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Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Claman On Call: Has Tesla's stock run out of fuel?

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Claman On Call

Daily Market Update with Liz Claman

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Has Tesla’s stock run out of fuel?

Claman on Call: FBN's Liz Claman with an after-hours web-exclusive on the markets, J.C. Penney, Tesla, Apple's future in China.

On Our Radar: News We're Following

Fluid regulation

On Thursday, 7,500 gallons of a toxic chemical, 4-methylcyclohexane methanol (MCHM), spilled from the tank where it was waiting to be used to clean coal into the Elk River in West Virginia.

The spill has highlighted the odd, overlapping, and somehow porous regulation of industrial chemicals, the infrastructure that holds them, and the companies that sell them. MCHM is one of the more than 60,000 chemicals exempt from the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), on the grounds that they were in in use when the law was passed in 1976. As a result, its safety and safe use isn’t regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The West Virginia Gazette’s Ken Ward reports that the plant where the chemical was being held wasn’t regularly inspected by federal or state authorities. The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection last inspected the plant in 1991, and OSHA has never inspected the site. The last time West Virginia did a water quality test at the location was 2002, and it didn’t mention MCHM. Adding to the sense that this disaster is unfolding in a parallel regulatory universe, the only permit that Freedom Industries, the owner of the site, applied for was for stormwater discharge.

Freedom Industries itself has an impossible-to-invent backstory: it is the little more than two-week old product of a merger, and when its predecessor company was formed two years ago, one of the two founders was a two-time felon.

Jedediah Purdy calls the disaster a “tableau of abdication: years of privatization and non-regulation followed by panic.” Not only does MCHM fall beyond various industry regulators’ responsibilities, state health authorities don’t quite know what to make of it. West Virginia health authorities set acceptable exposure levels to MCMH for humans by extrapolating from a single, non-peer reviewed study of lethal exposure in rats. The result, Purdy writes, “tells us nothing about disease risks, chronic ailments, and bioaccumulation”.

A senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund dives deep into the science behind the state’s “safe” MCMH level of one-part-per-million, and comes away concerned:

We have no way of knowing whether or not it is safe. The data needed to make that assessment simply do not exist for this chemical. And that distressing reality is in no small part due to the failings of our nation’s chemical safety law..

Matt Stroud surveys the damage done -- the West Virginia Gazette has a live map showing where the water has been declared safe to drink -- and concludes “the real problem is that this could've been much worse than it was”. Stroud quotes Juliana Serafin, an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Charleston, who studies chemical disasters:

There have been many close calls,” she said. “But usually we're worried about the air. With this water crisis, this is one of the first times we've worried about our water. And we should be concerned. Because it turns out that 300,000 people get their drinking water from the same place.”

Or, as the World Economic Forum put it last year, water supply crises are a “societal risk”. -- Ben Walsh

On to today’s links:

Innovation
Whisper, the app that turns your secret angst into dumb meme photos - Kevin Roose

Bout That Life
Welcome to Wall Street, here's your "massively inefficient workflow" - The Epicurean Dealmaker

Must Read
A spot-on screed on the failures of the elites - Martin Wolf

Ugh
Being poor causes people to go hungry, which causes them to get sick - Matt O’Brien
How startups will be hurt by the end of net neutrality - Fred Wilson

Charts
Imagining America's labor market recovery as a football field - Macroblog

Revolving Door
Switzerland's new top financial regulator was formerly head of a UBS unit tied to Libor manipulation - FT

Black Market
Making cocaine in the microwave: Inside Colombia's decentralizing drug economy - Vocativ

Remuneration
Congress' terrible record on the minimum wage for tipped employees - Fortune

Beta
Hedge funds are learning to be better indexers - Sam Ro

Billionaire Whimsy
"No self-respecting billionaire would ever buy a condo that shared a floor with someone else" - Curbed

Follow Counterparties on Twitter. And, of course, there are many more links at Counterparties.

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Business Today: S&P 500 closes at record on bank earnings, data

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01/15/2014

Reuters Election 2012 Daily round-up of the day's top news from the campaign trail, the White House and all the politics in between

S&P 500 closes at record on bank earnings, data

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks rose on Wednesday, with the S&P 500 climbing to an all-time closing high after strong earnings from Bank of America and data signaled that the economy was improving.

Deutsche, Citi feel the heat of widening FX investigation

LONDON (Reuters) - Global investigations into alleged currency market manipulation intensified on Wednesday as U.S. regulators descended on Citigroup's London offices and Deutsche Bank suspended several traders in New York, sources told Reuters.

Apple to refund at least $32.5 million in disputed kids' app purchases

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Apple Inc will refund consumers at least $32.5 million to settle a longstanding complaint that the technology company billed U.S. consumers for charges incurred by children through mobile apps without their parents' consent.

U.S. economy expanding at a moderate pace: Fed

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. economy continued to grow at a moderate pace from late November through the end of 2013, with some regions of the country expecting a pick-up in growth, the Federal Reserve said on Wednesday.

Bank of America fourth-quarter profit jumps as bank shakes off financial crisis

(Reuters) - Bank of America Corp said on Wednesday quarterly profit surged by nearly $3 billion as revenue increased and mortgage losses plunged, the clearest sign yet the bank was shaking off the impact of the financial crisis.

J.C. Penney to shed 33 stores, cut 2000 jobs as part of turnaround

NEW YORK (Reuters) - J.C. Penney Co Inc said on Wednesday it will close 33 underperforming stores and cut 2,000 jobs as part of its turnaround.

NYSE says it would take over Nasdaq stock quote system

NEW YORK (Reuters) - NYSE Euronext offered on Wednesday to take over the data processor at the center of the massive Nasdaq trading outage last August after Nasdaq OMX Group Inc indicated it would stop running it.

U.S. producer prices advance, but inflation still tame

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. producer prices recorded their largest gain in six months in December as the cost of gasoline rebounded strongly, but there were few signs of any sustained price pressures.

Early holidays point to grim outlook for China's small factories

DONGGUAN/KUNSHAN, China (Reuters) - Scores of factories in China's manufacturing heartlands have closed earlier than usual for the country's biggest annual holiday due to weak orders and rising costs, workers and owners say, suggesting a rocky outlook for a key sector of the economy.

Analysis: BP's U.S. Gulf oil spill settlement challenges may backfire

(Reuters) - A year after agreeing to a multi-billion dollar settlement with victims of the 2010 Gulf oil spill, BP is aggressively challenging terms of the deal in a legal strategy that could backfire with the judge who will rule on the company's potentially hefty federal fines.