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Coupon Clipping, the Old-Fashioned Way
by R. A. Hettinga 12 Feb '06

12 Feb '06

--- begin forwarded text Date: Sun, 12 Feb 2006 06:54:02 -0500 To: Philodox Clips List <clips(a)philodox.com> From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah(a)shipwright.com> Subject: Coupon Clipping, the Old-Fashioned Way <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/business/yourmoney/12bearer.html?_r=1&ore…> The New York Times February 12, 2006 Investing Coupon Clipping, the Old-Fashioned Way By KEN BELSON MOST bonds these days are never touched by human hands. They are typically bought online and plunked into brokerage accounts, where they are registered and tracked digitally. Interest is automatically calculated, paid and reported to the tax authorities. Then there are bearer bonds, the old-fashioned kind that my 92-year-old cousin Lou owns. Like silver dollars made with real silver and stock tickers that spit out prices on strips of paper, these bonds are relics of an earlier age. They are impressive-looking documents, printed on fancy, perforated colored paper. In some ways, bearer bonds are like cash: the holder is the owner and the bonds need not be registered, a feature that makes them highly appealing to tax evaders and to criminals looking to steal them from their holders. Worry about theft explains why Lou did not want his last name or photograph used for this article. (Bearer bonds even worked their way into a Hollywood script. In the first "Die Hard" movie, the villains tried to steal hundreds of millions of dollars worth of them.) Many holders leave their bearer bonds for safekeeping with their brokers, who every six months clip the coupons that are attached to the certificates and collect the interest payments. They also keep track of bonds that are called or retired. Lou, though, keeps his bonds locked in a safe at a bank and clips the coupons himself. A feisty native New Yorker, he ran a small business in Manhattan, and he still likes to handle his own finances. "I had a broker, but I got so many phone calls, letters and distractions that I was happy to pay $50 to transfer the account," he said. But as Lou has discovered, bearer bonds aren't long for this world. The bonds are the victim of tighter tax laws and the growing digitalization of the financial industry, which increasingly shuns paper pushing. Since 1982, when lawmakers passed the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act partly to foil tax evaders, few bearer bonds have been issued in the United States. (They remain popular overseas, however.) As a result, American bearer bonds will all but disappear when the remaining 30- and 50-year issues come due. "By 2013, most bearer bonds will go the way of the dinosaur," said John Colangelo, a managing director at the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, a settlement company that holds bonds on behalf of many financial institutions. The D.T.C. has a dozen or so employees working full time to clip coupons, redeem them and transfer the proceeds to the brokers, who credit their customers' accounts. That's a far cry from the situation in 1991, when the company handled 21 million bearer bonds, or 42 million coupons a year, and employed 600 people to get the work done. Since no new bonds are being issued, the number of bonds in the D.T.C. vault has fallen to about 700,000. (Most bonds have a face value of $5,000, so that is about $3.5 billion worth of securities, not including interest.) While the company has a well-honed system for dealing with bearer bonds, investors like Lou are having a harder and harder time handling them on their own. He has several bearer bonds issued decades ago by New York City agencies, including the New York City Housing Authority and the Battery Park City Authority. In the mid-1980's, he bought a bunch of them at a discount - about 50 to 60 cents on the dollar, because their coupon rates of 5 to 9 percent were considered low at the time. The bonds turned out to be a smart buy. Interest rates have generally fallen over the last 20 years, and because he lives in New York, he has not had to pay federal, state and local taxes on the municipal bonds. "I wish I had bought more of these bonds, because when interest rates dropped, I was doing better," Lou said. Over the years, the agencies have called many of Lou's bonds, in order to avoid paying relatively high interest rates. He has held onto as many of the securities as he can, but there are fewer and fewer places to redeem their coupons. Until late in the 1980's, Lou took them to his local bank and deposited them, along with his checks and cash. Nowadays, there are not enough bearer bonds around for banks to justify the expense of handling them. A pensioner, Lou does not want to spend the money to send the coupons by registered mail to a paying agent - typically the bank or broker that handled the original issue - in order to collect his interest. Besides, like many other people of his generation, he prefers to do things the old fashioned way: face to face. Or, as Mr. Colangelo put it, taking care of your own bearer bonds is "a throwback: you feel like you're engaged in handling your own assets." Lou is still in good shape, so he takes the subway to the financial district twice a year to find a teller who will take his coupons. That has become something of a quest. Many banks that handled the bonds have merged out of business. Some of the acquiring banks continue to accept coupons in person, but others have shut their windows and forced customers to send their coupons to a processing center. In December, I accompanied Lou on one of his bearer-bond jaunts. To redeem the coupons from his Battery Park City Authority bonds, we found the " J. P. Morgan Chase Bank Investor Services Receiving Window," which was behind an out-of-the-way door on the ground floor of 4 New York Plaza. Lou put his coupons, which look like raffle tickets, into a special see-through envelope and wrote his name and Social Security number on the outside. The teller spent five minutes checking a computer before handing him a receipt for a check that would be sent to him in about 10 days. That interest payment didn't arrive. He later received a note saying the bond had been called six months earlier. Lou had missed the advertisement in The Wall Street Journal announcing it, so, while he got his $5,000 principal back, he missed the chance to collect the last $215 interest payment. WE didn't have much more luck around the corner, at Deutsche Bank. There, a teller told us that Lou must now send his five coupons - worth $125 each - to its processing center in Tennessee. I called Nashville to find out more. An operator said that Lou could send the coupons in an ordinary envelope with a signed W-9 tax form. A lot of people are angry about the change. "We've been getting a lot of calls on this where people have gone to the old window and found it's not there anymore," she said of the New York location. It was small comfort to Lou, who ended up paying $10.32 in postage. On the ride uptown, we pondered technology, efficiency and how bonds issued by New York City agencies could no longer be redeemed in person in New York City. "It seems to me," Lou said, "that the coupons and the bonds are a contract, and if they are going to void part of the contract and make you send them in, they should reimburse you for the expense." It may be the way of the world, but that doesn't mean he has to like it. "It doesn't seem right," he said, "that I'm paying more and getting less service." -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Lab officials excited by new H-bomb project
by Eugen Leitl 11 Feb '06

