cryptogon.com

Loans secured by more than 1,500 hotels with a total outstanding balance of $24.5 billion may be in danger of default, according to Realpoint LLC, a credit rating company that tracks commercial mortgage-backed securities. Some of the biggest loans, put on the company’s watch list because of late payments, decreasing occupancies or cash flow, were made to luxury properties where rooms can cost more than $850 a night.

“All segments are showing signs of distress but the luxury segment carries much higher loan balances and is more clearly affected,” Frank Innaurato, managing director of CMBS analytical services at Horsham, Pennsylvania-based Realpoint, said in a telephone interview.

Lodging owners are struggling after adding rooms and properties at the peak of the CMBS market from 2004 to 2007, when $83.4 billion in hotel-backed securities was issued. Occupancy among chains with the costliest rooms fell to 60 percent in the first half from 70 percent a year earlier, according to Smith Travel Research. The decline was the industry’s largest for that period.

The disclosure, GATA says, contradicts denials provided by the Fed to GATA in 2001 and suggests that the Fed is indeed very much involved in the surreptitious international central bank manipulation of the gold price particularly and the currency markets generally.

The Fed’s disclosure came this week in a letter to GATA’s Washington-area lawyer, William J. Olson of Vienna, Virginia (http://www.lawandfreedom.com/), denying GATA’s administrative appeal of a freedom-of-information request to the Fed for information about gold swaps, transactions in which monetary gold is temporarily exchanged between central banks or between central banks and bullion banks. (See the International Monetary Fund’s treatise on gold swaps here: http://www.imf.org/external/bopage/pdf/99-10.pdf.)

The letter, dated September 17 and written by Federal Reserve Board member Kevin M. Warsh (see http://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/bios/board/warsh.htm), formerly a member of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, detailed the Fed’s position that the gold swap records sought by GATA are exempt from disclosure under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.

Warsh wrote in part: “In connection with your appeal, I have confirmed that the information withheld under Exemption 4 consists of confidential commercial or financial information relating to the operations of the Federal Reserve Banks that was obtained within the meaning of Exemption 4. This includes information relating to swap arrangements with foreign banks on behalf of the Federal Reserve System and is not the type of information that is customarily disclosed to the public. This information was properly withheld from you.”

The Fed would borrow from the funds via reverse repurchase agreements involving some of the huge portfolio of mortgage-backed securities and U.S. Treasuries that it acquired as it fought the financial crisis, the newspaper reported, without citing any sources.

This would drain liquidity from the financial system, helping to avoid a burst of inflation as the economy recovered.

The FT said Fed officials had in recent days held discussions with market participants on how it might implement such a scheme.

The Fed is considering whether to conduct a pilot scheme, but worries such a test might be seen as a signal that the central bank was about to drain liquidity on a large scale, the newspaper said. In the near term, a big drain remains unlikely, it added.

The central bank held interest rates at close to zero on Wednesday and upgraded its assessment of the U.S. economy, saying growth had returned after a deep recession.

The Fed also said it would slow its purchases of mortgage debt to extend that program’s life until the end of March, in a move toward withdrawing the central bank’s extraordinary support for the economy and markets during the contraction.

The idea of the Fed using reverse repos to help unwind policy is not new; Fed chairman Ben Bernanke identified them as a potential means of soaking up liquidity in July. But the market had previously expected the repos to be done with primary dealers, including former Wall Street investment banks.

The CCTV technology identifies suspicious individuals and behaviour and then acts to stamp out crimes before they happen.

When a crime looks like it is going to occur, the system will verbally warn the perpetrator and then if necessary alert the nearest police officer.

ISIS, short for Integrated Sensor Information System, is being developed by a team at Queen’s University Belfast at its Centre for Secure Information Technologies.

It is designed to work with the extensive network of CCTV cameras already installed on buses and trains as well as in stations, airports and on the street.

It centres on specially developed “computer vision technology” that analyses images picked up by CCTV and is able to profile individuals to see if they pose a risk and then to check for patterns of behaviour that may be suspicious or anti-social.

The computer constantly assesses the situation and if it becomes a major risk alerts a control room who can send out a verbal warning or alert officers nearby to stampout crimes before they occur.

Criteria that ISIS will look for are likely to include clothing such as hooded tops, sudden movements, odd behaviour such as moving seats and verbal aggression.

Metal detectors, motion detectors and even microphones could eventually be added to sharpen the system further.

“We have four million cameras across the country at present but their impact on anti-social behaviour is actually fairly negligible,” said Dr Paul Miller, who is part of the 50-strong team.

“We aim to develop a system which helps to make crime-free buses, trains, stations and airports a reality. We think it will be a strong deterrent.”

Headquartered in Crystal City, Virginia, just outside Washington, the FBI’s National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) maintains a hodgepodge of data sets packed with more than 1.5 billion government and private-sector records about citizens and foreigners, the documents show, bringing the government closer than ever to implementing the “Total Information Awareness” system first dreamed up by the Pentagon in the days following the Sept. 11 attacks.

Such a system, if successful, would correlate data from scores of different sources to automatically identify terrorists and other threats before they could strike. The FBI is seeking to quadruple the known staff of the program.

Data from Chandrayaan-1 also suggests that water is still being formed on the Moon. Scientists said the breakthrough — to be announced by Nasa at a press conference today — would change the face of lunar exploration.

The discovery is a significant boost for India in its space race against China. Dr Mylswamy Annadurai, the mission’s project director at the Indian Space Research Organisation in Bangalore, said: “It’s very satisfying.”

The FBI is assisting state and local police with their investigation, the law enforcement source told The Post’s Spencer S. Hsu. The law enforcement source was unsure of the cause of death.

It is a federal crime to attack a federal worker during or because of his federal job. Sparkman was an Eagle scout who moved to southeast Kentucky to be a local director for the Boy Scouts of America, his mother told the AP. He later became a substitute teacher in Laurel County and earned extra money as a Census field worker.

The Census Bureau has suspended operations in Clay County, Ken. where Sparkman was found pending the investigation. Hundreds of thousands of temporary workers across the country walk door-to-door conducting various demographic surveys. The Census will hire more than 1 million temporary workers to conduct follow-up interviews for next year’s 2010 decennial Census.

“We are deeply saddened by the loss of our co-worker, and our thoughts and prayers are with William Sparkman’s son, other family and friends. We are monitoring the developments closely,” Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said in a statement Wednesday night. The Census Bureau is part of the Commerce Department. “Mr. Sparkman was a shining example of the hard-working men and women employed by the Census Bureau. The work they do on a daily basis is not easy but is a great and important service to our nation.”

There was no immediate comment from Census Director Robert M. Groves. Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry may also comment on the situation later today at an event in Washington. He has spoken frequently about the denigration of federal employees.

News of the apparent murder of a Census employee comes during an already busy period for the Census Bureau. Groves told a Congressional panel on Tuesday that he fears next year’s headcount will be impaired by the recession and continuing concerns about immigration. The agency also recently cut ties to the controversial community organizing group ACORN, one of more than 10,000 civic organizations, churches and corporations recruited to help increase participation in next year’s Census.