Can anyone explain to me why the water supply is a public utility and the electric and gas lines are private companies, even though they essentially have a regional monopoly?
That actually differs throughout the country. Some municipalities supply water, gas and electricity. They usually buy the electricity through some kind of group buying with other cities. A few generate power or own part of a power plant. For example, the City of Dalton owns 3% of a nuclear plant.
There wasn't really any planning involved. The system jist growed. In Georgia, for example, a company called Georgia Electric Light Co. started a street lighting and streetcar service and built a dam to supply power to it. It then bought or merged with many other small companies to become Georgia Power. At one time, Georgia Power supplied natural gas, electricity and streetcar services to Atlanta, but SEC and federal court rulings forced them to sell the gas and streetcar businesses, mostly for antitrust reasons. The gas service was then supplied by a Atlanta Gas Light, but the city bought the streetcar system.
I suspect that cities supply water because cities have supplied water thousands of years. There are places where companies have bought the water system and operate it for the city.
Er, so when you WERE flirting, you'd just, uh, take your shirts off? That's probably clear enough....
hah! Yeah. The reverse problem happens too often as well.
Still sending the ~ma for your niece, Scrappy.
So much ~ma for your niece, Scrappy.
I... don't know. Developing an investment strategy based on the TV series Flip This House sounds kinda dumb to me, especially if you develop the strategy after the show's been on a couple of years.
You must have made a killing shorting the "reality tv-based strategies" fund.
A lot of the subprime mess comes from mortagage brokers offering credit to people of very poor risk - in many cases they didn't even verify the applicant's employment. The mortagage broker would then get its commission (regardless of whether the loan went bad or not) and pass all the risk to the bank. The bank would then pass the risk on by packaging the loan with other iffy loans.
From this line of questioning and the guy's answer:
Q: This is your loan file. What do Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald do for a living?
A: I don't know. Open it up and find it.
etc...
I assumed that this was one of those mortgages with no verification of the employment of Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald. If I'm right, then I think I could make the case that the mortgage broker is being mendacious in offering the loan to Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald without verifying their income. Certainly someone involved in the packaging of subprime loans was.
Flight of the Conchords fans (Matilda!) need to get the new issue of Bust.
[link]
You must have made a killing shorting the "reality tv-based strategies" fund.
Yes! When Survivor went on the air for the first time, I sold rats and snakes wholesale and made my first billion.
OK - but the subprime crisis is not just about subprime. It is simply that the poorest get hit by this stuff first. In general assets were overvalued. A lot of people who are not poor, and who got good mortgages still owe more on their house then their house is worth. In the last month we have numbers for 40% of default notices went to be people either in the prime market, or in the various markets between prime and subprime. And lots of assets besides mortages are overvalued and overleveraged
