KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Sunday January 1 Housing and Economic stories

Saturday, December 31, 2011

Sunday January 1 Housing and Economic stories

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Million-Dollar Nurses Show U.S. Payroll Struggle - (www.bloomberg.com) California (BCAX) has paid Lina Manglicmot $1.5 million since 2005, an average of $253,530 a year, to work as a prison nurse in the agricultural town of Soledad. Manglicmot is one of 42 state nurses who each made more than $1 million in those six years, mostly by tapping overtime, according to payroll data compiled by Bloomberg News. Together, those nurses collected $47.5 million. In 2008, Manglicmot was paid $331,346, including $211,257 in overtime. The extra pay that allows some nurses to triple their regular compensation underscores a broader trend in California, where government workers are paid more than in other states for similar duties and civil-service job protections hamper efforts to close budget gaps. Governor Jerry Brown said this week that revenue will fall short of expectations, triggering $1 billion in cuts to school busing, libraries and care for children, the elderly and the disabled, among other programs.

Analysis: Emerging borrowers face rollover risk, default threat - (www.reuters.com) Scarce dollar funding and a retrenchment in bank lending will force up premiums for emerging market countries and companies refinancing debt next year, adding to strains on public finances and potentially triggering a surge in corporate defaults. JPMorgan calculates that emerging sovereign debtors will need to find $63.6 billion to cover coupon and redemption payments in 2012 while corporates must raise $107 billion. Total issuance should be around $245 billion, the bank forecasts. Such volumes would not usually portend difficulty -- even this year, emerging bond issuance has been over $250 billion, not far off last year's record. But with markets still awaiting a solution to the euro zone's debt crisis, 2012 could be tough for entities that need to refinance debt or secure new money.

MF Global Used Customers’ Money Days Before Company’s Failure, CME Says - (www.bloomberg.com) MF Global Holdings Ltd. used about $700 million of customer funds to “meet liquidity issues” in the days prior to its bankruptcy, according to CME Group Inc. (CME), which had auditing authority over the failed futures broker. CME Group detailed its dealings with MF Global in documents released yesterday by the oversight panel of the House Financial Services Committee. Christine Serwinski, chief financial officer for North America at MF Global, and Edith O’Brien, a treasurer, told Mike Procajlo, an exchange auditor, at around 1 a.m. on Oct. 31 in Serwinski’s Chicago office that the customer money was transferred on Oct. 27 and Oct. 28 and possibly Oct. 26, according to a CME Group timeline.

Spain Unpaid Bills May Haunt Rajoy as States Crave Liquidity - (www.bloomberg.com) Spanish Prime Minister-electMariano Rajoy is set to inherit billions of euros of unpaid bills along with the euro region’s third-largest budget deficit. Spain’s 8,000 municipalities and 17 semi-autonomous regions are suffering from a cash squeeze as many are shut out of markets, prompting them to delay paying suppliers. Regions’ debt rose 1.5 percent to 135 billion euros ($176 billion) in the third quarter the Bank of Spain said today. Catalonia had the highest debt, at 39.3 billion euros. Companies are being paid 157 days late on average, about three times the legal payment delay, according to the Platform Against Late Payment, a federation of employer groups, and pharmaceutical companies say they are owed 5.83 billion euros by public hospitals. While Rajoy has pledged to help local administrations pay suppliers, that may add to the state’s debt burden and undermine efforts to lower sovereign borrowing costs.

French attacks on UK grow louder - (www.ft.com) The governor of France’s central bank has said Britain is more deserving of losing its top-notch credit rating than France as Paris braces itself for a potential downgrade of the country’s triple A status. Christian Noyer, head of the Bank of France, said a French downgrade would not be justified on economic fundamentals. On that basis, he said: “They should begin by downgrading the United Kingdom which has bigger deficits, more debt, higher inflation, less growth than us and where credit is shrinking.” Accusing the agencies of being driven by political factors, Mr Noyer said they had become “incomprehensible and irrational”. “They launch threats, even though [eurozone] states have taken strong and positive decisions ... a downgrade does not seem to me justified based on economic fundamentals,” he told Le Télégramme newspaper in Brittany.