Secure Flight Rule and the Watch List

Just saw news* that the US Govt Dept of Homeland Security has revealed the size of the "Terrorist Watch List". The list is supposed to be about 2500 names long (the no fly list) and less than 10% on the list are US citizens according to the DHS/TSA**. Read DHS Official Press Release here.

"Airlines will be required under Secure Flight to collect a passenger's full name, date of birth, and gender when making an airline reservation."

Information on "Secure Flight" a program to pre-register so that you are considered a "safe passenger" is also briefly covered in this post.

So the list is finally quantified, ending a lot of speculation and folk tales of the list size being in 100's of thousands to almost a few millions. The main no fly list consists about 250 US Citizens according to the DHS.

While there is a ton of legalese and other information in the Final Secure Flight Document (195 pages), including TSA responses to several comments from different air operators and other authorities etc., the one thing that caught my eye was this:

"The Secure Flight Service Center will be staffed 24-hours a day,
7-days a week to receive telephone calls from covered aircraft operators' staff and assist in the clearance of inhibited passengers"

So there you go, somebody will be working 24/7!

Anyways to wrap this up, I will just mention that I read the first few pages, then I read several pages of comments. Then i got tired, and decided to run keyword searches on how TSA was using the age information that it requires to be provided by airlines 72 hrs ahead of time or as soon as available in case of last minute reservations.

I searched for food, kids, children or child and did not get a single hit in the 195 pg document. I did this because we often see in the news that a young child has a name match with somebody on the TSA watch list and ends up getting delayed and undergoing enhanced screening.

DHS Official Press Release.

* News on CNN.

DOB, Full Name Required Headline

Secure Flight Ruling (10.7 MB, PDF)

**Dept of Homeland Security and Transportation Security Admininstration

Stock Market on Monday gains-in-the-East

The Stock Market on Monday, How Will it Pan Out - like last week or like Friday? Or will it be an inverse of Friday's opening behavior?
i.e will it rise fast and then give the gains away?
Reporting time at New York time: Sunday, Oct 12, 2008 9:20pm
(in the Eastern part of planet Earth: Monday, Oct 13, 2008)
- Nari, Soundarrajan. Blogger.

The Latest News coming in from the Eastern parts of the Globe indicates a positive trend in the markets right now. Futures markets in bloomberg also indicate a positive trend

DJIA futures are up 280, no 260 pts as I write this.

Turning our attention back to the "East"...

The New Zealand Stock Market's primary index is up 1% in the afternoon, after falling initially in the morning.

"After starting the day lower, the New Zealand market reversed early losses and was up over 1 percent in afternoon trading.

The benchmark NZX 50 started the day 20.734 points down at 2784.58, after falling 5 percent last Friday.

By early afternoon, the index reversed early losses, to move into positive territory, up 40.232 points, or 1.4 percent at 2845.541."

Reproduced from source: http://www.nzx.com/news/markets/4725582

AUSTRALIAN MARKETS are up close 5% in early trading. The major bounce has been helped by positive moves in bank shares.

This is mostly in response to the Aussie Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's guarantee that the Aussie Federal goverment would guarantee deposits of ANY SIZE in Australia for the next three years.
For more on the news follow this link.

You can imagine what kind of smart money + foreign institutional money that kind of safety net is going to bring in especially when you see negative yields in US and bank failures left and right.

Also I heard (saw on Japanese news feed) that UAE is guaranteering bank deposits. European leaders have pledged support for banks too. S. Korean and Singapore markets are also up. (news from BBC)

Hopefully this might move some positive money sitting on the sidelines to come in and also probably trigger some short covering - both which could lead to a quick upside gain in blue chip stocks and some key emerging market stocks. I am not giving any stock tips here because it is crazy out there and I have no clue just like anyone else. However, I am long on Bristol Myers (BMY) and I would stay long in a company I think is blue chip: ABB (any one agree?).

Update: Just found out that Japanese markets are going to be closed for some holiday -not Columbus day. I am also not too happy that the Driver License office in PA are closed on Sat for
Columbus day -and Monday is their usual closed date.
Update 2: Indian markets gained by about 4-5 % on confident measures by the Indian finance minister, who actually quoted the gains of East Asian markets to seek confidence and calm, duh!
Disclosure: Other joker stocks that I am long on are NAT, NCC, CHKE and CSR (China). I am not short on anything.

