Saturday, April 14, 2012

Tuesday April 17 Housing and Economic stories

TOP STORIES:
Ranks of Working Poor Grow in Europe - (www.nytimes.com) When Melissa Dos Santos leaves her job at the end of each day, she goes home to an unlikely place: a tiny trailer in a campground 30 miles north of Paris, where scores of people who can barely make ends meet are living on a sprawling lot originally designed as a bucolic retreat for vacationers. “I grew up in a house; living in a campground isn’t the same,” Ms. Dos Santos, 21, said wistfully. Her dreams of a more normal life in an apartment with her boyfriend evaporated when they both took minimum-wage jobs — she in a supermarket and he as a Paris street sweeper — after months of searching fruitlessly for better-paying work. “People call us marginal,” she said. “Little by little, it’s eating us up.”
Why Are the Fed and SEC Keeping Wall Street’s Secrets? - (www.bloomberg.com) Getting what should be public information about major Wall Street firms can be maddeningly difficult. Bloomberg News discovered this in its ultimately successful effort to get information on the $1.2 trillion in “secret loans” the Fed doled out during the financial crisis. And I’ve had no small experience of it myself. As I started each of my three books -- about Lazard Freres, Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) -- I submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to the appropriate government agencies (the Securities Exchange Commission, the State Department and the Federal Reserve) to obtain whatever documents, memos and e-mails they had about these companies and their senior executives.
"Londongrad" on edge after attack on Russian banker - (www.reuters.com) A failed hit on a former Russian banker in London has sent a chill through Russian immigrant circles and shone an unwelcome spotlight on a hidden criminal underworld encroaching on the British capital. The shooting also raised concerns Britain might be turning into a playground for Russian mobsters as gangland violence appears to spill over Russian borders into European capitals. London is the chosen home for many Russians seeking a haven from the cut-throat world of their homeland where, 20 years after the Soviet collapse, they have little faith in the rule of law. Now, some exiles say, few are safe in a city known affectionately as "Londongrad" to many of its Russian inhabitants.
'Massive Wealth Destruction' Is About to Hit Investors: Faber - (www.cnbc.com) Runaway government debts have triggered uncontrolled money printing that in turn will lead to inflation that will decimate portfolios, according to the latest forecast from "Dr. Doom" Marc Faber. Investors, particularly those in the "well-to-do" category, could lose about half their total wealth in the next few years as the consequences pile up from global government debt problems, Faber, the author of the Gloom Boom & Doom Report, said on CNBC. Efforts to stem the debt problems have seen the Federal Reserve expand its balance sheet to nearly $3 trillion and other central banks implement aggressive liquidity programs as well, which Faber sees producing devastating inflation as well as other consequences.
EU Lenders Kick Troubles Down Road - (online.wsj.com) Even as the European banking crisis shows signs of easing, lenders across the Continent are engaging in a variety of maneuvers to avoid, or at least delay, coming to terms with potential problems lurking on their books. Some banks are concocting unorthodox structures designed to improve all-important capital ratios, without raising new capital or moving unwanted assets off their balance sheets. Others are engaging in complex transactions with struggling customers to help temporarily avoid loan defaults—but possibly exposing the lenders to future problems. Banks now have greater flexibility to pursue such tactics because of the roughly €1 trillion ($1.33 trillion) of cheap three-year loans that the European Central Bank recently handed out to at least 800 lenders. The program, known as the Long-Term Refinancing Operation, or LTRO, is widely credited with averting a possible catastrophe as banks struggled to pay off their maturing debts.

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