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Hillary Transcends Economic Reason, Vows To Smash OPEC
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05:40 am
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Clinton: OPEC 'can no longer be a cartel'
Clinton's attacks on oil prices as artificially inflated, Enron-style, keep escalating, and today she appeared to threaten to break up the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
"We’re going to go right at OPEC," she said. "They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world, they decide how much oil they’re going to produce and what price they’re going to put it at," she told a crowd at a firehouse in Merrillville, IN.
Apparently, OPEC states will no longer be allowed to control their own natural resources? Or something? She'd explain how the OPEC cartel meetings are different than the G7 cartel meetings, but then she'd have to talk like an *economist* and everyone knows those guys are fags.
"That’s not a market. That’s a monopoly," she said, saying she'd use anti-trust law and the World Trade Organization to take on OPEC.
Clinton has cast herself as a warrior for working people against the oil industry and malicious "speculators," and made that -- along with her push for a gas tax holiday -- central to her closing message in Indiana.
It's a potent message, like the attack on "Wall Street money brokers," with deep roots in American politics. It' It's also very hard to figure out what exactly she means by the threat to break OPEC.
UPDATE: The Obama campaign points out that Clinton has not signed on to cosponsor a bill that aspires "to make oil-producing and exporting cartels illegal."
UPDATE: Clinton's campaign says she voted a version of the bill in 2007 and has long favored filing a WTO complaint against OPEC.
What's she going to do, go to war to conquer the Persian Gulf and Venezuela too? Hillary for president! This bitch might not know karate, Putin, but she knows ka-razy! |
Wachovia hit by policies revaluation
By Ben White in New York
Published: May 6 2008 18:57 | Last updated: May 6 2008 18:57
Wachovia, the fourth-largest US bank by assets, nearly doubled the size of its first-quarter loss to $708m on Tuesday after adding $315m in writedowns on the value of life assurance policies it takes out on its own employees.
The new writedown came after the bank, hit by mortgage losses and rising credit costs, reported a $393m first-quarter loss last month and revealed plans to raise $7bn in new capital. The lender also agreed last month to pay up to $144m to settle claims that it failed to stop abusive telemarketing practices.
EDITOR’S CHOICE
Wachovia pays $144m to settle claim - Apr-26
Wachovia confirms $7bn capital raising - Apr-14
Video: Ben White on Wachovia - Apr-14
Lex: Pain at Wachovia - Apr-14
Wachovia set to get cash infusion - Apr-14
Wachovia shares were little changed in midday trade at $30.07 after the bank said it could record gains in the value of its insurance portfolio in future quarters.
In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Wachovia said it had “reviewed information” regarding stable value agreements totalling $360m provided by a third-party guarantor covering three related contracts within Wachovia’s bank-owned life assurance portfolio.
The bank said the review led to valuation losses of $315m on the life assurance portfolio, which in turn increased the first-quarter loss to $708m, or 36 cents a share. The change is not technically a restatement of earnings because Wachovia has not yet filed its full first-quarter report with the SEC.
Bank-owned life assurance portfolios consist of policies that banks take out on their own employees. The policies pay off for companies when employees die, even if they are no longer with the company. They are also intended to provide tax benefits.
The policies have been criticised by shareholder groups and some members of Congress for artificially padding profits and because employees often do not know about, or benefit from, the coverage.
Wachovia declined to comment beyond the SEC filing. The bank has said it uses benefits it derives from its bank-owned life assurance portfolio to help defray the costs of other benefits for employees.
The writedown was the latest in a line of problems for Wachovia which, along with other big commercial banks, is struggling as consumers fall behind on mortgage, credit card, home equity, automotive and other loans. The bank said last week it might take an after-tax writedown of $800m to $1bn based on past leasing transactions in light of a court ruling.
Shares in Wachovia are down more than 50 per cent from early 2006. Many of the bank’s mortgage problems are the result of its 2005 acquisition of Golden West Financial, the California lender, for $26bn. Golden West was a leader in adjustable rate loans, which have been hit hard in the mortgage crisis. |
Fannie Mae Capital Rules Relaxed; Share Sale Planned (Update2)
By Dawn Kopecki
May 6 (Bloomberg) -- Fannie Mae's regulator will reduce restrictions on the largest financer of home loans, even after a wider-than-expected loss forced the company to raise capital and reduce its dividend.
Fannie Mae rose 8.9 percent after the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight said it will lower surplus capital requirements to 15 percent from 20 percent to allow the company to buy and guarantee more mortgages, its biggest source of profit. Washington-based Fannie Mae reported a $2.19 billion loss, cut the dividend for the second time in six months and said it plans to raise $6 billion to increase capital.
