21 Jul, 2008
Catch-Up On A Headline
By happenstance, then, I picked up the 7/9 NYT. The front-page, top-of-fold right-hand column headline: "Fed Sees Turmoil Persisting Deep Into Next Year."
2 -- hasn't the Fed made a lot of questionable moves, if what it's doing is trying to help the economy -- i.e., bailing out the firms that employ financial bigwigs (you as a citizen should question whether bailing out every one of these filthy rich people is going to help the country at all).
3 -- given (1) and (2) . . .
-3b- . . . given how wrong the Fed has been about EVERYTHING, is it reasonable to think it is WRONG about this, too? And if so . . . duya think they are wrong on the short time horizon (i.e., the "turmoil" is likely to end SOONER than "deep into" 2009 . . . or LATER (i.e., it will go "deep" into 2010 . . . or maybe 2011) . . .?
-3c- . . . while we're at it, for how long will what the Fed says and does (about anything and everything) be thought worthy of putting on the front page of the New York Times?
-3d- . . . and, when the day comes that the Fed falls in the forest and no one hears the sound -- what will that mean for the economic system of the United States of America?
21 Jul, 2008
. . . and this IS NOT all of it
FIRST: As the U.S. government did NOT count the non-citizens who worked in construction (especially housing) -- which it admitted, officially, a while ago -- it also has not counted the non-citizen jobs lost. So the number of construction jobs lost since the 9/06 housing peak EXCEEDS 528,000 . . . perhaps by many tens of thousands (if not 100,000-plus).
SECOND: We're about to have a commercial construction collapse (maybe) at the same time that residential is doing a great imitation of an "L" recovery (i.e., No Bounce Here). So we're going to lose more jobs in construction through the end of 2009 . . . and perhaps not recovering in 2010 or 2011, even.
21 Jul, 2008
PHEV Hubbub Begins
Recent news from the U.S. DoE:
From the 6/18 EERE Network News (a DOE publication) -- "DoE to Award $30M for PHEV Demonstrations."
EleBlog take: And so it begins.
Incidentally, the EERE Network News is worth getting delivered -- to your e-mail in-box, FREE, courtesy of the U.S. government (and my tax dollars, if not also yours). See the Network News Archives -- or get it . . . subscribe.
21 Jul, 2008
Construction Data -- Roundup
Reed Construction Data -- first-half construction starts down 17.5% vs. Jan-June 2007 . . . which isn't all that different from the MHC number above, is it? But RCD says non-residential building is down 5.0%.
American Institute of Architects -- the AIA's economist, Kermit Baker, put together a consensus outlook for 2008 (full year) and the forecasts for 2009 . . . non-residential only. The consensus, AIA/Kermit says, is down 1.2% this year, down 6.7% next year. THAT'S NOT A TYPO. You definitely should click here and go to the article, it shows the consensus numbers -- AND, if you mouse over the various sources of the forecasts, you get the forecasts from various construction economic services.
SUMMARY: Things are already bad. They are either already bad enough on the nonresidential from (if you believe RCD) or en route to worsening on that score (if you take the MHC and AIA consensus numbers and put them together).
EleBlog take: We haven't seen the worst of it yet.
21 Jul, 2008
Home Medical Device
The touch-screen Intel Health Guide device collects vital signs and information, sends the data to doctors and acts as a videoconferencing and e-mail link. The system will go on sale in the fourth quarter of this year.
The computer is the first Intel-branded product from Chief Executive Paul Otellini's 3-year-old initiative to open the healthcare market to the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company's silicon chips. The machine is aimed at winning sales to hospitals, doctors, insurance companies and governments.
21 Jul, 2008
Copper Bubble?
Yet so far this year China's refined copper imports and semi-finished products are down almost 13% against 1H 2007.
Sure there are some supply side worries over Chilean production and possible strikes in Peru, and exchange stocks remain low by historic standards. But western world demand is flat. Yet prices nudge record levels.
This has the making of a speculative investment bubble. If Chinese demand does not pick up after the Olympic Games are over, it will be increasingly difficult to justify this elevated price. LME 3-month shortterm:$7,800/t-$8,400/t.
Note: That 7/2/08 record price is OVER $4.00/pound.
EleBlog take: I don't think copper is in a bubble. I think the Chinese are NOT particularly efficient (as we have become) at using this metal; they're not efficient at using things like electricity, coal, and whatever else you care to think about.
