Loren C. Steffy's Blog, page 58

Imperial Sugar reports loss as auditor questions company's future

Imperial Sugar finally files its year-end financial report, and the results aren't pretty.

As natural gas prices fall, shale drilling loses some luster

Shale drilling has, in some ways, become a victim of its own success. With natural gas now selling for less than $3 per million British thermal units, shale drillers have been looking for foreign investments and other tactics to keep drilling programs going. But at these prices, the more gas they produce only feeds the [...]

Will more Fed forecasting help the economy?

The Federal Reserve is encouraging all of us to become its back seat driver. The central bank said on Tuesday that it would begin publishing its policymakers' forecasts for interest rates — not just the consensus forecast of the Fed, but the individual predictions that are used to create the consensus. The latest move is [...]

Airlines' latest fee hike exposes flaws of carbon trading

Air fares may be going up again, and this time it's so you can pay for airlines to continue belching carbon across Europe. As of Monday, the European Union began implementing new carbon emission rules for airlines taking off or landing within the 27-nation zone. The trading scheme works much the same way that one [...]

2011: The Year of the Debt

Well, I'm back after taking a little time off at the end of last year. Before we delve into the new year, let's take a moment to reflect on one of the more surprising financial results from 2011. As the Atlantic's Derek Thompson points out, what made last year so unusual from an investment standpoint [...]

Video: Deepwater Horizon survivor Chad Murray discusses the accident

Last weekend, I went to Louisiana to interview Chad Murray, who was the chief electrician aboard the Deepwater Horizon when it exploded on April 20, 2010. Murray had contacted me a few months ago, after reading my book on the disaster. He said he wanted to tell his story in hopes that it would draw [...]

Once-secret Fed lending data now public

Was your favorite bank on the dole during the financial crisis? Now you can find out. Bloomberg News, which fought a legal battle to the Supreme Court to force the Federal Reserve to release details of its emergency lending program has made the raw data available to the public. And just in time for Christmas, [...]

Imperial Sugar embraces `quiet period' myth

In my Wednesday column, I discussed the mounting problems facing Imperial Sugar, which has been the worst-performing Houston-area stock this year. One of the oldest Texas businesses, dating to the days of the Republic, Imperial has battled lagging earnings and persistent production issues at its refineries. In a brief conversation with chief executive John Sheptor, [...]

Stanford bank official's description of CDs undermines SIPC argument

Testimony in a legal dispute between the U.S. and Antiguan liquidators of the Stanford Financial empire seems to bolster investors' arguments that Stanford's certificates of deposit were more securities than traditional bank notes. Stanford's U.S. investors have argued that because of the unusual nature of Stanford's CDs, some of their losses from Stanford's 2009 collapse [...]

Guess who's paying to defend Fannie and Freddie execs

That's right, you are. Just when it seemed as if the government might actually be making progress in holding some high-ranking officials accountable for the mortgage crisis, Matt Stoller rains on our parade. The former policy adviser for Rep. Alan Grayson writes on the Naked Capitalism blog that the Federal Housing Finance Agency has agreed [...]