Steven Thorpe

“This makes sense. The underwriters of the IPO, led by Goldman Sachs, could only support the shares for so long before market forces took over. And the market, in turn, has shown intense skepticism for cleantech stocks over the past five years.

It’s a pattern most visible with IPOs of solar companies. In 2004 and 2005, there was a golden age of growth for solar companies, with big venture capital investments. In 2006, there was a strong wave of such IPOs, and their stock prices fizzled within six months. This year, again, solar company Solyndra had to pull its IPO. The problem then, as now, was always the same: high costs and low profits. Clean technology is expensive, and it doesn’t have the benefit of the extensive government subsidies that go to fossil fuels like oil.”

A short but great article on Forbes.com regarding IPOs of cleantech companies – http://wallstreet.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2010/07/07/tesla-motors-not-so-different-after-all/?source=yahoo_quote

• Mr. Prechter is convinced that we have entered a market decline of staggering proportions — perhaps the biggest of the last 300 years.
• “I’m saying: ‘Winter is coming. Buy a coat,’ ” he said. “Other people are advising people to stay naked. If I’m wrong, you’re not hurt. If they’re wrong, you’re dead. It’s pretty benign advice to opt for safety for a while.”
• His advice: individual investors should move completely out of the market and hold cash and cash equivalents, like Treasury bills, for years to come. (For traders with a fair amount of skill and willingness to embrace risk, he suggests other alternatives, like shorting the market or making bets on volatility.) But ultimately, “the decline will lead to one of the best investment opportunities ever,” he said.
• For a rough parallel, he said, go all the way back to England and the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, a crash that deterred people “from buying stocks for 100 years,” he said. This time, he said, “If I’m right, it will be such a shock that people will be telling their grandkids many years from now, ‘Don’t touch stocks.’ ”
• He has far less day-to-day influence now, after years spent developing a theory he calls “socionomics,” which holds “social moods” as the cause not only of market cycles but also of economic and political events. A grand cycle is ending, he says, and the time for reckoning is near.
• In 2002, he published “Conquer the Crash,” which predicted misery ahead. Even so, he said in 2008 that the market would soon rally sharply — then said late last year that stocks were about to fall and that the great decline would resume.

Read the whole article – http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/your-money/04stra.html?ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=all

Finally, there is the “garage band hedge fund” started by Jamie Mai and Charlie Ledley in 2003 with a Schwab account containing $110,000 and housed in a shed in the back of a friend’s house in Berkeley, Calif. Mr. Ledley believed, Mr. Lewis writes, “that the best way to make money on Wall Street was to seek out whatever it was that Wall Street believed was least likely to happen, and bet on its happening.” In this case, his contrarian instincts told him, in Mr. Lewis’s words, that “the markets were predisposed to underestimating the likelihood of dramatic change.”

Four and a half years later the American economy was in trouble, and, Mr. Lewis says, the fund run by Mr. Ledley, Mr. Mai and their partner, Ben Hockett, would net more than $80 million.

Continue reading – http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/books/15book.html?src=me

A few key sentences from this article -

• Governments and utilities worldwide are likely to spend $200 billion on so-called smart grid initiatives by 2015, a development that promises greater energy efficiency on a global scale, but that is only a small step towards what could be done to use energy more efficiently.
• Right now, only a fifth of the energy we actually burn or otherwise generate for electricity is actually used.
• A smarter grid is the basic building block for such initiatives as electric and hybrid cars, and utility executives like Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, consider increasing efficiency a source of energy in and of itself.
• Bringing a full smart grid online in the United States alone is a $1 to $2 trillion proposition over the next couple of decades, according to research by Jackson Associates, and it will save $48 billion for the 200 largest U.S. utilities.
• Take, for instance, the Bush tax cuts of the early 2000s. That legislation cost $2.48 trillion from 2001-2010—enough to have already modernized our electric grid by now, if we’d chosen to invest it that way.
• Closer to our own time, the government will spend more money bailing out banks, AIG, General Motors and Chrysler than the entire world will spend on smart grid technology that could lay the groundwork for future growth and help mitigate the effects of global warming.