Of course, the Chinese won't FOREVER be inefficient at make use of copper. But their burgeoning need and inefficient use of the stuff probably won't go away tomorrow. Verdict from here, then: Too many people are using the word Bubble, and they should stop it. That includes the folks at Fortis/VM Group.
21 Jul, 2008
Contractor On Green
Here's NECA's release on the appearance. Look to the bottom for a link to ALL the testimony and a YouTube video of what went on.
13 Jul, 2008
Green Buildings - Propaganda
Katz: It's already uneconomical to build the conventional way. Energy prices are soaring, and green buildings save 30 to 50 percent on energy, which can really reduce operating costs and energy bills. And, while many think that green building costs more, the upfront costs for a high-performance office building average only 1 to 2 percent of the overall budget. The average return on investment is 20 percent over the building's lifetime. Add in the health and productivity benefits for the building's occupants, and the benefits for the environment, and it's clear that green building makes both economic and environmental sense.
13 Jul, 2008
Rosendin's New OR Scheduler
When Rich Edwards was hired last year as the first project scheduler for Rosendin Electric’s Portland operation, he knew he’d face some resistance from his new colleagues.
General contractor Hoffman Construction Co. had just hired Rosendin to design and install the electrical systems at Genentech’s new $400 million, 150,000-square-foot pharmaceutical plant in Hillsboro, and the project was on the fast track. Construction needed to be complete in a two-year timeframe so the U.S. Food and Drug Administration could certify the facility to start manufacturing by 2010.
The last thing the company’s electricians wanted was some new guy telling them what to do.
“A scheduler is like a personal trainer; they make people do what they have to do, when they don’t want to,” said Edwards, an electrician and former Portland Community College instructor. “People don’t want to plan; they just want to go to work.”
Obviously, things went well from there. It's worth your time to read the rest of it!13 Jul, 2008
Light Bill Going UP
There are three perspectives on this:
b. Electric power is pretty close to a "must have" for 100% of our 300+ million residents. How are the poor going to afford lighting, heating, air conditioning, etc., as the electric bill goes up and up and up?
c. Reasonably, looking forward, what we "should" see is EVER-HIGHER prices. We should implement more nuclear power plants! But these have already become much more expensive to build (I believe the estimated cost has doubled since 2000). And since my belief is that we should "do nuke right" in the future -- including proper, permanent, safe-forever disposal -- the cost of nuke-plant-generated electricity should be Much, Much Higher in the future.
Sounds bad? Well, it's the way it's gotta be. Perhaps thing might have been different had we thrown billions into research on energy storage (batteries), solar photovoltaics, subsidies for solar thermal installations, wind power construction (etc., etc., and etc).
But we didn't. And now we're in the soup.
13 Jul, 2008
Wind Map
(More)
13 Jul, 2008
Immodest Plug (on GREEN)
On July 2, TEDMAG.com posted a column by yours truly that summed up the panel (very briefly, I hope accurately -- but not doing justice to all that was said and heard).
13 Jul, 2008
Housing Comment
The inventory of new homes that have been completed and are available for sale is up 35 percent. In June 2006, there were 135,000 such homes. This May, the latest figure available, there were 182,000 such homes.
And the median age of those completed but unsold homes has gone up 136 percent over that period, from 3.6 months to 8.5 months. That later figure is the highest since the government started keeping that statistic. Some of those homes are in subdivisions where foreclosures are already climbing, and may be hard to unload at any price.
The actual number of completed but unsold new homes peaked in January at 199,000 homes, and is now down 9 percent. Unfortunately, sales of such homes are slower than ever, relative to the inventory. May was the first month ever that sales of completed new homes totalled less than 10 percent of the number of such homes that had been available for sale at the beginning of the month.
Builders have largely stopped building, so the inventory must eventually fall. But what is noteworthy is how slowly that process is proceeding
EleBlog: If you read the mainstream media, and listen to blahblahblah from so-called experts, you might hear that we're at a bottom, near a bottom, things are gonna get better in 2009, etc. It's worth re-reading this portion of Norris's post -- and the sentence I bolded -- and let it sink in. While these experts have been opining on the bottom, we just (in May) set a record for incredibly low volatility on the home-buying front.
Is THAT the bottom? Maybe. But a chart of the "recovery" might (as some analysts have come to say) look like a Bathtub . . . which means, folks, we might end up spending a long, long, LONG time on the bottom.
