The estimated cost of the bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is $300 billion, that’s if their loan books only suffer 5% loss. For some, that 5% guess is a little low, for others it’s on target.

When Freddie Mac (FRE) and Fannie Mae (FNM) were taken into conservatorship, their common stock was essentially rendered valueless. The numbers you see are their 52-week stock price ranges as of Wednesday (9/10/08) and it’s a pretty grisly sight isn’t it? Why are people buying the stock? You never know what can happen. Bear Stearns was sold for $2 a share yet people kept buying it, a week later the price was revised to $10 a share. You never know!

Want to get fired up about something? How much do you think you can get to run Freddie Mac into the ground? What about Fannie Mae? Exiting CEO Syron of Freddie Mac may get between $12m and $14m. Exiting CEO Mudd of Fannie Mae could get anywhere from $7m to $9m. [Newsday] It’s hard work getting the “sponsored” out of “government sponsored entities.” (apparently it was harder at Freddie Mac!)

And, to put all these numbers in this perspective, the mortgage market is about $12 trillion a year.

This week’s Week in Numbers requires a bit of an introduction. One of my new favorite blogs is Ecomodder, a site all about modifying your car to make it more efficient and environmentally friendly. This week Ben wrote an article about gas mileage monitors that are, for the most part, easy to install.

MPGUINO

The MPGUINO is an entirely DIY monitor that you’ll have to sodder and wire into your car, it’s what Ben uses and the only option for cars made before 1996 because the rest of the gauges rely on hooking into the ODB-II system (On-Board Diagnostic System).

It’s also one of the cheapest at between $30-$40 plus the tools needed to install it.

ScanGuage 2

The ScanGauge II 3-in-1 Compact Multifunction Vehicle Computer runs a little pricier at around $160 but is one of the most popular gauges and one of the easiest to install (hooks into the ODB-II port underneath the dash, which means you have to have a ODB-II car). In addition to offering up gauge-type information, it lets you check engine codes and helps with other diagnostic function.

• Programmable 3-in-1 automotive trip computer, diagnostic scan tool, and up to 37 digital gauges in one (vehicle dependent)
• Watch fuel consumption, cost-per-mile, coolant temperature, engine speed, horsepower, and much more in real time
• Works on all 1996 or newer OBDII cars, including gas, diesel, propane and hybrid vehicles
• Checks for Diagnostic Trouble Codes (DTCs), clears the codes, and can turn off the “Check Engine” light

PLX Kiwi

The PLX Kiwi, at a pricier three hundred bones that offers more than a gauge. It can monitor your driving behavior and “teach” you how to become a better driver through ratings and suggestions.

• Named after the green fruit, the Kiwi is a green driving device that helps users monitor their driving behavior and increase fuel efficiency. With Kiwi users can save up to 33% on their fuel consumption while also reducing their carbon footprint by 2 tons per year!
• Monitors driving behavoir over four parameters Smoothness, Drag, Acceleration, Deceleration. Also comes equiped with an Instantaneous MPG readout
• Drive Green mode is a series of lessons designed to optimize user’s driving behavoir
• Check engine feature can diagnose and fix engine code errors
• Compatible with all vehicles 1996+ including hybrids.

Dashhawk

The MSD Ignition 13100 DashHawk Vehicle Information Display is another unit that runs around three hundred bucks and looks crazy slick, though it’s not clear what you get (that you would need) over the ScanGauge II besides a more polished looking unit (and backlighting!).

4 Ways to Add a Gas Mileage Display to Any Car [EcoModder Blog]

This week, in lieu of a Week in Numbers, I give you NBC’s 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics by Numbers.

My favorite numbers of the bunch?

