Tesoro, Seawater AC, Hoku Scientific and Wall Street

Written by Howard Dicus - hdicus@kgmb9.com

January 15, 2008 01:16 PM

Part I:

Tesoro, owner of the larger of Hawaii's two refineries, says gasoline price margins have shrunk so it will make less gasoline. Tesoro says its Kapolei refinery will be dialed back to as little as 74% capacity.

Here's an alternative to oil for downtown office buildings. Honolulu Seawater Air Conditioning has lined up more than 10 million dollars in equity financing. U.S. and Swedish investors are chipping in for a zero emissions seawater air conditioning plant. Downtown building owners could save a fifth of their air conditioning costs by using seawater instead of a system-based on freon.

Hoku Scientific has installed two solar power systems on neighbor islands. Its newest turnkey photovoltaic systems are at the Lihue and Kona operations of Paradise Beverages. The company uses a lot of power to refrigerate its warehouses, since it's the Hawaii distributor of Coors, Corona, Miller and Heineken.

Part II:

There's a lot going on this morning to shake up the financial markets, so I'm going to walk you through it, item by item.

Citicorp lost almost 10 billion dollars in the last three months of the year. Its new CEO has written down another 18 billion in bad mortgage debt. He's cutting 4,000 jobs, he cut the dividend 41%, and he's raising cash by selling part ownership of the company to Prince Walid of Saudi Arabia.

Merrill Lynch had a similar announcement this morning. Its own new CEO has raised tens of billions of dollars by selling part ownership to investors from Kuwait and Korea.

New from Washington D.C., inflation at the wholesale level rose more than 6% last year, the largest jump in 26 years.

Christmas for retailers nationwide was less ho-ho-ho than ho-hum. The December retail sales report, which economists thought would be flat, was actually down four tenths. Take out auto sales and it was still down.

With all this bad news, it's no surprise that stocks are down. The Nikkei fell below 14-thousand and in Honk Kong the Hang Seng index lost more than 300 points. In London, the Footsie has lost 2% of its entire value.The Dow is down 140 points.