Ofheo is giving Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac more freedom to boost their mortgage portfolios and alleviate the worst housing slump since the Great Depression. The companies last quarter accounted for 81 percent of the home-loan market that other firms fled. The money raised will enable Fannie Mae to ``emerge from this crisis'' in a stronger position, Chief Executive Officer Daniel Mudd said.
``With a weak housing market, for God's sake, we need Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to work,'' said Andrew Parmentier, a managing director at Friedman Billings Ramsey & Co. in Arlington, Virginia.
The first-quarter net loss was $2.57 a share, Fannie Mae said in a statement today. Analysts were anticipating a loss of 64 cents, the average of 12 estimates from a Bloomberg survey.
Losses to Increase
Credit and derivative losses rose fivefold to $8.9 billion, Fannie Mae said in a statement. The government-chartered company cut its dividend to 25 cents after lowering it to 35 cents from 50 cents last year. Fannie Mae will begin a $4 billion sale of common and convertible preferred shares today.
Fannie Mae told analysts to expect bigger credit losses in 2009 and said it sees U.S. home prices falling 7 percent to 9 percent this year, up from its previous estimate of 5 percent to 7 percent. Executives see U.S. home prices eventually tumbling by an average of as much as 19 percent before starting to recover.
``There are certain things that we can't control, like home prices and the overall condition of the economy, and until they improve, they will be a drag on our old book,'' Chief Business Operator Rob Levin told analysts during a conference call today.
Deteriorating Fast
``They are now starting to realize the fact that their credit losses will be considerably higher than they were in 2007,'' said Ajay Rajadhyaksha, head of fixed-income strategy for Barclays Capital, who is based in New York. ``Things in the housing and credit markets are deteriorating very fast.''
Ofheo lifted its consent order with Fannie Mae, imposed in 2006 after the company admitted to $6.3 billion in accounting errors. The regulator's willingness to free Fannie Mae from restrictions and allow it to buy more mortgages shows lawmakers aren't keeping up with the housing market slump, said Jim Vogel, head of agency debt research at FTN Financial Group in Memphis, Tennessee.
``Some of the things Fannie said today and experienced in the first quarter tells Washington they've fallen farther behind,'' Vogel said. ``The problems are outpacing Washington's programs.'' |
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Evidence CCTVs Don't Work Mounts, Police Reccomend Double-Down Strategy
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08:22 pm
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Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.
The warning comes from the head of the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) at New Scotland Yard as the force launches a series of initiatives to try to boost conviction rates using CCTV evidence. They include:
Doesn't work? Invest more! Where are the powerpoints that were no doubt displayed during the initial capital outlay request that showed the immediate strong impact of the technology? Oh, that's two slices back along the salami, and we don't want to talk about the past, we want to talk about the expanded staffing and technologies that will grow our budget and give us expanded opportunity for advancement.
* A new database of images which is expected to use technology developed by the sports advertising industry to track and identify offenders.
* Putting images of suspects in muggings, rape and robbery cases out on the internet from next month.
* Building a national CCTV database, incorporating pictures of convicted offenders as well as unidentified suspects. The plans for this have been drawn up, but are on hold while the technology required to carry out automated searches is refined.
Owen Bowcott on why CCTV is catching few criminals
Use of CCTV images for court evidence has so far been very poor, according to Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville, the officer in charge of the Metropolitan police unit. "CCTV was originally seen as a preventative measure," Neville told the Security Document World Conference in London. "Billions of pounds has been spent on kit, but no thought has gone into how the police are going to use the images and how they will be used in court. It's been an utter fiasco: only 3% of crimes were solved by CCTV. There's no fear of CCTV. Why don't people fear it? [They think] the cameras are not working."
More training was needed for officers, he said. Often they do not want to find CCTV images "because it's hard work". Sometimes the police did not bother inquiring beyond local councils to find out whether CCTV cameras monitored a particular street incident.
"CCTV operators need feedback. If you call them back, they feel valued and are more helpful. We want to develop a career path for CCTV [police] inquirers."
Thus when you want to term a project or cut it back, you have a job reduction to howl about, and you can make it a police officer so that anyone who cuts your surveillance technology budget is taking police off the streets.
The Viido unit is beginning to establish a London-wide database of images of suspects that are cross-referenced by written descriptions. Interest in the technology has been enhanced by recent police work, in which officers back-tracked through video tapes to pick out terrorist suspects. In districts where the Viido scheme is working, CCTV is now helping police in 15-20% of street robberies.