• $25,000 - The amount each Olympic athlete is given by the USOC for a gold medal.
• 44 - The number countries with apparel deals with Nike at the Olympics, there are 204 countries participating in total.
• 0 - How much Michael Phelps will pay to eat pizza at Pizza Hut for the next year (all because he broke Spitz’s single-Games gold medal count record, I had no idea he did that)

CNN reported that the Philippine government has offered 9.5 million pesos to any athlete who brings home their first-ever Olympic gold medal. The government ponied up the first five mil and private businesses kicked up the remaining. According to Wikipedia, there are 15 competitors in 8 sports in the 2008 Games and their chances look as good as they did the last two games where they blanked on medals in Sydney and Athens.

According to The Epoch Times, China spent approximately 2.0 billion yuan (~$292 million USD) on its delegation across the four years of preparation. China has 639 competitors in the Beijing Games, putting the cost of each competitor at about half a million dollars over four years.

According to NPR, the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics cost about $100 million. That makes it about half a million per minute ($476k) and about eight grand spent each second. Absolutely AMAZING.

Finally, Beijing National Stadium, also known as the Bird’s Nest, cost an estimated 4 billion yuan, or about half a billion US dollars according to Wikipedia.

And absolutely no mention of Michael Phelps and 8. Well, until I mentioned that I didn’t mention it.

When the first iPhone was released, the sticker price was six hundred dollars. That’s six hundred just for the unit, not counting the monthly plan. A scant two months later, Apple dropped the price by two hundred bones and gave all those suckers early adopters some vouchers to use at their store. And you know what? All those early adopters are still lining up to get their fix. L. Ron Hubbard ain’t got crap on Steve Jobs.

$999.99 is the price for Armin Heinrich’s I Am Rich iPhone app that does absolutely nothing except flaunt your wealth to the world. It was available for one day until Apple pulled it but that didn’t stop eight people from buying it. Six were from the United States, one was from Germany, and the last was from France. Heinrich pocketed a cool $5,600 for his trouble. Not bad.

It took Apple a mere 75 days to sell one million iPhones. Seventy five days… that’s 13,333.33 iPhones a day. The scary part is that iPhones flew off the shelves most rapidly after the price drop on September 5th. From September 5th to September 9th (the day they sold their one millionth), they sold 27,000 iPhones a day versus the 9,000 a day they were previously recording.

Now I’m going to go out and buy an iPhone.

That’s the projected deficit for the U.S. Government in 2009.

Kind of takes your breath away, doesn’t it?

According to the Federal Reserve, report in a NYTimes article, Americans have nearly a trillion dollars of revolving debt (which includes credit card debt). That’s a lot of debt… oh yeah, total consumer debt is $2.57 trillion. Amazing right?

Those are two really big numbers huh? Well, if you were John Adams Kansas, President - Banking of Capital One Financial Corp., then that top number would be your total compensation package for 2007. If you were Richard D. Fairbank, Chairman, President and CEO of Capital One Financial Corp., then that bottom number would be your total compensation for 2007. In fact, if you were Richard D. Fairbank, you’d probably be upset about your number because it’s 45.5% less than what you got in 2006, which was nearly $37.5 million dollars.

Before people get all upset that they’re making so much money, their salaries are $0. Their bonuses are $0. It’s all in stock. I’m not pointing their salaries because I think it’s excessive, though they might be, I wanted to point out how ridiculous those numbers are. (Data taken from the July 2008 issue of Cards & Payments)

This is the most amazing debt story I’ve ever heard. When the story starts, Diane McLeod tells us that she has $286,000 in debt. Her story is one of misstep after misstep, from rolling her credit card debt (~$25k) into an adjustable rate mortgage ($10k in fees, plus it adjusted) to raiding her 401(k) (which cost $3k in taxes, paid in credit cards). Along the way, she was given shoddy advice from people with their own interests in mind. I’m not absolving her of responsibility but someone had to extend her this credit. She’s not drowning in debt, she’s halfway to the center of the Earth.

This figure is again from the New York Times series The Debt Trap (click on Start and then the lifetime link). The average household has thirteen credit cards. 40% of households carry a credit card balance. While having 13 cards doesn’t mean you’ll use them all, you can’t escape the 40% figure… especially when you couple it with that first number.

