Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Thursday January 31 Housing and Economic stories


TOP STORIES:

Muni arrives in S.F.'s top overtime spot - (www.sfgate.com) San Francisco municipal overtime spiked $18 million over budget in the first year of Mayor Ed Lee's administration - with one Muni mechanic raking in an extra $163,856. Khoa Trinh, who heads the Muni signal shop, more than doubled his base of $106,036 by clocking in 1,954 hours of overtime - which is roughly equal to working an extra 40 hours a week, every week, at $83.85 an hour. Add in more than $23,000 in premium pay and shift differentials, and Trinh's salary for fiscal 2011-12 totaled $293,370. As for how he could pile up all those hours: "We had to do a lot of work at night, when the trains weren't running, to get the new train control system working," said Muni chief Ed Reiskin. While Trinh was tops in OT earnings, Muni Transit Supervisor Evette Geer-Stevens clocked the most hours - with 2,262 hours of overtime, for $147,446. According to Reiskin, Geer-Stevens is one of the supervisors you often see on street corners, keeping an eye on the buses and trains - and helping out in emergencies. Last year, 10 Muni supervisors made more than $100,000 in overtime - bringing their pay to $200,000-plus apiece.

Ranks of working poor increasing - (www.washingtonpost.com) Nearly a third of the nation’s working families earn salaries so low that they struggle to pay for their necessities, according to a new report. The ranks of the so-called working poor have grown even as the nation has created new jobs for 27 consecutive months and is showing other signs of shaking off the worst effects of the recession. “Although many people are returning to work, they are often taking jobs with lower wages and less job security, compared with the middle class jobs they held before the downturn,” said a report released Tuesday by the Working Poor Families Project, a national initiative aimed at fostering state policies to help low-income working families. With the nation’s economy in recovery, the report said, more than 70 percent of low-income families and half of all poor families were working by 2011, the report said. The problem is they did not earn enough to cover their basic living expenses.

U.S. Crop-Insurance Claims Rise to Record After 2012 Drought - (www.bloomberg.com) The worst U.S. drought since the 1930s led to record payouts on crop-insurance claims, with farmers collecting $11.581 billion as of yesterday for damage in 2012, government data show. Payments are up 6.8 percent from 2011, when claims reached the previous record of $10.843 billion, according to a Risk Management Agency report published today on the U.S. Department of Agriculture website. In 2010, the total was $4.251 billion. Last year’s Midwest drought sent corn and soybean prices surging to records as output fell, while dry fields across the Great Plains left winter-wheat conditions in November at their worst since at least 1985, when the USDA began collecting the data.

Hedge funds nurse heavy losses after UPS-TNT deal collapses - (www.reuters.com) United Parcel Service's decision to abandon its 5.2 billion euro bid for TNT Express has left hedge funds nursing potential losses of more than $700 million, as the Dutch delivery firm's shares slid. So-called merger arbitrage funds - which make money betting on the outcomes of corporate events including takeovers - are estimated to have owned around 30 percent of TNT shares before Monday's news European anti-trust regulators would veto it, several sources familiar with the sector said. With TNT shares losing half their value when the market opened and ending the day down 41 percent, funds collectively could have lost more than 540 million euros. "This was one of the only large, liquid, all-cash deals in Europe right now. It's going to have been really painful across the street," one merger arbitrage manager who owned TNT shares before selling them on Monday morning told Reuters.

Fitch warns on US and Spanish ratings - (www.reuters.com) The United States faces a "material risk" of losing its triple-A status if there is a repeat of the wrangling seen in 2011 over raising the country's self-imposed debt ceiling, credit ratings firm Fitch said on Tuesday. Fitch also said Spain will continue to face downgrade risks even if it avoids having to ask for a bailout, while Ireland could claw its way back into the single-A rating band if a deal is struck to share the burden of its banking debts. Despite December's deal by U.S. politicians to avoid the so-called "fiscal cliff" of spending cuts and tax hikes, Fitch's head of sovereign ratings, David Riley, said pressure on the country's rating was increasing.




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