Day: October 29, 2014

The trick is in the polling methodology

Mary Landrieu’s only chance is to win outright in the primary:

Two polls predict Senate runoff, but differ in support for Mary Landrieu and Bill Cassidy ~ Bruce Alpert

Meantime the statistical gurus over at FiveThirtyEight have increased Bill Cassidy’s chances of winning to 79% with their latest simulation (Election tab). Drilling down on the polling data shows that many of the polls in the Louisiana Senate race are from C rated pollsters though Suffolk University, which conducted one of the latest Louisiana Senate polls is B rated. All the polls line up with Landrieu losing to Bill Cassidy, the main difference being in victory margin.

Kemper County Power Plant a disaster: Southern Company wants to stick you with more (cow)bill

And when the costs get passed along with the parties in charge bearing little financial risk it is no surprise to see a chart like this one. The runup into the latest earnings release is especially interesting.

Kemper County power plant price tag tops $6.1 billion as costs climb again, start-up delayed ~ Associated Press

I’m going to be spending some time on Edgar learning more about this mess for myself.  I see stockcharts like the one linked above against the backdrop of these massive cost overruns at Kemper County and the term moral hazard immediately comes to mind. In layman’s terms, it is easy to take risks when someone else bears a disproportionate share of the financial burden.

Stay tuned because this is likely not the last of the bad news form Southern Company and the Kemper coal boondoggle.