Eideard

Count it if you don’t believe me!
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The Federal Reserve said on Tuesday that it contributed $76.9 billion in profits to the Treasury Department last year, slightly less than its record 2010 transfer but much more than in any other previous year.

The Fed is required by law to turn over its profits to the Treasury each year, a highly lucrative byproduct of the central bank’s continuing campaign to stimulate economic growth.

Almost 97 percent of the Fed’s income was generated by interest payments on its investment portfolio, including $2.5 trillion in Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities, which it has amassed in an effort to decrease borrowing costs for businesses and consumers by reducing long-term interest rates…

But Fed officials note that this cycle — payments flowing from Treasury to the Fed and then back to the Treasury — still saves money for taxpayers because those interest payments otherwise would be made to other investors.

“It’s interest that the Treasury didn’t have to pay to the Chinese,” the Fed’s chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, half-jokingly told Congress last year.

The scale of the transfers grew rapidly after the financial crisis.

RTFA. Always gives me a chuckle to see nutballs from the Kool Aid Party to preachers of the Gold Bar religion like Ron Paul forced to confront a Fed which functions smoothly – even with double the tasks, say, of any European Central Bank.

Add to that the profits taken from the Evil Socialist Stimulus Plan which – yes, once again – gave Keynes another victory over Hayek and genetically-restricted Bears.

Volkswagen’s electric city car, the Nils concept car, is still my favorite. Click on the photo for many more – costing much, much more. If any of these ever made it to production.

We had a post about the economics and politics of the Paris Show a little earlier, today. Here’s a peek at the tech.

Massachusetts’ technology sector is fueling strong growth, helping the state’s economy expand more than twice as fast as the nation’s in the first three months of this year, the University of Massachusetts reported yesterday.

Global demand for technology products and increased business spending on software and equipment have provided a strong boost in Massachusetts, which has a high concentration of companies that sell high-tech equipment, components, and services, particularly to other businesses…

“It’s the reason we have a stronger economy than the country as a whole,’’ lan Clayton-Matthews said. “We export a lot of science and technology-based goods and services to other countries around the world, especially developing countries like China and India.’’

The global tech boom helped the Massachusetts economy grow at a 4.2 percent annual rate, accelerating from 3.3 percent in the last quarter of 2010, UMass said. The US economy expanded at a 1.8 percent rate in the first quarter, after growing at a 3.1 percent rate the previous period, the Commerce Department reported yesterday.

In March, the state’s 8 percent unemployment rate, though historically high, remained well below the national rate of 8.8 percent.

Reflecting technology’s strength, some Massachusetts companies are fiercely competing for skilled workers, offering cash bounties to find them…

The same is happening on an even larger scale in Silicon Valley. Growth and expansion there requires another 150,000 staff and local sources can’t provide for the situation.

I note this – as I have been for years – that college-level education in one or another arena of technical prowess is what should be recommended to those with any apparent talent, a bent for geek adventure and economics. Ain’t nothing wrong with being overqualified until the right job happens along.

Man of the Match, Ben Foster

More nutball news from California

This is supposedly based on revised calculations. I guess if he doesn’t show up, we know that somebody forgot to carry a one.

Remembrance Day at the Olympic Cauldron in Vancouver
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

The government of Canada has confirmed that its military would end its combat mission in Afghanistan at the end of 2011.

The United States had asked Canada to continue the military effort in Afghanistan with other members of NATO, but Parliament had already set the timetable for withdrawing combat troops. Some soldiers will remain in the country after next year, training Afghan security forces…

Public opinion polls indicate little support among Canadians for continued fighting in Afghanistan.

Under the new plan, the current deployment of about 2,700 troops will be cut by about two-thirds by the end of next year. The 950 remaining soldiers will be withdrawn from Kandahar and train Afghan troops and police officers until 2014 on military bases near Kabul and possibly elsewhere. The remaining troops will also support Canadian aid and reconstruction efforts.

“This will not be a combat mission,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper told the House of Commons. “It will occur in classrooms, behind the wire and in bases…”

The Obama administration praised Canada for maintaining at least some military presence in Afghanistan until that date…

Canadians should be proud of both the hardiness of their troops – and the good sense of the electorate to make it clear to the government they want those troops home.

Print your own 2011 Chandra calendar with spectacular images from the past year. Featured objects include supernova remnants, galaxies in various shapes & sizes and star clusters in our very own Milky Way. Available as a 12-page full color PDF in 17×11″ sizes. Individual months may also be downloaded.

With all of the reveals and partnership announcements here at the New York Auto Show the most important thing we’ve heard is a number: $25,280. That’s the price that Nissan said yesterday it will sell the Leaf for when it goes on sale later this year (full production starts in 2011), and it’s much lower than rumors we’ve heard from competitors in the plug-in vehicle space. We sat down with Mark Perry, Nissan’s director of product planning, to talk about this price – how it came to be, what the reaction has been, etc. – because we’re pretty sure readers would like to know more details about Nissan’s strategy.

Perry was all smiles when he talked about how Nissan got to the $32,780 price – of course, the headline is that this turns into $25,280 after $7,500 worth of federal tax credits – and we understand why. He told us that this price is the result, in part, of 17 years of work Nissan has done on lithium-ion batteries. By doing everything in-house for so many years, Nissan doesn’t need to charge the customer for battery research like other companies that are freshly bursting into the electric vehicle (EV) market and are just now figuring out how to make EVs that work. Plus, by spreading the research and development over many years, selling the Leaf for just under $33,000 allows the company to make a profit off the car, or at least minimizes early losses.

Of course, the Leaf does not exist in a vacuum, and Perry said that the $33k was most definitely based on market factors. Government incentives played a role in setting the price, Perry said, as did estimating what other companies will price their plug-in vehicles at. Considering we don’t know for sure yet what cars like the Chevrolet Volt or the Ford Focus Electric will be, we can’t say yet how Nissan’s announcement will impact those MSRPs. Still, we assume there was a lot of hand-wringing in offices that didn’t belong to Nissan.

The announcement certainly caught the attention of this household.

If that ever happens, it will be difficult to come with a better solution than the Nissan Leaf.