Updates: Following the Money

The window is closing on Seth Carey's casino. This morning's Boston Globe is reporting that two North Shore racetracks, Suffolk Downs and Wonderland Greyhound Park, are combining operations, perhaps with the goal of launching "a premium resort-style casino." This is bad news for Rumford lawyer Carey and his envisioned Evergreen Mountain Four Season Resort & Casino in Oxford County. With gaming revenues stalling nationwide, Carey's only chance for a viable enterprise rests on further delay in Massachusetts, where Governor Deval Patrick supports the idea of casino development. Mainers are still waiting for details from the Evergreen campaign regarding exact location and investor support.

Wall Street banks raise money any way they can. Desperate for cash, Merrill Lynch is expected to cut its dividend to shareholders by at least half. This long overdue step would be a first (Merrill has never cut its dividend since it became a public company in 1971) and follows the company's announcement two weeks ago that it sold a tranche of mortgage-backed securities at a huge discount to face value. Meanwhile, Lehman Brothers is selling off a third of its commercial real-estate assets, three-quarters of which are mortgages sure to be be discounted.

But the money keeps going out faster than it comes in. Last week Citigroup and UBS joined Merrill in agreeing to buy back auction-rate securities sold to retail clients earlier this year. Combined price tag: $40 billion (and climbing, as JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley have just settled). For pushing ARS, several of these firms have been fined by government regulators to the total tune of $200 million. And the write-downs for mortgage-backed securities are never-ending. J.P. Morgan revealed in a 10-Q filed Monday with the SEC that its collateralized debt lost $1.5 billion in value just in the past month. That's 75% of the firm's second-quarter profit--gone.

MDOT puts pavings projects on ice. Apparently $105 million does not go as far as it used to. The Maine Department of Transportation originally planned to pave 825 miles of the state's roads in 2008. But with the price of liquid asphalt jumping 150% since January, the Department is going to come up 85 miles short for the money budgeted.

The news has Peru residents patting themselves on the back. In 2007 the Town voted to borrow $400,000 to address a backlog of local road projects. At the time there was no competition for contractors from the state, which had placed a moratorium on paving projects pending the results of a bond referendum. Peru's timing looks even better now that paving costs have skyrocketed, easily justifying the borrowing costs of the ten-year loan from the Maine Bond Bank.