Thursday, Dec 26th
Last update09:02:29 AM GMT
Economic Glance
Texas, which may balance its budget by firing thousands of teachers, plans to commit $25 million in state funds to Formula One auto racing each year for a decade.
As many as 100,000 teachers in Texas may be fired because of spending cuts to cope with the state’s budget crisis, according to Moak Casey & Associates, an Austin-based education consultant. For $25 million a year, the state could pay more than 500 teachers an average salary of $48,000.
The government accused the bank and its subsidiary MortgageIT of lying about the quality of some mortgages that were to be insured by the government. With the government insurance, Deutsche Bank and MortgageIT were allegedly able to sell weak mortgages for more than they were worth. Because the mortgages were weak, the FHA has been forced to honor insurance policies on the loans.
"You can always get someone up on charges if you work hard enough given all the regulations we have," says Ed Novak, an attorney at Polsinelli Shughart. "I don't buy that the financial industry has so weakened the statutory framework of this country that we can't pursue something."
The nation’s unnerving descent into debt began a decade ago with a choice, not a crisis. In January 2001, with the budget balanced and clear sailing ahead, the Congressional Budget Office forecast ever-larger annual surpluses indefinitely.
The outlook was so rosy, the CBO said, that Washington would have enough money by the end of the decade to pay off everything it owed. 1807 Voices of caution were swept aside in the rush to take advantage of the apparent bounty. Political leaders chose to cut taxes, jack up spending and, for the first time in U.S. history, wage two wars solely with borrowed funds.
An Anatomy of a Financial Collapse” (PDF). The 650-page indictment reveals the myriad of ways Wall Street lies, cheats, steals and defrauds on a routine basis. Arguably the report is as revealing as the Nixon tapes or the Pentagon Papers. Unfortunately, it’s too technical to get widely read. So here are the Cliff Notes.
The president of the World Bank has warned that the world is "one shock away from a full-blown crisis". Robert Zoellick cited rising food prices as the main threat to poor nations who risk "losing a generation".
He was speaking in Washington at the end of the spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Meanwhile, G20 finance chiefs, who also met in Washington, pledged financial support to help new governments in the Middle East and North Africa.
Analysts who reviewed complex mortgage bonds that ultimately collapsed and ruined the U.S. housing market were threatened with firing if they lost lucrative business, prompting faulty ratings on trillions of dollars worth of junk mortgage bonds, a Senate report said Wednesday.
The 639-page report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations confirms much of what McClatchy first reported about mismanagement by credit ratings agencies in 2009.
The Federal government is trying to establish bartering private currency of any type as an illegal enterprise in a false interpretation of the court's recent conviction of Liberty Dollar's owner Bernard Von NotHaus.
In a case where the government used conspiracy and counterfeit charges against NotHaus to establish that he intended to mint and illegally replace US currency with a private one using silver coins, the US Attorney is now parlaying the conviction to say that this ruling sets a precedent against any private barter transactions which use any form of currency besides established Federal Reserve Notes.
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