Blog Posts by Morgan Korn

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"Save yourself - some money."

Those were William Shatner's last words as Priceline's "Negotiator." The discount-travel booking site apparently killed off the television and movie legend last week in a TV advertisement.

In the commercial, which has been airing nationally and will also be shown during the Super Bowl pre-game show, Shatner's character saves the lives of fellow travelers as their bus teeters on the edge of a bridge. As the last passenger steps off, Shatner says "Save yourself - some money," handing his cellphone to a woman just before the bus falls off the bridge, bursting into flames as it crashes to the ground.

According to the company, Priceline is moving in a new direction - from negotiating to a fixed-price business model. In an official press release, Priceline's Chief Marketing Official Brett Keller said: "We felt it was necessary to go to extremes to grab the attention of every consumer in America and drive home

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NPR and ProPublica released an explosive report Monday that found government-owned mortgage giant Freddie Mac betting against the very homeowners it is supposed to help. According to the news article, the investment division of Freddie Mac (or as Henry calls it, Freddie's "gambling desk") placed billions of dollars of bets against homeowners who were trying to refinance their mortgages at lower rates.

NPR/ProPublica's review of public documents found that Freddie Mac invested in securities called "inverse floaters," which receive all the interest payments from specified mortgage-backed securities. "If lots of people 'pre-pay' their old loans and refinance into new, cheaper ones, then Freddie Mac starts to lose money," ProPublica's Jesse Eisinger and NPR's Chris Arnold explain. "If people can't refinance, then Freddie wins because it continues to receive that flow of older, higher interest payments."

Although Freddie Mac's bets are legal, they're highly offensive. Rightly or not, many Americans blame Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae -- which was not mentioned in the NPR/ProPublica report -- for the housing boom and subsequent bust. Nearly all Americans would agree that these companies should not be focused on generating profits, especially now that they're officially wards of the state and are using taxpayer dollars to make these bets.

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Blackstone Vice Chairman Byron Wien released his 27th annual market predictions list and the most "surprising" prognostication centers on oil prices. He tells The Daily Ticker's Aaron Task that oil could drift to $85 a barrel, about a 15 percent drop from oil's current price. Many economists are predicting that oil will stay above the $1oo per barrel mark as tensions between Iran and the West heat up. (See: $100 Oil Is Here to Stay, but Iran Closing the Strait of Hormuz "Can't Happen": Stuart)

"U.S. will produce more oil this year than last year," asserts Wien. Domestic natural gas production will increase (otherwise known as "fracking" - a highly controversial way of producing energy) and more oil from Libya and Iraq will lead to a price decline, he says. Moreover, world-wide demand for crude will soften as global growth slows.

President Obama has expressed his support for more domestic energy production, mentioning both natural gas and offshore drilling in Tuesday night's State of the Union address.

"The prospect of the U.S. becoming less dependent on Middle East oil is a game changer," says Wien. "It's a big deal."

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The FOMC's decision to keep interest rates near zero until late 2014 -- at least -- signifies two things:

1. Credit will remain cheap for consumers and businesses.

2. The Fed may know something about the economy that U.S. markets and investors do not.

At least that's how Gerald O'Driscoll feels. The former vice president of the Dallas Federal Reserve and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute said in an interview with The Daily Ticker's Aaron Task that the Fed's circumspection makes him question his own views on the economy.

"I was shocked by the implied pessimism of the forecast in the Fed statement," he says. "I feel the economy is improving. We have to assume the Fed may know something that things are really worse than I thought in the global financial system in order to explain the pessimism underlying their forecast."

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The Federal Open Market Committee will release its interest rate decision today at 12:30 p.m. ET Wednesday. Interest rates are expected to remain at zero, as the Fed has pledged to keep rates low at least through mid-2013.

The question on many investors' minds is whether the Fed will begin another round of bond-buying, a.k.a. quantitative easing. The U.S. economy has surprised to the upside over the past few months, beating back recession talk although the unemployment rate remains uncomfortably high.