Saving Money in Drying Clothes and Humidifiers and Saving water

Energy Cost Reduction by
What this article helps in:
Saving money, one quarter at a time or 1 kWh at a time
--> drying clothes over several hours, teaching you patience and planning
Reducing the dryness in your room in winters
-->Reduce electricity bills for running humidifiers

So let us see what activity would enable us to all this.

We all know that in winter, rooms in centrally heated houses (almost all houses in US) get fairly dry.

You wake up in the middle of the night, with an incredibly dry mouth, and a possibly dry nose. You drink water, then you reach for your saline drops or saline sprays to moisten your nose and then try to go back to sleep.

How can you prevent this from occurring in winter? Well, option 1 is that you can buy a humidifier and run it at full blast all through the night. But this will cost you money and also increase your electricity bill.

Now consider a cheaper option, drying your washed, (damp) clothes on a rack, that work out in big savings. It may not guarantee the exact comfort offered by the humidifier, but it contributes fairly well to reducing your discomfot.

*Note* this method is more suitable for homes with hardwood floors.

What you can do is to go get a clothes drying rack and keep it in your bedroom. Now if you take your clothes after washing them in a machine when they are fairly damp (after the spin cycle), then you can lay them out to dry in the clothes rack and let them dry over the next day or two (30-50 hours).

Well that is the time it takes to dry clothes when we keep our thermostat at 70 F. It might also help to position the clothes rack closer to the heater in the room. This way the heat meets the moisture sooner, and your clothes dry faster.

Some points to note:

>> This method is less of a pain if you dry only your larger clothes on a line. Laying out several small pieces like socks, handkerchiefs, underwear etc take a lot of time and you might get annoyed using the clothes rack.. It is still better to use a dryer for those anyway.

>> Do not be attempting to lay out clothes when you are in a hurry to do something else. Again you might get annoyed and just switch to the dryer. So planning is important.

>> Do not place extremely wet clothes on a rack in a room, it might create puddles causing a slipping risk on the floor (or wet your carpet - turning it into a germ growth medium..eww).

>> Continue using your humidifier till you get used to this system. Keep saline sprays as a backup.
Further to save water resources you can recycle any water from the humidifier in this manner explained in the Lean Mean Green Family Blog
Keeping in tune with the saving water pledge that I signed up recently with BRITA's campaign, I am going to request you too sign up for the pledge and do your bit for our watersheds and the planet. Plus you SAVE MONEY by reducing your spending on disposable bottles.



If you sign up for the pledge, please leave a comment for me too right here . Thank you.

AIG Post Bailout Spa Scandal Explained

Can you guess where the taxpayer promised $85 Billion to AIG is being spent? I cannot. But I saw this news article on yahoo, an excerpt from which says:

As of Sept. 30, AIG had drawn $61 billion on the credit facility, of which about $54 billion has gone toward its securities lending and AIG's financial products area.

The rest of the money has been for other liquidity needs amid an "unprecedented" freezing of credit markets, Chief Executive Edward Liddy said last week.

Now, we have all been beaten to death with the St. Regis luxury spa scandal news, so I won't joke about resort spending here. In fact we are talking only $440,000, which is a mere 0.00052% of the bailout amount offered to AIG. Come on people, stop complaining so much about an event at a posh, luxury resort.

It was not a gala bash to celebrate AIG's survival from bankruptcy. It was an event to treat insurance agents.

Wait, what are you saying: 440, 000 can provide for 2-3 comfortable homes, maybe the college education of 2 young adults, 10-20 cars depend on what you pick.

Disclaimer: Ok, I will make one thing clear. I am here to just join the bandwagon and bash AIG, because, it is fun, right now.

It is a faceless corporate entity, which by very definition, protects all the management and employees from any liabilities for conduct that cannot be clearly proven as bad, for the lack of a better legal term. So there, I am not bashing people, I am just bashing a 'corporation'.

