Until now, the country?s power grid has been divided into three unconnected, noncompetitive kingdoms (in the spirit of Game of Thrones), making transnational transmission impossible, leading to huge regional mispricing. While California and New York suffered from periodic brown outs and sky high prices, electricity was given away virtually for free in Texas.

A group of power companies is now proposing to build the $1 billion Tres Amigas superstation in Clovis, New Mexico that would connect all three grids. The plant would use advanced superconducting technology that will send five gigawatts of power down cables cooled at 300 degrees below zero. Construction is expected to reach completion in 2014.

The facility would solve a major headache of alternative energy planners, and will no doubt accelerate development. It would allow the enormous wind farms in the Lone Star State to ship energy to the power hungry coasts. Ditto for the mega solar projects proposed in the Southwest deserts, and the big geothermal plants being built in Nevada. With the Department of Energy having already sent tidal waves of government cash towards the sector, the timing couldn?t be better.

During my recent quick run through Chicago to visit clients, I couldn?t resist the temptation to stop by President Obama?s house and see how close I could get.

Nestled on Greenwood Avenue and 50th street in up and coming Hyde Park, I was thwarted by two concrete crash barriers, 16 cop cars, and army of elderly Chicago police happily pulling overtime. Shifty looking characters wearing long overcoats and sprouting wires out of their ears were everywhere. Needless to say, I did not get invited in for tea and cookies.

Every neighborhood bird nest, flagpole, and chimney sported video cameras, and Google Earth has wiped the block off the map. Not wanting to risk my valued Secret Service clearance, I scuttled out of there before anyone started asking questions.

The nice thing for Barack and Michele is that the house has probably doubled in value since he came into office four years ago. And who knows how much of a premium they will be able to command when it is designated a National Historic Site?

Instead, I settled for a visit to the delicious Valois Cafeteria around the corner, the president?s favorite diner, and his preferred bookstore at 57th Street Books. They carried all of his publications. Amazing!

I managed to run into someone, who knew someone, who once babysat Obama?s kids. Need, a presidential pardon, a cushy ambassadorial appointment, a new alternative energy program, or a juicy government contract? I?m now your ?go to? guy! Just make a discreet donation to my favorite 501 (3) (c) and it?s a deal.

When I lived on New York?s Sutton place overlooking the East River, my next-door neighbor was UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar. The Secret Service maintained a permanent box in front, and as a result, we had the only crime free block in the city. This was at a time during the early 1980?s when crime was raging in the Big Apple.

I bet Obama?s Chicago?s neighbors are now getting the same great deal.

Checking Out the Neighborhood

 

Yale professor, Robert Shiller, is the kind of imp like, peripatetic college professor you might expect to find in a Disney movie. Highly animated and jumping from one radical idea to the next it is hard to keep up with his stream of consciousness torrent of economic innovations. After a two-hour barrage, I was so intellectually exhausted that all I could do when I returned home was to plop down on the sofa with a Jack on the rocks and watch Fox News.

You know Robert Shiller as the creator of the Standard & Poors-Case Shiller Real Estate Index, which tracks 20 major residential housing markets around the US. His data was originally the domain of a handful of real estate brokers with a theoretical bent or securitizing investment bankers. But when the real estate collapse began to accelerate in 2007, it suddenly became the data point du jour for every property investor, business news network, and hedge fund manager.

Shiller is a devout non-believer of the efficient market theory espoused by Eugene Fama of the University of Chicago. He thinks that financial markets are so emotional that they are beyond rational analysis. The systemic vulnerability of financial markets was a major cause of the 2008 crash and is still not well understood. He argues that people should have a 100-year time horizon when making investments, because that?s how long today?s children will live. Does anyone have the trading call for the Spring of 2113? (No typo!).

He says that teaching finance today is about as popular as being the university Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) instructor during the Vietnam War. People are angry at bankers, as the Occupy Wall Street crowd has so amply shown, which Shiller sees as our own ?Arab Spring?. Since 1990, the top 1% of the wealthy have seen their net worth soar by 60%, while it has fallen for the other 99%.

When Occupiers discovered that their movement could cause governments to fall, it rapidly spilled beyond its Madrid, Spain origins. But the financial industry is not all bad. Witness the miracle in emerging markets which has been made possible through new capital provided by western investment bankers.

Robert titillated me with some highly creative innovations which we may see adopted in coming years. I?ll give you the highlights.

*Options on individual real estate markets, now five years old, will go mainstream and finally become liquid as individuals seek to protect their home equity during economic downturns. This will become a major area of new profits for Wall Street.

*?Continuous mortgages? should be created whereby the debt is never paid off, but is assumed from one owner to the next in exchange for a higher interest rate. If you package many of these together and securitize them, it would be a major step towards clearing out the massive inventory of unsold homes.

*The government already issues plenty of bonds and next should sell equity in itself in one-trillionth increments. That puts the value of the government?s share price today at about $16.00. If the economy grows, the share price should go up.

*Tax rates for the wealthy should rise with inequality. The more wealth that is concentrated with the 1%, the higher the maximum tax rate should go. Remember, the maximum rate was 90% at the time of the Roosevelt administration during the Great Depression, nearly triple today?s 39% rate.

*The actual impact of high frequency traders, who he refers to as ?millisecond traders?, is vastly exaggerated.

*Although the new ?crowd funding? bill just signed by president Obama has been described as the ?Boiler Room Full Employment Act?, it will provide a valuable source of venture capital for micro startups. Those earning only $40,000 a year are limited to an $800 bet, with the maximum legal investment set at $10,000.

*Some 14% of the total economic activity of the US involves security. Just having people watching people is an enormous waste of resources.

*For profit nonprofits, called benefit corporations, should proliferate to advance specific social goals. These should work well as they pay little in wages and enjoy community support. They are already legal in eight states.

If you would like to attend one of Shiller?s classes for free and expose yourself to more out of the box economic thinking, you can do so through regular offerings of his online courses. To sign up for Open Yale University, which Time magazine lists as one of the top websites, please click the following link: ?http://oyc.yale.edu.