Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Thursday May 29 Housing and Economic stories


Catching Social Security Disability Fraudsters in the Act – (abcnews.go.com) Rogers and his agents recently busted Ramona Hayes, 42, and Cory Eglash, 52. The two of them ran a coffee shop in Friday Harbor, a beautiful tourist town in Washington’s San Juan Islands. With the eye-catching name “Criminal Coffee” the two of them boasted their cafe was “The place to come when you’re on the run.” But when Eglash filed for disability in 2012, a review of his application turned up the fact that he was working the coffee shop and that Hayes – who also worked in the coffee shop -- was already receiving disability payments. "The uniqueness of this case shows that the system works,” Rogers said. “We get an allegation on him. He’s trying to get on social security and when we are looking at him we discover her already on.” In her application, Hayes had written she couldn’t work due to “anxiety, severe depression and PTSD." Eglash is on-record in her application to support her claim, writing that her symptoms were so severe that he doubted she could work a part time job or even put gas in her car. The government was paying her more than $1,000 a month in disability based on her application and she ultimately received over $40,000 from Social Security before she was caught. In his application, Eglash claimed to have difficulty “lifting, squatting, bending, standing, reaching, kneeling, stair climbing, seeing, memory, completing tasks, concentration, understanding, using hands, getting along with others.”

Think the euro crisis is over? These firms say it's not - (www.cnbc.com) More than half of European businesses are suffering as a result of late or non-payment of bills and invoices – cutting off vital funds that could be used to invest or employ new staff, a new survey finds.While investors have hailed the end of the euro zone sovereign debt crisis, as bond yields fall and even countries like Greece have returned to the markets, European businesses have been forced to write off 360 billion euros ($495.7 billion) of "bad" or unpaid debt, up 10 billion euros from the previous year, data shows. Polling more than 10,000 businesses across Europe, credit management group Intrum Justitia found 55 percent of companies, the highest level in the history of its annual European Payment Index, said unpaid debt is hurting their business. Nearly three out of four companies surveyed also said they had not yet felt any impact from a recovery in the euro zone with small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) at most risk, Intrum Justitia said.

Japan Posts Record Low Current-Account Surplus in Fiscal ’13 - (www.bloomberg.com) The surplus of 789.9 billion yen ($7.74 billion) in the year ended March was the smallest in data back to 1985, the Ministry of Finance said in Tokyo today. A 14 percent surge in primary income from overseas investments helped make up for a shortfall in the balance of trade and services that suffered from weak exports and a higher import bill. A slide into sustained deficits in Japan’s widest gauge of trade could make the government more reliant on foreign funding to service the world’s biggest debt burden. Keeping the balance in the black depends on how successful Japanese companies are in boosting exports following the yen’s slide and their ability to generate higher returns on overseas investments, according to economist Izumi Devalier.

China’s New Credit Declines - (www.bloomberg.com) China’s broadest measure of new credit fell last month as authorities extended their campaign to tame financial dangers even as construction and manufacturing data point to risks that the economy’s slowdown will worsen. Aggregate financing was 1.55 trillion yuan ($249 billion) in April, the People’s Bank of China said yesterday in Beijing, compared with 2.07 trillion yuan in March. New local-currency bank loans were 774.7 billion yuan, down from 1.05 trillion yuan the previous month. The figures add to signs that officials are reluctant to heed calls for monetary stimulus, with President Xi Jinping saying in remarks published May 10 that the nation needs to stay “cool-minded” amid what analysts forecast will be the weakest annual growth since 1990. PBOC Deputy Governor Liu Shiyu said the same day that shadow banking threatens to undermine the financial system, as policy makers try to rein in credit.

Senators eye bill to halt corporate tax 'inversion' - (www.reuters.com) Democratic senators on Thursday said they are considering legislation to prevent corporate inversions, an increasingly-popular transaction that involves U.S. companies reincorporating overseas to avoid U.S. taxes. Senator Finance Committee chairman Ron Wyden, a Democrat, said he wants to make it harder for U.S. companies to move their headquarters abroad to lower their taxes for inversion deals that take place on or after May 8, 2014. "I don't approach retroactivity in legislation lightly, but corporations must understand that they won't profit from abandoning the U.S.," Wyden said in a Wall Street Journal editorial posted online late Thursday. Wyden said he wants to increase to 50 percent from 20 percent the amount of stock a foreign company must own in a U.S. company for an inversion deal to legally take place. Additionally, Wyden called for comprehensive tax reform as a way to make the U.S. more business friendly.






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