Read the full article here – http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/daily-brief/2009/12/29/smart-grid-spending-on-the-rise-but-not-enough/

NEW YORK (AFP) – Wall Street prepares to close out 2009 on an upbeat note with the market holding hefty gains from a stunning comeback following a disastrous start to the year.

The stock market enters the final week of trading at its highs for the year on the heels of a stunning nine-month rally that lifted the main indexes from their lowest levels in over a decade.

The final four trading days of the year in the upcoming holiday-shortened week are expected to see light activity and a favorable mood, with the market enjoying a so-called Santa Claus rally.

In the holiday week ending Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 1.85 percent to 10,520.10, its best level in nearly 15 months.

The tech-rich Nasdaq composite meanwhile rallied 3.35 percent to 2285.69 and the broad Standard & Poor’s 500 index advanced 2.18 percent to 1,126.48.

Fred Dickson, market strategist at DA Davidson & Co., said the mood on Wall Street should remain positive through the coming week.

“Trading activity should pick up next week as investors make last minute portfolio changes like tax-loss sales and portfolio rebalancing,” he said.

“We still expect to see the minor Santa Claus rally continue through New Year’s Eve.”

Continue reading – http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091225/bs_afp/stocksusweekly_20091225174912

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US consumer spending rose as Americans enjoyed their biggest income gain in six months in November, government data showed Wednesday in a sign the economy is gaining steam following recession.

The Commerce Department said personal consumption expenditures climbed 0.5 percent in the penultimate month of 2009 fueled by spending on goods as retailers slashed prices to woo shoppers amid the year-end shopping season.

The spending jump was slightly lower than the revised 0.6 percent rise in October and the 0.7 percent anticipated by most economists.

The government data also showed personal income grew 0.4 percent in November, the fastest growth since May, following upwardly revised growth of 0.3 percent the prior two months.

Wage income of Americans climbed 0.3 percent, the largest growth since April.

Continue reading – http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091223/bs_afp/useconomyconsumerincomespending_20091223161228

Washington (CNN) — Facing year-end holidays and running out of time to discuss health care reform, the Senate voted early Friday to end debate on funding for the Department of Defense.

The motion passed 63 to 33, gaining the necessary 60-vote majority to avoid a GOP filibuster. It also will set up a final vote on the $636 billion package on Saturday.

The House of Representatives passed the spending bill 395 to 34 on Wednesday. The measure includes money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but does not include the additional costs expected for the 30,000 U.S. troops the Obama administration announced it will send to Afghanistan next year. A separate request for those troops is expected to come up for a vote next spring.

The defense bill is the last spending measure of the year for both chambers of Congress.

Continue reading – http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/12/18/senate.defense/

LONDON (Reuters Life!) – After more than three centuries, the humble check is set to become a historic relic after British banks voted to phase it out in favor of more modern payment methods.

The board of the UK Payments Council, the body for setting payment strategy in Britain, agreed on Wednesday to set a target date of October 31, 2018 for winding up the check clearing system. The board is largely made up of Britain’s leading banks.

“There are many more efficient ways of making payments than by paper in the 21st century, and the time is ripe for the economy as a whole to reap the benefits of its replacement,” Paul Smee, the council chief executive, said in a statement.

The use of checks has fallen drastically in the past 10 years as more consumers transfer money electronically, by direct debit or with debit and credit cards. Last year, around 3.8 million checks were written every day in Britain, compared to a peak of 10.9 million in 1990, the council said.

It costs about one pound to process every check.

Continue reading – http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091216/lf_nm_life/us_britain_cheques

Billed as a city within a city, the $8.5 billion CityCenter opens on Wednesday in Las Vegas. CityCenter is a complex containing a resort and casino, hotels, condos and a shopping mall — all designed by some of the most well-known names in architecture: Rafael Vinoly, Daniel Libeskind, Norman Foster, Helmut Jahn and Cesar Pelli.

It’s one of the largest projects to date built to LEED standards for sustainable construction. And it features public art by artists such as Maya Lin, Frank Stella and Henry Moore. CityCenter is said to be the most expensive privately funded project in U.S. history.

Its 67-acre footprint is unmatched in size in Las Vegas. And with 19 million square feet, it has twice the space — though not the height — of the two World Trade Center towers.

Continue reading – http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121480584