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Tables turn on Spain with pressure to seek bailout - (www.reuters.com) Spain once pushed hard for Ireland and
Portugal to ask for bailouts from their partners in the euro because it was
keen to shelter itself from an accelerating sovereign debt crisis. Now the
tables are turned and Madrid is holding back from applying for help, not least
because the Spanish government knows all too well what befell its Portuguese
and Irish peers once they did seek help -- voters dumped them. Facing an
important regional election on October 21, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is in
no rush to yield to nervous pleas, from France, Italy and indeed Ireland, that he
request a rescue deal that might dampen investors' concerns about their own
debt.
Germany Losing Patience With Spain on Aid, Merkel Ally Says
- (www.bloomberg.com) Germany’s governing coalition
showed growing exasperation with Spain,
as a senior ally of Chancellor Angela
Merkel said Prime Minister Mariano
Rajoy must stop prevaricating and decide whether Spain needs a
full rescue. “He must spell out what the situation is,” Michael Meister,
finance spokesman for Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, said in an
interview in Berlin today. The fact he’s not doing so shows “Rajoy evidently
has a communications problem. If he needs help he must say so.” Meister’s
comments underscore Europe’s crisis-fighting stalemate amid
discord over a banking union, Greece’s ongoing debate on how to meet
bailout commitments and foot-dragging by Spain on a possible aid bid. European
Union President Herman Van Rompuy warned today against
“a tendency of losing the sense of urgency” in fighting the debt crisis three
years after it erupted in Greece.
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Bank Layoffs Coming: 'Bad as I've Seen It': Whitney - (www.cnbc.com) Banks have been behind the curve in terms of
downsizing, with their employees paying for it now through a rash of furloughs,
analyst Meredith Whitney told CNBC. The industry has
seen a recent spate of big layoff announcements, including 16,000 from Bank of
America alone. Though banks already have jettisoned about half
a million workers since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008, Whitney
said more are to come as the shrinking big institutions struggle to compete.
Hillary
Clinton: Raise Taxes on the Rich Everywhere - (www.cnbc.com)
It's no secret that the
foreign policy of the United States tends to reflect the world views of the
occupant of the White House. Sure, there used to be some homage paid to the
notion that "politics stops at the water's edge," but that hasn't
really been true for generations. Particularly if you are out to improve the
world, you are going to wind up exporting your own ideas about world
improvement. Free-market types will urge freer markets, even when these take
the form of the kind of corrupt privatization that gave rise to Russia's
oligarchs. And the Obama administration, well, it thinks the wealthy need to be
taxed more — everywhere.
AMERICAN
DELAYS SOAR - (www.money.cnn.com) American Airlines and its pilots union blamed
each other Monday for a surge in flight cancellations and delays tied to
contract issues at the bankrupt carrier. Flight tracking service
FlightStats.com says 103 flights were canceled as of midday, the second highest
one-day number of cancellations since problems at the airline began on Sept.
16. That brought the total number of flights canceled to 570, or about 3.5% of
its total schedule. Less than half of American's flights have been on time in
the past eight days, according to FlightStats. American, which said last week
it would reduce its flights by 1-2% to deal with service problem, took issue
with the cancellation number. Spokesman Bruce Hicks said many of Monday's
grounded flights were scrubbed in advance.
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