Archive for the 'Economy' Category
French Farmer is New Sun King
March 2nd, 2009This is an interesting piece that looks at how France is using guaranteed contracts to buy power to stimulate alternative energy projects. It sounds better toward the end, where they’re talking more about decentralization, with risk and profits being spread around to larger numbers of people. Via: Reuters: Bright winter sun dissolves a blanket of […]
Laid-Off Professionals Turn to ‘Survival Jobs’
March 2nd, 2009This reads like Cryptogon circa 2004-2005. During the final days at the last corporate job that I would ever have, I tried to tell those guys that I worked with… “Don’t blindly sell yourself to another criminal organization. They’ll just screw you again and again. Play the next one to win. Get out of debt. […]
AIG Enters Record Books with $61.7 Billion Quarterly Loss
March 2nd, 2009Via: Reuters: American International Group Inc posted a $61.7 billion fourth-quarter loss — the biggest quarterly loss in corporate history — after reaching a revised rescue deal with the U.S. government that wards off for now the prospect of crippling credit rating downgrades. The massive quarterly loss, equal to $22.95 a share, was AIG’s fifth […]
UK: Contingency Plan for Deployment of British Army in Case of Bank Riots
March 2nd, 2009Let me know if there’s a better source on this. Via: Daily Express: TOP secret contingency plans have been drawn up to counter the threat posed by a “summer of discontent” in Britain. The “double-whammy” of the worst economic crisis in living memory and a motley crew of political extremists determined to stir up civil […]
Gordon Brown: ‘Globalisation is Not an Option , it is a Fact’
March 2nd, 2009I have obtained secret surveillance video from inside Number 10 that sheds some light on Gordon Brown’s “Global New Deal”: Via: Times Online: Historians will look back and say this was no ordinary time but a defining moment: an unprecedented period of global change, and a time when one chapter ended and another began. The […]
Delphi Allowed to Cancel Benefits for 15,000 Workers
March 1st, 2009Via: Bloomberg: Delphi Corp., the bankrupt auto- parts maker, won permission to cancel health-care benefits for 15,000 current and former salaried workers, saving $1.1 billion as it tries to emerge from court protection amid falling vehicle sales. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain in New York issued the ruling today after witnesses for Troy, Michigan-based Delphi […]
Arsonists Torch Berlin Porsches, BMWs on Economic Woe
February 28th, 2009Via: Bloomberg: When Berlin resident Simone Klostermann returned from vacation and couldn’t find her Mercedes SLK, she thought it had been towed. Police told her the 35,000- euro ($45,000) car had been torched. “They’d squirted something flammable into the car’s engine block in the gap between the windshield and the hood,” said Klostermann. “The engine […]
New York: Apartment Buyers Abandoning 6-Figure Deposits
February 28th, 2009Via: New York Times: At 304 Spring Street, a sleek condominium building in SoHo with stunning Hudson River views, the buyer for the duplex penthouse recently decided he would not go through with the deal and walked away from a $780,000 deposit. At 1120 Park Avenue, a classic prewar co-op filled with multimillion-dollar apartments, it […]
Schwarzenegger Declares California Drought Emergency
February 28th, 2009Via: AP: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency Friday because of three years of below-average rain and snowfall in California, a step that urges urban water agencies to reduce water use by 20 percent. “This drought is having a devastating impact on our people, our communities, our economy and our environment, making today’s […]
FDIC Raising Fees on Banks, Adds Emergency Fee
February 27th, 2009Via: AP: Facing a cascade of bank failures depleting the deposit insurance fund, federal regulators on Friday raised the fees paid by U.S. financial institutions and levied an emergency premium in a bid to collect $27 billion this year. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. now expects that bank failures will cost the insurance fund around […]
