"A federal-appeals-court ruling late Monday might spare BP PLC from making hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation payments stemming from its 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said a lower-court judge in New Orleans must address whether companies seeking payouts from a 2012 settlement actually suffered damage that directly stemmed from the oil spill. That judge, Carl Barbier, had argued he only needed to ensure the court-appointed administrator overseeing the settlement was using proper accounting methods, not whether the firms’ losses were caused by the spill.

The appeals court disagreed. “The district court erred by not considering the arguments on causation,” the appeals court said in a 2-1 decision. “The issue of causation is again remanded for expeditious consideration.”

The appeals-court order also calls for a halt, at least temporarily, on payments to any business that cannot trace its injury directly back to the spill. Those payments could be made at a later date, the ruling said.

A BP spokesman said Monday’s ruling supports what the company has been saying over the past year, both inside and outside the courtroom—that the court-appointed administrator was misinterpreting the language of the oil-spill settlement."

I hereby make a prediction: Bitcoins will go down in history as the most spectacular private Ponzi scheme in history. It will dwarf anything dreamed of by Bernard Madoff. (It will never rival Social Security, however.)

To explain my position, I must do two things. First, I will describe the economics of every Ponzi scheme. Second, I will explain the Austrian school of economics' theory of the origin of money. My analysis is strictly economic. As far as I know, it is a legal scheme -- and should be.

PONZI ECONOMICS

First, someone who no one has ever heard of before announces that he has discovered a way to make money. In the case of Bitcoins, the claim is literal. The creator literally made what he says is money, or will be money. He made this money out of digits. He made it out of nothing. Think "Federal Reserve wanna-be."

Second, the individual claims that a particular market provides unexploited arbitrage opportunities. Something is selling too low. If you buy into the program now, the person running the scheme will be able to sell it high on your behalf. So, you will take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity.

Today, with high-speed trading, arbitrage opportunities last only for a few milliseconds seconds in widely traded markets. Arbitrage opportunities in the commodity futures market last for very short periods. But in the most leveraged and sophisticated of all the futures markets, namely, the currency futures markets, arbitrage opportunities last for so brief a period of time that only high-speed computer programs can take advantage of them.

MANY REPUBLICANS in Congress oppose immigration reform for fear of it creating millions of new Democratic voters and putting the White House forever beyond the GOP’s electoral reach. “This is President Obama’s number one political agenda item because he knows we will never again have a Republican president, ever, if amnesty goes into effect,” Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) told World Net Daily, an online publication, in June.

That conviction helps explain the party’s opposition to a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. But there are at least two reasons to doubt the Republican assumption. One is that any plan with a chance of enactment will contain a very long timeline for naturalizing the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants. Under the Senate bill passed in June, immigrants would have to wait 13 years to become citizens; under some House proposals, the wait would be even longer. It is folly to predict how the nation, let alone particular voting blocs, might tilt in the 2028 or 2032 presidential elections.



The second problem is the numbers themselves. Even if all 11 million of these people had magically been made eligible for citizenship — and, for those over 18, the vote — in time for last year’s presidential election, there is no evidence they would have had a major impact on the outcome or on Mr. Obama’s margin of victory in the electoral college.