KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Friday September 12 Housing and Economic stories

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Venezuela Will Begin Fingerprinting Grocery Shoppers To Control How Much Food They Buy - (latino.foxnews.com) Venezuela's food shortage is so bad the country is mandating that people scan their fingerprints at grocery stores in order to keep people from buying too much of a single item. President Nicolas Maduro says a mandatory fingerprinting system is being implemented at grocery stores to combat food shortages. He calls it an "anti-fraud system" like the fingerprint scan the country uses for voting. In announcing the plan late Wednesday, Maduro did not say when the system would take effect, but other administration officials suggested it could be in place by December or January. The move was met with skepticism. Critics said the new system is tantamount to rationing and constitutes a breach of privacy. Others simply wondered if anything short of a systemic overhaul of the economy could help the socialist South American country's chronically bare shelves.

Soros’s Argentine Bond Bet Revealed in Lawsuit in London - (www.bloomberg.com) Less than a month after Argentina defaulted for the second time in 13 years, George Soros has suddenly emerged as a key rival of fellow billionaire Paul Singer in the legal fight over the nation’s debt. According to court documents filed in London last week, Quantum Partners LP, a fund managed by Soros’s family office, has joined a group of investors suing bond trustee Bank of New York Mellon Corp. for failing to distribute 226 million euros ($298 million) of interest payments on Argentine debt. The group, which also includes Kyle Bass’s Hayman Capital Management LP, owns more than 1.3 billion of euro-denominated bonds, court documents obtained by Bloomberg News show.

A Theory on Long-Term Economic Trends and a Sudden Crash - (www.nytimes.com) In the view of Mr. Davis and Mr. Haltiwanger, the recession just made a bad situation worse. The economy clearly had problems before the crisis. Indeed, those problems contributed to the crisis. But economists and policy makers will have to reconcile the assertion that these trends were the dominant factors with the reality that the employment rate rose in the years before the recession, then dropped sharply during the recession. The new paper, like others of its genre, basically requires belief in a big coincidence: that a short-term catastrophe happened to coincide with the intensification of long-term trends — that the economy crashed at the moment that it was already beginning a gradual descent.

Warren Buffett to help finance (25%) Burger King-Tim Hortons deal - (www.marketwatch.com) Investor Warren Buffett is helping finance Burger King Worldwide Inc.’sBKW, -4.32% planned takeover of Canadian coffee-and-doughnut chain Tim Hortons Inc. according to people familiar with the matter, in a surprise twist that could add to investors’ enthusiasm for the deal. The Berkshire Hathaway Inc. chairman and chief executive would invest in the deal in the form of preferred shares, some of the people said. Berkshire is expected to provide about 25% of the deal’s financing, one of the people said. The exact structure of Mr. Buffett’s participation in the deal remains unclear, and the discussions are ongoing. The takeover, likely valued at around $10 billion or more, could be announced in the next day or two, according to the people.

Warren Buffett has donated $1.2 BILLION to abortion groups - (www.dailymail.co.uk) America's second richest man has shown his support for abortion by donating more than $1.2 billion to pro-choice groups in the last decade, it was claimed today. Billionaire Warren Buffett, the so-called 'Sage of Omaha', has pumped cash into a series of trusts and charities offering family planning advice and care between 2001 and 2012. Planned Parenthood, NARAL and Buffett's own charity, The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, which is named after his first wife who campaigned for women's rights, were among the beneficiaries. Buffett has given $289,811,421 to Planned Parenthood alone since 2001, Fox News reported According to its webside, Planned Parenthood promotes a 'commonsense approach to women’s health and well-being, based on respect for each individual’s right to make informed, independent decisions about health, sex, and family planning'. In 2006, two years after his wife died, Buffett gave the foundation that bears her name a substantial gift. He said that he expected the gift to increase the foundation's annual expenditures by $150 million.

Hollande Replaces Cabinet as EU Austerity Rebellion Stirs - (www.bloomberg.com) French President Francois Hollande’s firing of malcontent minister Arnaud Montebourgrisks unleashing the ruling Socialist Party’s chief critic of budget cuts, adding to an austerity backlash stirring across Europe. Montebourg, 51, industry minister for the past two years, will not be part of the new team Hollande names today after he publicly criticized the president for “slavish” and “dogmatic” deficit reduction that he said stokes unemployment. The dismissal of a top minister underlines the political crisis confronting Hollande as he seeks to balance European Union pressure to reduce the deficit with domestic demands to revive a stalled economy. It also exposes a wider rift in Europe as Italy uses its six-month presidency of the 28-nation EU to make a stand against a German-led drive to clamp down on spending.

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