"We are [beginning] to collate images from across London," Neville said. "This has got to be balanced against any Big Brother concerns, with safeguards. The images are from thefts, robberies and more serious crimes. Possibly the [database] could be national in future."
The unit is now investigating whether it can use software - developed to track advertising during televised football games - to follow distinctive brand logos on the clothing of unidentified suspects. "Sometimes you are looking for a picture, for example, of someone with a red top and a green dragon on it," he explained. "That technology could be used to track logos." By back-tracking, officers have often found earlier pictures, for example, of suspects with their hoods down, in which they can be identified.
"We are also going to start putting out [pictures] on the internet, on the Met police website, asking 'who is this guy?'. If criminals see that CCTV works they are less likely to commit crimes."
Cheshire deputy chief constable Graham Gerrard, who chairs the CCTV working group of the Association of Chief Police Officers, told the Guardian, that it made no sense to have a national DNA and fingerprint database, but to have to approach 43 separate forces for images of suspects and offenders. A scheme called the Facial Identification National Database (Find), which began collecting offenders' images from their prison pictures and elsewhere, has been put on hold.
He said that there were discussions with biometric companies "on a regular basis" about developing the technology to search digitised databases and match suspects' images with known offenders. "Sometimes when they put their [equipment] in operational practice, it's not as wonderful as they said it would be, " he said. "I suspect [Find] has been put on hold until the technology matures. Before you can digitise every offender's image you have to make sure the lighting is right and it's a good picture. It's a major project. We are still some way from a national database. There are still ethical and technical issues to consider."
Asked about the development of a CCTV database, the office of the UK's information commissioner, Richard Thomas, said: "CCTV can play an important role in helping to prevent and detect crime. However we would expect adequate safeguards to be put in place to ensure the images are only used for crime detection purposes, stored securely and that access to images is restricted to authorised individuals. We would have concerns if CCTV images of individuals going about their daily lives were retained as part of the initiative."
The charity Victim's Voice, which supports relatives of those who have been murdered, said it supported more effective use of CCTV systems. "Our view is that anything that helps get criminals off the street and prevents crime is good," said Ed Usher, one of the organisation's trustees. "If handled properly it can be a superb preventative tool."
And there you go, the intellectual downfall of the Western world summed up in one sentence; whatever furthers our immediate goals is good, we prefer not to contemplate consequences. Pesky consideration of long-term impact or realistic comparison to other strategies! They slow us down, and mire us in bureaucracy that a lifetime of hard-nosed cop dramas have taught us is a useless burden. But not the West! We solved the Gordian Knot! We cut off the "tail" of end-to-end planning, and we can now make shortsighted and unconsidered decisions faster than ever before, and we'll never even think to consider the consequences, because our policy apparatus doesn't include that capacity!
You who come after these doomed fools, consider this well! |
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Countrywide Slashes Largely Underwater Las Vegas Home Equity Lines
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09:53 pm
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Countrywide Takes Away Home-Equity Credit Lines in Las Vegas
By Vivien Lou Chen
More Photos/Details
May 6 (Bloomberg) -- Countrywide Financial Corp. has suspended the home equity credit lines of almost all its Las Vegas customers, including the $60,000 Christopher Whipple says he needed to expand his cell-phone accessories business.
Future mogul there, you bet.
``I hope this doesn't break me,'' the 35-year-old retailer said. His credit score was 790 out of a possible 850, putting him in the top 40 percent of borrowers. ``It's going to hurt more than I thought.''
Since January, Countrywide, Bank of America Corp., Washington Mutual Inc. and IndyMac Bancorp Inc. have frozen about 600,000 equity credit lines nationwide, said Michael Kratzer, president of a Bankrate Inc.-owned Web site that's fielding consumer complaints. The lenders are targeting borrowers in cities where property values are falling, including Las Vegas, Chicago and Los Angeles, he said.
Frozen credit and real estate declines are putting a chill on spending and hurting the economy. In February, taxable sales in Clark County, Nevada, which includes Las Vegas, fell 3.1 percent from a year earlier, dropping 13 percent at furniture stores and 6 percent for durable-goods wholesalers. In the same month, as it became harder to borrow money across the U.S., consumer spending rose at the slowest pace in more than a year.
``It's really putting borrowers in a panic,'' said Kratzer, president of feedisclosure.com in North Palm Beach, Florida. The amount of credit frozen nationally may be $6 billion, based on an assumption that the 600,000 borrowers each had $10,000 available, he said. |
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