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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (81462)	6/16/2010 7:08:02 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

56-Day BP Oil Spill Having Major Affect on Bankers, Developers and Hoteliers realestatechannel.com <<...The 56-day-old BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is beginning to haunt the nation's residential, commercial and vacation real estate markets. The biggest potential losers to date are the St. Joe Co. (NYSE: JOE) of Jacksonville, FL and Regions Financial Corp. (NYSE:RF) of Birmingham, AL. St. Joe already has lost about 32 percent of its common stock price since the April 20 sinking of BP's oil rig off the Louisiana shoreline in the Gulf of Mexico. Eleven workers were killed; 70 seriously burned. St. Joe, the biggest landowner in Florida, owns 577,000 acres in Northwest Florida, much of it within 15 miles of the ocean and 5.7 miles on the coast. The company also owns eight luxury resorts near Panhandle beaches and earns about one-third of its revenue from tourism. St. Joe CEO William Britton Greene told the Wall Street Journal his company is concerned over the effects of the oil spill but is not as dependent as it was a few years ago on vacationers flocking to its beaches. "Our past (growth) was oriented around the beach, and the future will be oriented toward commercial development and jobs," Greene told the WSJ. "In the past, we had been concentrating on the fairly low-hanging fruit during a real-estate market that was moving forward at a fairly quick pace." Greene said St. Joe stopped building luxury resort homes nearly four years ago and is focusing on master-planning, including buildings for some of the 1,900 defense contracting jobs recently drawn to nearby Eglin and Tyndall Air Force Bases. But Paul Puryear, an analyst with Raymond James & Associates Inc. in St. Petersburg, FL, told the WSJ St. Joe's investments in office parks and retail strips to serve the defense contractors might not be enough. "For St. Joe's performance to really impress and move the share price, they're going to need residential as well as commercial." Puryear said. "It's good to talk about the airport ... but that is not going to carry the share price to the levels that investors are looking for. "Given the volume of land that St. Joe owns, and the volume of residentially-zoned land, the residential side has to work, and it is not working (right now)," he said. St. Joe said it is preparing a claim against BP for "business interruption" that might include lost revenue from vacationers who canceled their rentals. St. Joe also has offered refunds to renters at their 151 coastal homes and 60-room inn who decided to relocate because of the oil. On the lending side, Foresight Analytics of Oakland, CA confirms to the WSJ that U.S. banks have a total exposure of $136.4 billion to commercial real estate owners and developers in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi. Regions Financial Corp., based in Birmingham, AL, has the biggest exposure of potentially bad loans totaling $12.4 billion...>>

To: koan who wrote (81462)	6/16/2010 7:31:15 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Obama has also refused to waive the Jones Act (the Jones Act deals with cabotage (i.e., coastal shipping) and requires that all goods transported by water between U.S. ports be carried in U.S.-flag ships, constructed in the United States, owned by U.S. citizens, and crewed by U.S. citizens and U.S. permanent residents. The purpose of the law is to support the U.S. merchant marine industry, but agricultural interests generally oppose it because, they contend, it raises the cost of shipping their goods, making them less competitive with foreign sources). This means that foreign owned, built and manned vessels cannot help in the oil spill cleanup unless Obama waives the Jones Act. During Katrina President Bush waived the Jones Act because of the desperate situation, why isn’t Obama doing the same now (probably because the unions support the Jones Act). snafu-comics.com

To: koan who wrote (81462)	6/16/2010 7:32:11 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

National Incident Commander Admiral Thad Allen announced the development of specific guidance to ensure accelerated processing of requests for Jones Act waivers should they be received as a part of the BP oil spill response. Currently, 15 foreign-flagged vessels are involved in the largest response to an oil spill in U.S. history. No Jones Act waivers have been granted because none of these vessels have required such a waiver to conduct their operations in the Gulf of Mexico rigzone.com