A subsidiary of Sempra Energy (SRE) recently became an equal partner of a BP Plc. (BP) unit for developing a 200MW Fowler Ridge II Wind Farm in Benton County, Indiana. 

The Fowler Ridge joint venture is currently under construction on a 17,000-acre site, about 90 miles northwest of Indianapolis and is expected to be operational in the first quarter of fiscal 2010. The 200MW facility will produce enough electricity for nearly 60,000 homes.

The project's entire power output has already been sold under four, long-term 50-MW contracts. Three of these deals were signed with units of American Electric Power (AEP) and one with Vectren Energy Delivery (VVC) of Indiana for 20-year terms each. The project will use 133 wind turbines, each with the ability to generate 1.5 MW.

The Fowler Ridge II development is an expansion of Fowler Ridge I, a 400-MW wind farm that commenced operations

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Overall, we continue to maintain a negative outlook on both U.S. and non-U.S. Banks in the near-to-medium term.

The new Financial Stability plan announced by the Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner fell short on the details and we think that the benefits, if any, will take a long time to come by. While the earlier programs launched by the government have helped alleviate the capital and funding concerns to a great extent, the efforts have not succeeded in restoring the lending activity at banks.

It remains to be seen whether these steps and others like them in other countries will be sufficient to restore confidence in the financial system and increase lending.

In the meantime, lower lending activity will continue to hurt the margins though the low interest rate environment should be beneficial to the banks with a liability sensitive balance sheet.

It still remains a bit

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Top 10 Value Traps

Alexander Wissel, Editor in Chief, Investment U

With the credit crisis ransacking good companies and leaving less stable ones in shambles, some of the metrics used to find good “values” are setting some value traps for investors. Here are the Top 10 Value Traps that have unreasonably high dividends:

Company  Ticker Yield Bank of Ireland ADR   (NYSE: IRE)  103.79% Royal Bank of Scotland Group ADR (NYSE: RBS)  53.63% Harvest Energy Trust (NYSE: HTE)  34.21% Allied Irish Banks ADR     (NYSE: AIB) 30.21% Penn West Energy Trust (NYSE: PWE) 27.66% Hospitality Properties Trust     (NYSE: HPT)  22.29% Pengrowth Energy Trust (NYSE: PGH) 21.66% The Macerich Company (NYSE: MAC) 21.11% Duke Realty Corporation (NYSE: DRE)  20.90% Nordic American Tanker Shipping (NYSE: NAT)   19.99%

 

If a dividend yield looks too good to be true, it generally is. If the stock price has plummeted, ratcheting up the yield, look for the company to cut its dividend to save

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h1 style="text-align: center;"bBank Nationalization/b/h1h2 style="text-align: center;"bspan class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(102, 0, 0);"Bank Nationalization Day/span/b/h2a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_tvshDVnXSLc/SS_l74vGpJI/AAAAAAAAAf4/J6EgOxMC024/s1600-h/RBS-DundasHouse.jpg"img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 200px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_tvshDVnXSLc/SS_l74vGpJI/AAAAAAAAAf4/J6EgOxMC024/s320/RBS-DundasHouse.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5273686505679135890" border="0" //a Old HQ pictured. Following failure of shareholders to buy more than 0.24% (only £36m for 56m shares) of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group's £20bn share issue, RBS (1) (including Citizens Bank, USA, and NatWest Bank, England) today became the third to be formally nationalised (nearly 58%). The small take-up of the issue by existing shareholders had been expected as the offer price of 65.5p was 10p higher than the price at which the shares were trading, so those who did buy on paper lost £5m doing so. The share issue by RBS was part of the government's plan to recapitalise banks. The government will pay £15bn for the majority stake in the bank plus £5bn of ...

by Edward Hugh: BarcelonaThe euro fell against the dollar yesterday - by the largest amount registered in any single day since the introduction of the single currency in 1999. The drop was effectively a response to the growing signs of strain in Europe's banking sector. Activity in support of banks was widespread throught the day, and across the whole system. The euro fell 2.5 percent to $1.4077 by mid morning in New York, down from $1.4434 on Monday. Early this morning in Europe it was trading in the $1.41 range.This current pressure on the euro is more the result of signs of liquidity problems in the banking sector than it is a response to the growing weaknesses in the eurozone real economies, which, as we saw at the end of last week, are really pretty substantial in their own right. What follows is simply ...

By William Patalon III Executive Editor Money Morning/The Money Map Report As rocky as the global markets have been, the worst is yet to come, the Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC (ADR: RBS) warns. RBS analysts have warned clients to brace for a full-blown crash in the global stock-and-bond markets over the next three months as the conflicting realities of slowing growth and rising inflation paralyze the world’s major central banks - causing “all the chickens [to] come home to roost,” Great Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper reported. The report, which first surfaced late Wednesday, raced across the Internet yesterday (Thursday), though it appears that European news organizations are giving it much wider play than their U.S. counterparts. The predicted swoon would cause the U.S. Standard & Poor’s 500 Index - already down 15% from its trading high of 1,576.09 reached ...