The Fed has a dual mandate: full employment and price stability. The unemployment rate has fallen to 8.5 percent - the lowest rate in three years - but many economists attribute the decline to a smaller pool of people searching for jobs. Many of the long-term unemployed have simply stopped applying. The Fed's aggressive bond-buying strategy has won its fair share of critics who say the economy has not improved despite the Fed's purchase of more than $2 trillion of securities since the start of the financial crisis.

Axel Merk of Merk Funds tells The Daily Ticker's Aaron Task that the Fed's monetary policy actually hinders the economy's recovery and its insistence to "keep the floodgates" open puts downward pressure on the U.S. dollar.

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Research in Motion (RIMM) co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie resigned this morning and investors took the news harshly, sending shares of the company down 7% at one point. The Street may have been showing its disapproval of new RIM CEO Thorsten Heins, a company insider who most recently held the COO position. In a conference call with investors, Heins declared the shakeup at RIM was not a "seismic" event and suggested the company doesn't need to make drastic changes, which is not what the Street wanted to hear.

The beleaguered BlackBerry maker has seen its market share and stock price plummet over the past few years and many investors were demanding change at the top. According to The Wall Street Journal, Balsillie and Lazaridis agreed to step down in December, the board accepted their resignation and and unanimously backed Heins as the company's new leader (once the vetting process was completed). Lazaridis started RIM in 1984

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President Barack Obama may have rejected the construction of the highly controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline, but the story is far from over.

Republican lawmakers last week said they want to circumvent the White House by asking the Federal Regulatory Commission to issue a permit for the pipeline. The House Energy and Commerce Committee could vote on legislation authorizing the federal agency's approval this week. According to a weekend report in Reuters, Republicans may link the pipeline to the payroll tax cut bill. Lawmakers have until Feb. 29 to extend the popular tax break.

"The Keystone pipeline is a prime example of a shovel-ready project that's been through every approval process here in Washington," said House Speaker John Boehner in the Reuters article. "We're going to do everything we can to make sure this Keystone pipeline project is approved."

The 1,700-mile Keystone pipeline would have run from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico and cost $7 billion to build. Republicans, energy companies and labor groups supported the pipeline while environmentalists and many Democrats fought its construction. Obama said he decided to halt the project because the 60-day congressionally imposed deadline was "rushed and arbitrary" and too short to weigh the environmental risks.

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In the landmark 2010 Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission case, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations and unions could spend unlimited money on political speech. The 5-4 decision struck down part of the McCain-Feingold campaign law, which according to the court, limited the first-amendment rights of independent organizations, unions and corporations. Nearly two years after this decision, a new movement dubbed "Occupy the Courts" has emerged, vowing to overturn Citizens United. A dozen U.S. states have introduced legislation that would effectively amend the Constitution, the only way to reverse the Supreme Court's ruling. Most recently, two lawmakers from Massachusetts introduced "The People's Rights Resolution" that calls on Congress to "pass and send to the states for ratification a Constitutional amendment to restore the First Amendment and fair elections to the people." On Friday hundreds of people flocked to court houses across the U.S. to protest the two-year anniversary of Citizens United.

The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote in a recent editorial that many local governments are taking action to end undisclosed corporate money in elections. City councils that have passed resolutions opposing Citizens United include Los Angeles, Oakland, New York, Albany, Duluth and Boulder. There are also Congressional members seeking a Constitutional remedy, including Maryland Congresswoman Donna Edwards; Representative Dennis Kucinch; Senator Tom Udall and Representative Betty Sutton; Representative Ted Deutsch and Senator Bernie Sanders; Representative Jim McGovern; Representative John Yarmuth and Republican Representative Walter Jones and Representative Keith Ellison.

The state that has taken a firm stance against excessive corporate spending is Montana. Its Supreme Court upheld 100-year-old election spending limits last December, essentially rebuffing Citizens United. If the decision is appealed, and it is widely expected to be, the case could be the first challenge to the controversial Citizens United decision.