December-January Gardening Calander

December 2012
3rd-6th Barren Period. Kill Plant Pests.
7th-8th Plant Root Crops, Fine For Sowing Grains, Hay, And Forage Crops. Plant Flowers.
9th-11th Plant Carrots, Beets, Onions, Turnips, Irish Potatoes And Other Root Crops, In The South. Lettuce, Cabbage, Collards, And Other Leafy Vegetables Will Do Well. Start Seedbeds. Good Days For Transplanting.
12th-13th Do No Planting.
14th-16th Plant Sweet Corn, Beans, Peppers And Other Aboveground Crops, Where Climate Is Suitable.
17th-19th Kill Weeds, Briars And Other Plant Pests, Poor For Planting.
20th-21st Plant Peppers, Sweet Corn, Tomatoes And Other Aboveground Crops, In Southern Florida, California, And Texas. Extra Good For Cucumbers, Peas, Cantaloupes, And Other Vine Crops.
22nd-23rd A Poor Time To Plant.
24th-25th Plant Beans, Peppers, Cucumbers, Melons And Other Aboveground Crops, Where Climate Is Suitable.
26th-27th Seeds Planted Now Will Rot.
28th-29th Plant Beets, Onions, Turnips And Other Root Crops, Where Climate Allows. Plant Seedbeds And Flower Gardens. Good For Transplanting.
30th-31st A Most Barren Period. Kill Plant Pests And Do General Farm Work.

January 2013
1st-3rd A Barren Time. Best For Killing Weeds, Briars, Poison Ivy, And Other Plant Pests. Clear Woodlots And Fencerows.
4th-5th Favorable Days For Planting Root Crops. Fine For Sowing Grains, Hay, And Forage Crops. Plant Flowers.
6th-7th Plant Carrots, Turnips, Onions, Beets, Irish Potatoes, And Other Root Crops In The South. Lettuce, Cabbage, Collards And Other Leafy Vegetables Will Do Well. Start Seedbeds. Good Days For Transplanting.
8th-9th Seeds Planted Now Will Grow Poorly And Yield Little.
10th-11th Favorable Planting Days: First Day Good For Planting Root Crops. Second Day Good For Aboveground Crops Such As Sweet Corn, Beans, And Peppers.
12th-13th Good Time To Kill Plant Pests Or Do Plowing. Poor For Planting.
14th-16th Fine For Planting Any Aboveground Crop Where The Climate Permits. Extra Good For Peppers, Tomatoes, Peas, And Other Vine Crops.
17th-18th Barren Days. Do No Planting.
19th-21st Fine For Planting Beans, Peppers, Cucumbers, Melons, And Other Aboveground Crop Where Climate Is Suitable.
22nd-23rd Poor Days For Planting. Seeds Tend To Rot In Ground.
24th-26th Favorable Planting Days: First Two Days Are Best For Planting Aboveground Crops. Especially Good For Peas, Beans, Cucumber, And Squash. Last Day Is A Most Fruitful Time To Plant Beets, Carrots, Onions, And Other Hardy Root Crops. Also Good For Transplanting.
27th-30th A Barren Time. Best For Killing Weeds, Briars, Poison Ivy, And Other Plant Pests. Clear Woodlots And Fencerows.
31st Favorable Day For Planting Root Crops. Fine For Sowing Grains, Hay, And Forage Crops. Plant Flowers.

ScienceDaily

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