This will become more (or less) interesting once there are more details. Are the straw buyers stuck with mortgages they can’t pay? Were they willing accomplices or coerced? Who knows.

I should have started this post with a quick summary of what the fraud actually is, but I’m tired right now.

In the same article I mentioned there, Rossi suggests that “since energy rates are provincially regulated, consumers don’t have to worry that privatizing the utility will lead to a rate increase.”

I think the customer service aspect should be part of the conversation. Rogers is terrible (I know), Bell is terrible (I know), Telus is terrible (I’ve heard), everybody’s terrible, but at least you can say “Fuck it, I’m going to your competitor.” Yes, it’s an oligopoly and still blows, but it’s something. If someone’s going to be given a monopoly on something, it shouldn’t just be their pricing that’s regulated, but their customer service. Require certain measurable goals to be met.

Also, with revenues of $2.5 billion, and profits of $42.8 million, Toronto Hydro would be a very large private company. Presumably even bigger if the sale goes over well with the public and similar proposals start spreading in municipalities around the GTA, then leading to mergers (if allowed). The point being, this would go from being part of the government, to a very large private company with a very significant incentive to start putting its resources towards political gain, to adjust the rules governing it.

Front-runner George Smitherman, former deputy premier to Dalton McGuinty, and a former Ontario energy and infrastructure minister, told the audience that the city must hold on to ownership of Toronto Hydro. It’s about the way they are treated as customers, he told them.

“They’ve seen what happens when we lose control of public assets like we did with Highway 407,” he elaborated in a brief interview after the debate.

I regularly deal with both Enbridge and Toronto Hydro. Toronto Hydro is usually (not always) surprisingly good to deal with. Surprising compared to Enbridge, which always manages to disappoint no matter how low my expectations get. I’ve had the exact same issue with both companies (wrong meters being applied to wrong people) be resolved in two different ways:

1. “Ok, we’ll make those adjustments and send over revised billing” (which was then sent over).

2. “Ok, we’ll have to launch an investigation, which typically takes about six months” (which then took slightly less than six months for a letter to arrive with a conclusion, with no supporting documentation, and no return of several voicemails requesting any backup/documentation for the result.”

You can guess which was which.

I think one of the key positive things the tax has accomplished is making it socially acceptable to bring your own bags to the grocery store. The canvas bags now used by most people (and sold by most grocery stores) are far superior to plastic bags. I can carry in two bags what previously would have needed eight. And I don’t have to worry that one of those bags will have its bottom fall out the first time I decide to rush across a busy intersection.

Without making it an everybody thing, it’s awkward to say “Oh, don’t worry, I carry my own bags.” Because people who carry their bags are, you know, bag people.

I actually do own something to make opening packages easier, and I haven’t bled since buying it.

I’m guessing this is less a case of a Walmart board meeting with the agenda “How can we help the environment?” and more the case of a Walmart board meeting with the agenda “What are we already trying to do that happens to help the environment?”

Walmart ships bazillions of cubic whatevers of goods around. If they can cut down on the size of the packaging, they can ship more product in less space.

I’m not saying it’s not good, I’m just saying let’s not kid ourselves about their motivations.

Felix says

Schroeder explains that being universally liked is a major source of Buffett’s wealth: it makes it a lot easier for him to acquire any given business. Absent Buffett, it’s going be much harder for Berkshire to acquire the privately-held companies that it specializes in buying. And more generally, it’s going to be a practical impossibility for Berkshire to be run by someone as teflon-coated as Buffett. Could anybody else fire 3,000 Salvadorean textile workers and receive essentially no bad press at all?

The thing is, Buffett doesn’t fire people. The reason he’s so well-liked is he buys companies, but he doesn’t run them. I highly doubt the order came down from him to fire anybody. Buffett isn’t universally liked just because, as Schroeder says, “Buffett has gone to a lot of trouble to be universally liked.” He’s liked because when he takes over a company he lets that company keep running. He doesn’t say “fire 3000 people.” He says “run things the way you’ve been running things.” And sometimes running a business means letting people go.

I’d agree that to a greater than usual degree the success of a giant conglomerate rests on a single person, and there may be problems with their seemingly basic corporate model once Buffett and Munger are gone. But Buffett’s been saying for years that their size alone would make it very difficult to provide significant returns. It’s that kind of honesty that makes him so liked.

A single day of stock trading doesn’t represent much more than the random noise of morons. Yes, health insurance stocks generally went up relative to the general market much more than you would otherwise expect. Yes, that probably reflects some generally held belief about the impact of legislation on these companies’ bottom lines. First, “generally held” and “correct” are two very different things. Second, what’s good for private insurers isn’t necessarily bad for those being insured.

Nate Silver (via Yglesias) determines, “This would mean that the total value added from passage of the bill is $16.04 billion.” That’s market cap increases of publicly traded and privately held private insurance companies.

I was thinking this isn’t spelled out properly, but it is in Silver’s original post. In it, he notes that the numbers probably imply that “the increase in share prices today reflects an expectation of higher volumes — but probably not higher profit margins, which are likely to remain fairly low in the industry.”

And the main thing to note is that it’s all about discounted cashflows. Silver does: “The bottom line is that, by the stock market’s estimation, the private health care industry appears as though it will benefit if the Senate enacts its plan. But the benefit — about $16 billion in discounted cashflows — is small as compared to the total magnitude of the program, and likely reflects an increase in the size of their customer base rather than any anticipation of higher profit margins.”

But I think the $16 billion comparison to the $447 billion subsidy (over a ten year timeframe?) isn’t quite the correct comparison. $16 billion should be compared to the present value of the subsidies over forever, appropriately discounted.

But there’s this:

In 2005, provincial securities regulators opened the exempt market to smaller players as long as the securities had earned approval from a debt-rating agency. After that decision, the market for those types of securities ballooned from $10 billion to over $30 billion as poorly informed investors bought into the market.

If you give the prisoners knives, the prisoners aren’t the only ones culpable in the bloodshed.