KeNo's Housing and Economic Portal: Saturday June 26 Housing and Economic stories

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TOP STORIES:

hiring and firing of census workers multiple times to pad the employment report - (video.foxnews.com) The video shows three levels of supervisors promoting or ignoring the padding of hours by census employees. Whistleblower claims Census Bureau is using temporary layoffs to pump up employment numbers

Fury Turns Into Protests - (www.cnbc.com) Anger over the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is spilling into streets as protests are organized at BP’s offices and gas stations around the country. A multi-group protest made up of environmental groups is planned for Friday in Washington D.C., for example, while a week of demonstrations in several cities was kicked off yesterday by a new campaign, Seize BP. Besides the organized demonstrations, anti-BP Facebook accounts have popped up online. And in New York City, some one or several people have splattered what looks like brown paint on the logo of three different BP gas stations. BP's inadequate response has left the public frustrated, said Allison Fisher, the energy organizer at Public Citizen, one of the groups organizing Friday's protest in Washington. “They’re looking for ways to express that.” Friday’s protest organized by eight groups—Center for Biological Diversity, Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Energy Action Coalition, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Hip Hop Caucus, Public Citizen and 350.org—will take place in front of BP’s headquarters.

Hungary Risks Greek-Style Debt Crisis: Official - (www.cnbc.com) A Hungarian official was not exaggerating when he said on Thursday that the country had a slim chance of avoiding a Greek-style debt crisis, the prime minister's spokesman said on Friday. Party vice chairman Lajos Kosa was cited as saying by business news website napi.hu that the new government had found public finances in a much worse shape than previously expected and there was a slim chance of avoiding a Greek-style scenario. When asked about those comments, Prime Minister Viktor Orban's spokesman Peter Szijjarto told a news conference: "It was (Socialist) Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany who spoke about a default. Moreover, he proudly said that Hungary was close to default, he said that a year and a half ago...and then he was proud that he could only save Hungary from default by taking the IMF loan." "From this aspect I do not think this (Kosa's comments) are exaggerated at all." Szijjarto earlier in the day told television that Hungary's new government plans to take steps to improve public finances and wants deep reforms and tax cuts to boost competitiveness after it reveals the "true" state of the 2010 budget. At the press conference when he was asked whether it was conceivable that tax cuts and economic stimulus measures would have to be delayed due to higher deficit numbers he said: "No."

Universities are offering doctorates but few jobs - (www.latimes.com) Graduates frustrated by the lack of tenure-track positions available amid budget cuts are looking off campus. Many find work that wouldn't have cost them years in school or put them deep in debt. As they walk in hooded robes to the strains of "Pomp and Circumstance," many students getting their doctorates this spring dream of heading to another university to begin their careers as tenure-track professors. But when Elena Stover finished her doctorate in September, she headed to the poker tables. Frustrated with the limited opportunities and grueling lifestyle of academia, Stover, 29, decided to eschew a career in cognitive neuroscience for one playing online poker. She got the idea from a UCLA career counselor, who was trying to help her find employment. "The job market is abysmal, especially within the academic system," said Stover, who spent six years getting her doctorate at UCLA. It has never been easy to find a tenure-track teaching job. But this year, dwindling endowments and shrinking state budgets — especially in California — have made that goal more elusive than ever. Now, many graduates with doctoral degrees are finding themselves looking for jobs outside universities — jobs they probably could have gotten without five to six years of intense schooling and tens of thousands of dollars of education debt.

States Shrink ‘Unaffordable’ Benefits to Bridge $1 Trillion Gap - (www.bloomberg.com) Janet and Mark Hartmann, a New Jersey couple with 68 years of government jobs between them, may retire ahead of plan because the state is $102 billion short of funds needed to pay all the benefits it owes. New Jersey and 20 other states are urging early retirements, cutting benefits and demanding employees contribute more in the face of what the Pew Center on the States says is a $1 trillion gap between available assets and what’s owed workers. Declining tax revenue has left governments unable to make up the $724 billion of market losses suffered by the 100 largest state retirement plans in the two years that ended last June, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Some states have skipped payments to retirement accounts or borrowed to make them, endangering their credit ratings. “This, in my opinion, is the public issue of this decade,” New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research on May 25. “Things that used to be sacred cows, that used to be the third rail, no longer are. They’ve been replaced by the unaffordability, absolute unaffordability.”

Loan Selloff Forcing Borrowers to Boost Rates: Credit Markets - (www.bloomberg.com) Calpine Corp., the largest U.S. generator of natural-gas-fueled electricity, and at least five more borrowers are being forced to boost interest rates on proposed loans after the market’s worst month since 2008. The margin Calpine offered to pay over lending benchmarks for a $1.3 billion loan increased by as much as 2 percentage points to 5.5 percentage points, while the remaining companies had to raise rates from 0.75 percentage point to 4.5 percentage points, according to people familiar with the talks who declined to be identified because the terms weren’t set. For Houston- based Calpine, that’s an extra $26 million a year in interest. Prices of high-yield, high-risk loans fell 3.89 percent during last month as measured by the S&P/LSTA U.S. Leveraged Loan 100 Index as investors fled all but the safest government securities amid growing concern that rising budget deficits in Europe will cause the global economy to slow. The selloff created bargains among existing debt, reducing the attractiveness of new loans.