Cash under the mattress

I could not resist posting a note about the safety of cash under a mattress in this fear/panic situation in the stock markets. Clearly many, many people have been planning for this situation as you can see from Sealy's earnings

Sealy Corp. (ZZ US): The world's largest bedding manufacturer reported third-quarter sales of $405 million, topping the average analyst estimate by 3.9 percent, according to a Bloomberg survey. The stock fell 18 percent to $4.05 in regular trading. Source

Have you bought your mattress yet? Buy it on credit and keep cash under it. Just kidding. I am not giving you any type of stock advice without charging money, so no stock advice today kids.

AIG - POST BAILOUT Spending Excesses

Now comes news that executives at the government funded, taxpayer supported American Insurance Group (AIG) have managed to treat themselves to close to half million ($440, 000) dollars of spa treatments in a California resort.

This has happened a WEEK after the $85 billion bailout. AIG stock has taken a beating (and crashed) and then bounced back, but actions like these are not good for any left-over shareholders or the taxpayer or anyone holding insurance with AIG.

Fox Business also has put up the copy of the bill (a scanned copy as a pdf file) here.
The news article says that the executives who were at the resort were from the profitable divisions of AIG, but still...

Hello, who is the CEO now, Henry Paulson/president Bush, Neel Kashkari.. who is it?
Or is it you, john/jane doe taxpayer?

The link to the fox article: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,434223,00.html
I am neither long nor short on AIG common stock or any derivatives.

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Bank of America Halving Dividend

One of the big doubts that I had a few weeks back was the ability of Bank of America to maintain its dividend. Turns out BAC is cutting its dividend by 50% on its common stock and also planning to issue new stock. This is going to be a long, rough financial year. I don't have any positions in BAC nor in any other financials, but right now the entire market is looking gloomy (for people already invested into stocks). If anybody is just entering the market, then you can search around and find some good bargains in companies with low debt. Definitely avoid the financial companies for any long term trading. If you want to do , intra-day high-low trading, you can try high volume stocks - look it up on yahoo here to decide which ones.
One company I would avoid is Citibank group (Ticker: C).

Some of my long term long sentiments include Bristol Myers (BMY), Asae Brown Boveri (ABB) and Nordic American Tanker Shipping (NAT). Do your own analysis, just use these as a starting point.
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Crazy Air Travel

I have nt written much on air travel or airline miles for a while now. Most of the blame goes to the roller coaster ride happening in the financial sector right now. Anyhow, I came across an article on about scariest runways on CNN's website. Bhutan's Paro airport and Honduras' Toncontìn Airport in Tegucigalpa (this was one place where I have been thinking of going recently, haha, should be fun!) both top the list of scary runways mainly due to the terrain surrounding the airport.
Even an airport like Washington DC's Reagan National feature on the list. Another notable mention was an airstrip in Lesotho, the story of which reminds of James Bond's flight in Golden Eye.
To quickly jump to the spot I am referring to, go to time 6:35 on video and watch from there.

So if you are out to earn more and more airmiles, but do not pay attention to the destination, you might be in for some roller coaster rides! Watch out.

More on the SEC and Short selling ban

I came across an article on Yahoo finance which discusses the effect of SEC's sudden ban on (non market maker) short selling. Instead of reducing manipulation or preventing naked short selling, the SEC's ban has more effects than the required stability. Plus, the ban is only on financial and somehow related company stocks.
An excerpt:

From www.ETFguide.com
Ignoring SKF Tipping-Point, SEC Slams Free Market
Monday September 29, 12:05 pm ET
By Max Rottersman

HANOVER,NH (ETFguide.com) - In nine short months, investors rushed $3.3 billion into UltraShort Financials ProShares (AMEX: SKF - News). Any reader of the best-selling non-fiction book The Tipping Point would have come to a natural conclusion. Investors saw trouble.
But not the SEC. They so badly regulated the financials that rumors sent volatility off a cliff. Injuring long-term confidence in free markets, the SEC banned the short-selling of 799 stocks. The government decided who would win and who would lose on September 19th.

Unforseen effects began to ripple through the ETF market. There were failures to maintain a small spread between ETF prices and NAVs. There were liquidity problems; shares could be redeemed by APs, but not created. Counter-party risk raised its ugly head. Read more at

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