Archive for the 'Elite' Category
New York Midwives Lose Right to Deliver Babies at Home
May 16th, 2010Via: New York Times: As residents of the world’s consumer capital, New Yorkers can have anything delivered to their door at any time. They can have their hair cut in the living room, have champagne and caviar rushed to them on a whim, enjoy a shiatsu massage in their own bed or invite a clairvoyant […]
Prominent Mexican Politician Kidnapped
May 16th, 2010Via: Reuters: A major figure in Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s conservative party was missing and feared dead on Saturday after his abandoned car was found with signs of violence, the attorney general’s office said. Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, 69, an outspoken lawyer who was a presidential candidate for Calderon’s National Action Party, or PAN, in […]
Detroit to Use Federal Money to Demolish Thousands of Abandoned Homes
May 14th, 2010Via: Wall Street Journal: Detroit is finally chipping away at a glut of abandoned homes that has been piling up for decades, and intends to take advantage of warm weather and new federal funding to demolish some 3,000 buildings by the end of September. Mayor Dave Bing has pledged to knock down 10,000 structures in […]
Sarkozy Threatened to Quit Euro in Showdown with Germany
May 14th, 2010Via: EUbusiness: French President Nicolas Sarkozy threatened to pull his country out of the euro currency group to force Germany to help Greece with its debt crisis, El Pais newspaper reported Friday, quoting Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. Sarkozy made the threat at a Brussels summit of EU leaders last Friday that sealed […]
Morgan Stanley Conjured Doomed CDO Product, Shorted It
May 14th, 2010Via: Bloomberg: In June 2006, a year before the subprime mortgage market collapsed, Morgan Stanley created a cluster of investments doomed to fail even if default rates stayed low — then bet against its concoction. Known as the Baldwin deals, the $167 million of synthetic collateralized debt obligations had an unusual feature, according to sales […]
Volcker Sees Euro ‘Disintegration’ Risk From Greece
May 14th, 2010Via: Bloomberg: Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker said he’s concerned that the euro area may break up after the Greek fiscal crisis that sparked an unprecedented bailout by the region’s members. “You have the great problem of a potential disintegration of the euro,” Volcker, 82, said in a speech in London yesterday. “The essential […]
Bank of England: U.S. Faces Same Problems as Greece
May 14th, 2010Via: Telegraph: Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, fears that America shares many of the same fiscal problems currently haunting Europe. He also believes that European Union must become a federalised fiscal union (in other words with central power to tax and spend) if it is to survive. Just two of the nuggets […]
EU Bids for Power Over National Budgets
May 13th, 2010Via: CBC: Senior administrators of the European Union proposed on Wednesday that they be given unprecedented power to scrutinize the spending plans of countries before national parliaments vote on those budgets. The EU’s executive commission’s bid was a move to crack down on widespread government overspending and to begin to deal with the debt crisis […]
U.S. Probes Morgan Stanley
May 13th, 2010Via: Wall Street Journal: U.S. prosecutors are investigating whether Morgan Stanley misled investors about mortgage-derivatives deals it helped design and sometimes bet against, people familiar with the matter said, in a step that intensifies Washington’s scrutiny of Wall Street in the wake of the financial crisis. Morgan Stanley arranged and marketed to investors pools of […]
Freddie Mac Has a Message for Strategic Defaulters?
May 13th, 2010This is posted mainly its comedic value. It might also serve as a study in apoplexy as applied to economic commentary. Via: ML Implode: This guy may just win my Dick-of-the-Year Award hands down. Did he just say: “simply continuing to pay the bills might be best?” I can’t be sure because there’s no way […]