11 Feb '06

http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/localnews/ci_3480733 Lab officials excited by new H-bomb project By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER For the first time in more than 20 years, U.S. nuclear-weapons scientists are designing a new H-bomb, the first of probably several new nuclear explosives on the drawing boards. If they succeed, in perhaps 20 or 25 more years, the United States would have an entirely new nuclear arsenal, and a highly automated fac- tory capable of turning out more warheads as needed, as well as new kinds of warheads. "We are on the verge of an exciting time," the nation's top nuclear weapons executive, Linton Brooks, said last week at Lawrence Livermore weapons design laboratory. Teams of roughly 20 scientists and engineers at the nation's two laboratories for nuclear-explosive design b Livermore and Los Alamos in New Mexico b are in a head-to-head competition to offer designs for the first of the new thermonuclear explosives, termed "reliable replacement warheads" or RRWs. Designers are aiming for bombs that will be simpler, easier to maintain over decades and, if they fell into terrorists' hands, able to be remotely destroyed or rendered useless. Once the designs are unveiled in September, the Bush administration and Congress could face a major choice in the future of the U.S. arsenal: Do they keep maintaining the existing, tested weapons or begin diverting money and manpower to developing the newly designed but untested weapons? Administration officials see the new weapons and the plant to make them as "truly transformative," allowing the dismantlement of thousands of reserve weapons. But within the community of nuclear weapons experts, the notion of fielding untested weapons is controversial and turns heavily on how much the new bombs would be like the well-tested weapons that the United States already has. "I can't believe that an admiral or a general or a future president, who are putting the U.S. survival at stake, would accept an untested weapon if it didn't have a test base," said physicist and Hoover Institution fellow Sidney Drell, a longtime adviser to the government and its labs on nuclear-weapons issues. "The question is how do you really ensure long-term reliability of the stockpile without testing?" said Hugh Gusterson, an MIT anthropologist who studies the weapons labs and their scientists. "RRW is partly an answer to that question and it's an answer to the question (by nuclear weapons scientists) of 'What do I do to keep from being bored?'" The prize for the winning lab is tens, perhaps hundreds of million of dollars for carrying its bomb concept into prototyping and production. If manufactured, the first RRW would replace two warheads on submarine-launched missiles, the W76 and W88, together the most numerous active weapons and the cornerstone of the U.S. nuclear force. Altogether, the nation has 5,700 nuclear bombs and warheads of 12 basic types, plus more than 4,200 weapons kept in reserve as insurance against aging and failure of the active, fielded arsenal. Most are 25-35 years old. All were exploded multiple times under the Nevada desert before U.S. nuclear testing halted in 1992. It is in most respects the world's most sophisticated nuclear arsenal, and beyond opposition at home to continued testing, ending testing made sense to discourage other nations from testing to advance their nuclear capabilities. Faced by the Soviet Union, Cold War weapons scientists devised their bombs for the greatest power in the smallest, lightest package, so thousands could be delivered en masse and cause maximum destruction. Designers compare those weapons to Ferraris, sleek and finely tuned. Scientists at the weapons laboratories are laboring to keep the bombs and warheads in working order, by examining them for signs of deterioration and replacing parts as faithfully to the original manufacturing as possible. It is an expensive and not especially stimulating job. Some worry that an accumulation of small changes could undermine the bombs' reliability. So far, every year since 1995 directors of the weapons labs and secretaries of defense and energy have assured two presidents that the weapons are safe, secure and will detonate as designed. The new reliable replacement warheads are actually an old idea that 1950s-era weapons designers called, with some disdain, the "wooden bomb." Bomb physicists were proud of their racier, more compact designs and figured they were plenty dependable already. The wooden bomb by comparison was boring. "They said, 'Well heck, that isn't a challenge to anybody'," recalled Ray Kidder, a former Livermore physicist who found a chilly reception to proposals in the 1980s for