Guns won’t bring down America, debt will.

That’s the total minimum financial commitment to owning an iPhone 3G phone. Nearly two thousand dollars. Add a few more bells and whistles and you’re talking more. If you’re curious about the total cost of owning one elsewhere, CBC News has a cool interactive map you can use to navigate the world. (link courtesy of Loonies and Sense)

I don’t know where the number stands now but the bigscreen.com announced in January, before HD-DVD knew it lost the format wars to BluRay, that vendors had sold nearly a million HD-DVD players. Those million customers soon discovered they owned a dead format rebranded as “up-sampling DVD players.” Game over. Thanks for your money.

Early adopters of the Microsoft XBox 360, myself included, discovered that the units were experiencing catastrophic technical problems. Later models solved some of the earlier problems and Microsoft increased their warranty to three years and had to take a $1.06 billion write-down in the second quarter of 2007.

I couldn’t let Apple off the hook on this one… a scant 68 days after releasing the iPhone for the first time, Apple slashed prices by $200. The 8GB iPhone’s price dropped from $599 to $399. Those who bought within 14 days could get a refund of the difference but the rest had to be happy with a $100 credit at Apple stores. Steve Jobs is too hip and too rich to care about you, but keep on buying his products!

According to howstuffworks.com, the United States consumes about 400 million gallons of oil a day across 100 million households, or approximately 4 gallons per household per day. If you drive a 25 MPG car, that’s a hundred miles of driving a day. How does your household stack up? You using more or less than your four?

If we melt Greenland, we can get 50 billion barrels of oil. Actually, it’s already melting and oil companies already have oil exploration licenses to start poking around in Greenland. So, really we need to do nothing differently. Oh, and I heard penguins and polar bears make excellent soups so let’s melt the ice from under them too.

General Motors, as of the recent IRS report, has sold a mere 8,485 hybrid vehicles. By comparison, Toyota crushed the 60,000 limit and Honda just recently exceeded it. Ford is over halfway there. GM is, well, slightly slower out of the gate but remember the tortoise beat the hare.

The Tesla Roadster is a fully electric car made by Tesla Motors. On a single charge, it can travel 220 miles with an efficient of a reported 4.7 mi/kW·h which is the equivalent of 135 MPG. $100,000 is the price of one of the Tesla’s “Signature One Hundred” in all its tricked out glory. Fortune just published an article yesterday about the Tesla.

Have a great weekend everyone!

The Dow opened on January 2nd, 2008 at 13,261.82 and opened on July 1st, 2008 at 11,344.64 - for a spectacular fall of over 1,917 points. Don’t calculate the percentage, it’ll just make you throw up.


This week, a barrel of oil (NYMEX Sweet Crude) topped $145. A barrel of oil cost an average of $15.70 ten years ago (adjusted to 2007 dollars). I will be investing in a Flintstone-mobile. Here are the latest energy prices on Bloomberg. *sigh*


Can someone with better math, or better descriptive skills, explain why a 50% difference is only considered “slight?” We expected 40,000 fewer jobs in June, there are actually 62,000 fewer jobs… but it’s only slight. “Job losses in June were slightly worse than the 40,000 expected by economists surveyed…”


Starbucks to close 600 stores with 12,000 affected workers. Stockholders rejoice as SBUX jumped 4.6% and MBA professors sob as one of the most referenced marketing case studies gets a black eye. At least there’s always Southwest.



Royal Caribbean’s Project Genesis, a cruise ship yet to be named, will be the most expensive and largest cruise ship ever constructed and will cost a mere $1.24 billion dollars. It will carry 6,400 passengers, weight 220,000 gross registered tons, and displace more water than a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. (it wasn’t announced this week, in fact it was announced over a year ago, but it was worth putting in this week just because!)

Have a great Fourth of July Weekend!

(I’m going to start doing Week in Numbers [WIN] every Friday afternoon, please let me know what you think!)