Based on this order, I think it’s fair to surmise that U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks is fed up with several lawyers.
An order that most lawyers would not want to receive
Reply
Daily Archives: August 11, 2004
Young golfers don’t get it
Tour golf professional Chris DiMarco is interviewed in this month’s Golf Digest. Asked to opine on the observation that younger Tour players don’t seem to be having much fun while playing the Tour, DiMarco agrees and refers to a comment that fellow Tour professional Scott Hoch observed about fellow Tour pro Ty Tryon, who got his Tour card at the age of 17:
“Ty’s not going to be able to experience some of the best nights that he can’t remember.”
This is unfortunate
With all the bad television shows that we must endure, I am saddened to learn this.
No. 17 at Whistling Straits
The final major golf tournament of the season — the PGA — is being played this week at Whistling Straits Golf Club on the windy shores of Lake Michigan in Kohler, Wisconsin. Whistling Straits is a relatively new golf course that has a reputation of being a monster. However, it has never hosted a major golf tournament and thus, is not that well known to the general golfing public.
I was taking a look at some pictures and video of the golf course last night and came across this picture of the incredible 223 yard 17th hole. Check out video flyover that reflects that the hole is even tougher than the picture suggests. I think I would use my “block right” swing on this one.
Where have all the fiscal conservatives gone?
Before you dismiss this season’s Presidential race as an easy one between a profligate Democrat and a fiscally-restrained Republican, review this W. James Antle III piece from the The Foundation for Economic Education:
. . .over the past few years the Republicans have enjoyed unified control over both houses of Congress and the White House. Instead of a renaissance of spending restraint and economic freedom, government has grown at a prodigious clip.
According to the Cato Institute, total federal outlays are scheduled to rise by 29 percent between 2001 and 2005 while discretionary nondefense spending in particular will climb 36 percent over this same period. During President Bush’s first term, we have seen three of the five largest annual increases in real discretionary spending of the past 40 years.
This is not to suggest that Mr. Kerry would enact policies to reduce this trend if he is elected President. However, it is important to remember when you hear the inevitable drumbeat from the Republicans that Mr. Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress are acting in a fiscally responsible manner.
Hat tip to the good folks at Southern Appeal for the link to this article.
Former El Paso traders targets of criminal probe
About a dozen former El Paso Corp. traders and their supervisors have been notified they are targets of a grand jury investigation into natural gas price manipulation. The former employees received target letters from the United States Attorney’s office in Houston office advising them that they may face charges of commodity price manipulation, conspiracy and wire fraud.
The charges referred to in the target letters are virtually the same as those previously filed against Todd Geiger, a former El Paso trader who was accused of providing false information to Inside FERC’s Gas Market Report. In December, 2003, Mr. Geiger pleaded guilty to one count or wire fraud and of reporting inaccurate information under the Commodity Exchange Act.
The government’s investigation relates to natural gas price indexes, which various publications produced through surveys of energy traders and others. The indexes offer pricing snapshots for hubs across the country that buyers and sellers of natural gas use to help set prices in contracts. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has filed civil charges against several companies over the past couple of years in which the CFTC claims that traders knowingly provided false data to publications with the intention of influencing natural gas prices. The CFTC has collected about $250 million in penalties from companies, including $30 million from the Royal Dutch/Shell trading subsidiary, Coral Energy Resources, and $20 million previously from El Paso.
The Market for Insuring Terrorism
The Wall Street Journal’s ($) Holman Jenkins’ Business World column today reviews the market for insuring against terrorist attacks, and what Mr. Jenkins finds is quite revealing:
The insurance industry’s job is to quantify risk, and more and more evidence suggests that, in fact, we’ve pretty thoroughly smothered al Qaeda’s ability to bring laborious, slow-moving plots on the scale of Sept. 11 to fruition. If so, actuaries will only be catching up with the insurance market, where terrorism coverage has been a hard sell, even with a dollop of taxpayer subsidy, because most property owners judge the risk to be negligible. But don’t expect industry lobbyists to highlight this fact. Why give up a federal subsidy?
Both Republicans and Democrats on the influential House Financial Services Committee have already written to the White House urging renewal, though the law, known as the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, doesn’t expire for 15 months. John Snow at Treasury isn’t likely to stand in the way. In fact, aside from the Consumer Federation of America (motto: “If insurance companies are for it, we’re against it”), nobody has an obvious interest in lobbying on the other side — unless, by some miracle, a dissenter should happen to emerge from the insurance industry itself.
Our nominee for this role: Warren Buffett.
Now, why would Mr. Buffett be an advocate for removing the federal subsidy on terrorism insurance? Read on:
The Berkshire Hathaway chief’s most famous pronouncement concerned the inevitability of nuclear terrorism someday. Yet his firm actually has been one of the few large reinsurers willing to make big bets on target buildings like the Sears Tower. We suspect Mr. Buffett will end up laughing all the way to the bank on a careful judgment that the megaterrorist threat to the insurance industry’s capital base is exaggerated.
Mr. Jenkins then points out that even the largest potential targets of terror attacks are held by companies that can absorb the risk of such an attack:
As former Treasury official and Wharton economist Kent Smetters points out in an excellent paper, many megatargets are owned by publicly traded companies, and it’s not clear that insurance has much value for them: Their shareholders are already well diversified. Even the loss of a World Trade Center, at $40 billion, is hardly sneeze-worthy compared to the $100 billion fluctuations that such shareholders put up with in the equity markets every ho-hum day.
What about a nondiversified property owner with all his eggs in one target? That was the case with the Port Authority, owner of the World Trade Center. But even here “cat” bonds and other innovative instruments create ways to share the risk with willing investors in the global capital markets.
Read the whole piece. Another gem by one of the WSJ’s best thinkers.