteed, and the floating-rate piece would be divided, 80/20, in the exact same way.

 

   So a US$675m, 14-year, fully amortizing floating-rate tranche of "bank debt" was stripped as follows: 80% (or US$540m) of grantor-trust certificates benefitted fully from the DOE guarantee, while 20% (or US$135m) of pure project trust certificates were completely unguaranteed.

 

   The floaters were placed in this way: 60% of the US$540m guaranteed portion was structured for and placed into Citi's own Govco ABCP conduit, while the remaining 40% was purchased by the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, one of the joint arrangers on the deal. The US$135m unguaranteed floater was syndicated to the project finance bank market.

 

   Separately, the US$525m of fixed-rate, 17.9-year average-life bonds were divided in a similar way: 80% (or US$420m) had a full government guarantee and was sold as a so-called "delayed draw" into the US private placement market, while 20% (or US$105m) of unguaranteed notes were sold into the project-finance market.

 

"In a project, you draw down funds over a span of time," said Stuart Murray, a Citi banker overseeing the trade. "So you don't need all the cash up front. Sponsors get the benefit of the 'delay draw' afforded by the private placement market, which is more economical than having the funds sitting in escrow."

 

   Twenty-five percent of the fixed-rate, private placement portion was immediately funded when the transaction closed last Thursday; 50% more of the fixed-rate piece will fund in three weeks. The remaining 25% will fund in early May 2011.

 

   "By our estimate, the DOE guarantee reduced the credit spread on the transaction by almost 200bp," Malik said. "This is the real value to the sponsors."

 

   Additionally, US$231m in letters of credit were issued, a portion of which is 80% guaranteed by the DOE. The LOC were syndicated to the project finance bank market.

 

   Besides Citi, the other joint arrangers on the deal were Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, RBS, and West LB.

 

   The fixed-rate, private placement portion, rated 'BBB-' by Fitch, priced with a 4.97% blended coupon and a 166bp spread, and was 2.5x oversubscribed.

 

   Citi underwrote almost 50% of the floating-rate facilities and LOC. Bank-market syndication was approximately 2x oversubscribed, resulting in clean, unguaranteed project exposure to Citi of approximately US$8m.

 

   The Shepherds Flat wind project started construction this year and is expected to finish in mid-2012.

 

adam.tempkin@thomsonreuters.com

Thank You God

A way out, at last, for Chile's 33 trapped miners

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Play VideoABC News  – Drill Team Breaks Through to Trapped Miners

• Slideshow:Chile Mine Rescue Efforts
• Play VideoVideo:Rescuers finally reach Chile miners Reuters

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AP – Relatives of trapped miners embrace at the San Jose Mine near Copiapo, Chile, Saturday, Oct. 9, 2010. …

By MICHAEL WARREN, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 12 mins ago

SAN JOSE MINE, Chile – A drilling rig punched through to the underground purgatory where 33 miners have been trapped for 66 agonizing days under the Chilean desert, raising cheers, tears and hopes on Saturday.

Champagne sprayed and hard hats tumbled off heads as rescue workers pressed close to the drill, hugging each other and shouting for joy. Down in "Camp Hope," where the miners' relatives waited, people waved flags and cried as one man energetically rang a brass bell even before the siren sounded confirming the escape shaft had reached the miners.

The men are still several days away from efforts to bring them to the surface: the rescue team wants to eliminate even a remote chance of something going wrong on their way up, and plans to carefully inspect the shaft with a video camera before deciding whether to reinforce it.

"We feel an enormous happiness, now that i'm going to have my brother," said Darwin Contreras, whose brother Pedro, a 26-year-old heavy machine operator, is stuck down below. "When the siren rang out, it was overwhelming. Now we just have to wait for them to get out, just a little bit longer now."

The "Plan B" drill won a three-way race against two other drills to carve a hole wide enough for an escape capsule to pull the miners out one by one.

While "Plan A" and "Plan C" stalled after repeatedly veering off course, the "Plan B" drill reached the miners at a point 2,041 feet (622 meters) below the surface at 8:05 a.m., after 33 days of drilling.

Jeff Hart of Denver, Colorado, operated the drill, and said the entire rescue crew erupted with cheers when the T130 broke through.

"There is nothing more important than saving, possibly saving 33 lives. There's no more important job than that," Hart said. "We've done our part, now it's up to them to get the rest of the way out."

The milestone thrilled Chileans, who have come to see the rescue drama as a test of the nation's character and pride, and eased some anxiety among the miners' families.

But now comes a difficult judgment call: The rescue team must decide whether it's more risky to pull the miners through unreinforced rock, or to insert tons of heavy steel pipe into the curved shaft to protect the miners on their way up.

"This is an important achievement," Mining Minister Laurence Golborne said, "but we still haven't rescued anybody. This rescue won't be over until the last person below leaves this mine."

President Sebastian Pinera promised "to do everything humanly possible" to keep the miners safe, and as the drill was nearing the breakthrough, he said he had kept his promise.

Those in charge of the rescue say the decision on how to proceed next will be a purely technical one.

While engineers have said there is only a remote chance of something going wrong, everyone involved knows how terrible it would be — politically as well as for the families — if a miner gets stuck partway up for reasons that might have been avoided.

Steel pipe would prevent stones from falling and potentially jamming the capsule, but it wouldn't save a miner if the unstable mine suffers another major collapse, and might itself provoke a disastrous setback, Golbornesaid.

"You would have to put though a 600-meter hole a lot of pipes that weigh more than 150 tons," he warned. "And this structure can be set in a position that also could block the movement of the Phoenix (escape capsule). It's not an decision easy to make."

If Saturday's close video examination persuades engineers that the shaft is smooth, strong and uniform enough to let the capsule pass without significant obstacles, then rescuers plan to start pulling the men out one by one as early as Tuesday, in a made-for-TV spectacle that has captivated the world.

The miners will be initially examined at a field hospital where they can briefly reunited with up to three close relatives. Then, they'll be flown by helicopter in small groups to the regional hospital in Copiapo, where 33 fresh beds await and they will be observed for at least 48 hours. Only after their physical and mental health is thoroughly examined will they be allowed to go home.

"I'm very excited, very happy," said Guadalupe Alfaro, waving a flag outside her tent. Her son Carlos Bugueno, 26, is stuck down below. "I'm very excited, very content. I've wanted so long for this moment, I woke up to live this moment. My son will return soon."

"Our nervousness is gone now," said Juan Sanchez, whose son Jimmy is stuck in the mine. "Only now can we begin to smile."

___

Associated Press writers Vivian Sequera at the mine and Eva Vergara in Copiapo, Chile, contributed to this story.