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Pentagon moving to freeze hiring, delay contracts - (finance.yahoo.com) The Pentagon will begin
taking steps to freeze civilian hiring, delay some contract awards and curtail
some maintenance to prepare for drastic budget cuts if Congress can't reach an
agreement on a final spending plan, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said
Thursday. Speaking to reporters, Panetta said that department officials must
also develop detailed plans to implement unpaid furloughs for civilian
personnel. The furloughs would kick in if the automatic cuts are triggered. But
Panetta said he has asked defense leaders to ensure that any initial moves they
make now should be reversible if at all possible, and they must minimize
harmful effects on military readiness. "The simple fact is that this
fiscal uncertainty has become a serious threat to our national security,"
Panetta said during a Pentagon press conference. "We really have no choice
but to prepare for the worst."
Jack Lew had major role at Citigroup when it nearly imploded
- (www.washingtonpost.com) Treasury secretary nominee Jack Lew has spent most of his
career in government, but during the financial crisis, he was embedded inside
one of the country’s biggest banks as it nearly imploded. From 2006 to 2008, he
worked at Citigroup in two major roles, a notable line in his résumégiven that
as Treasury secretary, he would be charged with implementing new rules
regulating Wall Street. But Lew did not have just any position at the bank. In
early 2008, he became a top executive in the Citigroup unit that housed many of
the bank’s riskiest operations, including its hedge funds and private equity
investments. Massive losses in that unit helped drive Citigroup into the arms
of the federal government, which bailed out the bank with $45 billion in
taxpayer money that year. The group had been under pressure to compete with
similar units at other big Wall Street firms and, some analysts say, took on
too many risks as it played catch-up. “The mismanagement of risk was
comprehensive at that organization,” said Simon Johnson, an economist at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Who
is going to buy all those houses in Calif when the Gen X/Yers retire? -
(www.telegraph.co.uk) California is in the midst of
an unprecedented decline in its child population. Falling birth rates, a
decrease in migration and the retirement of the 'baby boom' generation are
threatening the future prosperity of America's most populous state, a new report
has revealed. The report, by the University of Southern California (USC), shows
that in 1970 children made up one third of the state's population. By 2030 that
number is expected to have declined to one fifth. "After decades of
burgeoning population and economic growth the state now faces a very different
prospect," the report, titled California's Diminishing Resource: Children,
said. Its author Dowell Myers, a USC demographer, said: "We have a massive
replacement problem statewide." He added: "These trends are not yet
widely recognised, but they should be a wake-up call for policymakers.
Banks
Get Away With Huge Robosigning Fraud By Paying Portion of Illegal Profits -
(www.zerohedge.com) The chapter on robosigning, i.e., Fraudclosure, is now
closed with a $10 billion wristslap on US banks, of which a whopping $3.3
billion in the form of direct cash and $5.2 billion in "other
assistance." The banks who are now absolved from any and all Linda Green
transgressions in the past include: Aurora, Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan
Chase, MetLife Bank, PNC, Sovereign, SunTrust, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo. And
so, banks can resume to resell properties with mortgages on which the original lien
may or may not have been lost in the sands of time. From the Fed: Independent Foreclosure Review to
Provide $3.3 Billion in Payments, $5.2 Billion in Mortgage Assistance: Ten
mortgage servicing companies subject to enforcement actions for deficient
practices in mortgage loan servicing and foreclosure processing have reached an
agreement in principle with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC)
and the Federal Reserve Board to pay more than $8.5 billion in cash
payments and other assistance to help borrowers.
Bank
of America Pays Far Less in Settlements Than Profits From Causing Bubble - (finance.yahoo.com) The mortgage settlements just
keep coming. On Monday morning, Bank of America said it reached an agreement to resolve
virtually all existing and future claims that it (and mortgage lender
Countrywide, which BofA bought in 2008) misrepresented the quality of home
loans it sold to Fannie Mae from 2000 through 2008. In the deal, Bank of
America is paying $3.6 billion in cash and is also repurchasing about 30,000
mortgages for $6.75 billion. That money all goes to Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored
enterprise that taxpayers bailed out in the financial crisis. Bank of America
is paying for the deal by tapping into reserves it had already set aside for
mortgage-related losses, plus is kicking in an additional $2.5 billion. That
Bank of America needed to draw on extra money has some bank watchers nervous
that it hasn’t set aside enough money for other outstanding mortgage cases.
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