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Detroit's Newest Deadbeat: Mayor Dave Bing - (www.mfi-miami.com) Bing Defaults On City Loan And Leaves Major Eyesore For City To Clean Up,
In 2007, before he was mayor of Detroit and as his automotive supply business
began to implode because of the financial crisis, Dave Bing had a great idea
save himself from financial ruin. He was going to get a group of
investors together and build a some high priced condos on the Detroit River
overlooking Canada. The City of Detroit, then under the reign of now convicted
criminal Kwame Kilpatrick liked the idea and gave Bing and his partners a loan
for $700,000 to help with construction costs. Sounds good, right? Well
not exactly. It’s turns out Bing was either living on Bizarro World or was just clueless to the
what was going on in the real estate market when he and his buddies decided to
do this venture. Major mortgage lenders like Countrywide Financial were going
bust and property values in Detroit were beginning to plummet. Obviously
Bing slept through the alarms that were going off on Wall Street as one by one
mortgage lenders were collapsing. Naturally, Watermark Development fell apart
and the unpaid loan for $700,000 and an abandoned building now home to crack
addicts, crack whores and skanky prostitutes was brushed under the carpet by a
population and a city government were consumed by the sorry tale of Kwame
Kilpatrick. Somehow in a city suffering from corruption news burnout,
they didn’t want to hear about Dave Bing and his failed businesses but instead
looked at him like he was Grandad from The Boondocks and twice
elected him mayor. That was until Pulitizer Prize winning reporter,
Charlie LeDuff did a segment about it the other day.
Spaniards lose patience with rotten institutions - (www.reuters.com) When a
corruption scandal hit Spain's ruling party earlier this year, attention turned
to the Accounts Tribunal, an obscure body that audits public spending. Surely
this independent institution, with an annual budget of $78 million and 800
workers, could shed light on allegations in the media that a former treasurer
for the People's Party had run a slush fund from party headquarters. It soon
emerged, however, that the watchdog lacked teeth. The Accounts Tribunal, akin
to an Auditor General's Office, had a five-year backlog in auditing party
books, so far behind that if it did unearth wrongdoing, it would be too late to
refer potential crimes to the justice system for prosecution.
The Shrinking Ranks of the Working - (www.nytimes.com) Just when you
thought it might be safe for the Fed to begin to think about taking its foot
off the accelerator, along comes a jobs report that
makes the employment picture look much less rosy than we had thought. The most
distressing part of the report came from the household survey. It found that 206,000 fewer
people were working in March than during the previous month. That would make it
the worst month in more than a year. (The more widely followed establishment survey found employment
rose by a disappointing 88,000.) The household survey also found the labor
force participation rate – the proportion of people at least 16 years of age
who were working or looking for work – fell to 63.3 percent, the lowest rate
since 1979.
Central banks move into riskier assets - (www.ft.com) Central bankers are putting cash into riskier assets and exotic currencies to compensate for ultra-low returns on US Treasuries, according to a poll of officials responsible for almost $7tn in reserves. The world’s central bankers together manage reserves worth $10.9tn, most of which is held by monetary authorities in Asia and the Middle East. The bulk of their reserves, usually accumulated from attempts to curb their currencies’ gains, are held in the form of US government debt as well as the bonds of safer eurozone sovereigns. But near-zero interest rates and large-scale money printing have cut returns on these assets to record lows. At the same time, the value of the dollar and other traditional reserve currencies has fallen, forcing central bankers to diversify or risk losses on investment portfolios.
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instructed Michigan's state employees not to attend some jobless insurance
fraud hearings - (www.freep.com) Gov. Rick Snyder signed a law in late 2011 lowering the monetary
threshold for felony unemployment insurance fraud to $3,500, down from $25,000.
It was a signal that the Legislature and the Snyder administration were getting
tough on a problem that is costly to Michigan businesses and workers because it
drives up the insurance rates both have to pay. But last October, a top
Unemployment Insurance Agency official sent an e-mail to officials instructing
them not to show up at administrative fraud hearings unless at least $15,000 in
benefits -- not counting penalties -- is at stake, according to records obtained
by the Free Press under the Freedom of Information Act.
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