clunkier, more reliable designs. "It was like saying, 'Well, why don't you make a Model A Ford.'" Now the wooden bomb is back in vogue. With fewer, simpler kinds of warheads, the argument goes, the arsenal could be maintained more inexpensively and b assuming construction of a factory to turn out the new bombs on demand b thousands of reserve warheads could be scrapped. But in a sharp break with the past, the new bombs would never be exploded except in war. The only button-to-boom tests of the new arsenal would be virtual b simulated detonations inside a supercomputer. Today's weaponeers say they've learned enough of the complex physics of thermonuclear explosives to guarantee the bombs would deliver precise explosive yields even after decades on the shelf. If military leaders agreed, the most lethal and final resort of U.S. defenses would be deployed without a test shot. Ex-military leaders are split on accepting a new, untested nuclear arsenal. Former Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre told a House appropriations committee last year that he thinks a new arsenal will be needed some day. But he said, "I do believe we should test the new weapons to demonstrate to the world that they are credible." Eugene Habiger, the senior-most commander over U.S. nuclear forces as chief of Strategic Command in the mid-1990s, said he would be inclined to accept the new weapons. "The science is pretty well understood," he said. The Bush administration and weapons scientists say the warheads will not have new military missions. They will ride on the same bombers and missiles as today's nuclear explosives and strike the same targets. But administration officials are talk of eventually wanting features beyond the sizable array of explosive yields and delivery methods available now: deep earth-penetrating bombs, enhanced radiation weapons and "reduced collateral damage" bombs with lower fission radiation. Designers and executives at Lawrence Livermore are taking a conservative line. The lab's weapons chief, Bruce Goodwin, talks of starting with nuclear-explosive designs that are well tested and well understood. "Our plan is to develop a design that lies well within the experience b and within what we call the 'sweet spot' b of our historical test base," he said in a recent statement. One candidate under consideration as a starting point is the W89, a 200-kiloton warhead designed for a short-range attack missile. It is well-tested, plus it comes from a long line of well-understood designs and uses every safety and security feature available at the time. Yet weaponeers at Los Alamos lab and Brooks, as the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, have talked of a more freewheeling design effort. "This is not about going back to rake over old designs. That's why I've got two different teams of weapons scientists at two labs working on this," Brooks said. "There's never been anything tested that will do the sorts of things we want to do." Such talk alarms Stanford's Drell. "How the hell do you make a new design without testing?" he said. "Those kinds of flamboyant statements worry me because I don't believe we could maintain a confident stockpile with new designs that haven't been tested." Some former weapons scientists say the wiser course is maintaining the current arsenal and boosting its reliability in simple ways, such as adding more tritium to "sweeten" the hydrogen gases at the very core of the weapon. "We've got a reliable stockpile. We have a test base for it. We have now in the last 10 or 15 years far more sophisticated computational abilities than we had doing these designs originally, so things are extremely well understand in terms of the performance," said Seymour Sack, once Livermore's most prolific designer, whose innovations are found in nearly every U.S. weapon. "I don't see any reason you should change those designs." Lawmakers say they are watching carefully to make sure the new warheads hew closely to existing, well-understood designs. But in a recent report on the new warhead program for the Livermore watchdog group, Tri-Valley CAREs, former White House budget analyst Bob Civiak said Congress has a poor record of restraining the weapons design labs from what after all they were built to do. "Congress thinks it can allow the labs to design new nuclear weapons but restrict them to existing designs," he said. "History shows that cannot be the case." Contact Ian Hoffman at ihoffman(a)angnewspapers.com. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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by Eugen Leitl 11 Feb '06

11 Feb '06

----- Forwarded message from Dave Farber <dave(a)farber.net> -----

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