The agency said the country’s net general government debt is the highest among A-rated sovereigns, and now expects it to peak later and at a higher level than it previously anticipated.
“In our view, Italy’s economic growth prospects are weakening and we expect that Italy’s fragile governing coalition and policy differences within parliament will continue to limit the government’s ability to respond decisively to domestic and external macroeconomic challenges,” S&P said in a statement.
All told, federal taxpayers last year received $1.08 trillion in credits, deductions and other perks while paying $1.09 trillion in income taxes, according to government estimates.
Only about 8 percent of those benefits went to corporations. (The write-off for corporate jets equals about .03 percent of the total.) The bulk went to private households, primarily upper-middle-class families that Obama has vowed to protect from new taxes.
As readers of this blog are aware, your Curmudgeon is no fan of the Dennis Canon, which I like to call the Episcopal Church (USA)’s Trojan Horse. It has spawned a disproportionate amount of Church property litigation, because it operates by stealth, and springs onto the back of a parish just at the time when it is most vulnerable, having decided to take the final step to disaffiliate from ECUSA. All of a sudden, the Bishop of the Diocese swoops down with his attorneys, and orders the congregation to vacate its building, and leave everything behind, from the altar candlesticks to the bank accounts and pew cushions. “Because you no longer are operating within the Episcopal Church,” he says, “Canon I.7.4 [the Dennis Canon] declares that all of your property is now forfeit to the Diocese, since it was always held in trust for this Diocese and the Church.”
Such a claimed operation for the Canon comes as a surprise to many congregations who thought that their years of paying for the acquisition, construction and maintenance of their building, plus a deed in their name, meant that they owned it. Furthermore, every State in the United States has a law which says that trusts in real property can be created only by a writing signed by the owner of the property. The Dennis Canon operates in reverse: it purports to create a trust in church property without the owner’s signature, and just on the authority of ECUSA’s General Convention. As I noted elsewhere, it purports to operate as though, upon you and your spouse’s joining the Democratic Party, your house and all your worldly goods become forfeit to the Party should you ever decide to become a Republican.
When companies I love (as a customer) and admire/enjoy writing about (as a journalist) do something that seems downright crazy to both sides of my brain, like splitting up a well-known brand and its useful and well-loved website, I tend to wonder if I’m missing something.
Netflix’s announcement that it would split into a streaming-only business (called Netflix) and a discs-by-mail business (called Qwikster) caught me by surprise. It’s easy to miss a lot of things when you’re surprised, particularly when the surprise drops after midnight on the east coast, and you stay up all night writing and talking about it.
When this happens, it’s best to look for smart people with different opinions from yours, who’ve probably also had more sleep than you have.
It is apparent not only that US banks have lost confidence in their European counterparts and have started shutting them out of inter-bank funding markets, but also that US officials are busy making matters worse by seeking to shift blame for America’s dire domestic performance on to influences from this side of the Atlantic. “Seventy-five per cent of the dark things happening in the world economy are because of the eurozone,” one of Geithner’s team said at Marseille….
Markets are convinced of several things: that Greece is politically incapable of meeting the austerity demands imposed by the EU and the IMF, and is now locked into a spiral in which its debt position can only become worse as its economy deteriorates; that a default on Greek sovereign debt is therefore inevitable sooner rather than later, and will impose losses on European banks, including the likes of Société Générale and Crédit Agricole of France, which may in turn need to be bailed out by their governments; and that the eviction of a bankrupt and incorrigibly irresponsible eurozone member is not only a technical possibility but an economic necessity if the single currency is to survive at all.
The Church in Wales will next week consider taking a further step towards equality for gay clerics by providing improved pension rights for their civil partners.
But progressive elements in the Church remain uneasy that while there is an acceptance that priests can have a monogamous sexual relationship, the same tolerance does not extend to Bishops.
During a two-day meeting starting on Wednesday of the Church’s Governing Body, it will be recommended that surviving civil partners of retired clerics should receive a pension based on the priest’s entire working life. Until now, the rate of pension has only been calculated from 2005, when civil partnerships were first allowed.
Americans are pumping money into bank accounts at a blistering pace this year, sending deposits to record levels near $10 trillion on escalating fears that the U.S. economy is on the verge of another implosion.
There’s no sign that the flood into checking, savings and money market accounts is slowing down. In the last three months, accounts at U.S. commercial banks have increased $429 billion, or 10%, almost double the increase for all of last year.
There’s one big problem: Banks don’t want your money.
During the English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell took a dim view of Rose Castle, the Bishop of Carlisle’s palace in Cumbria. One of the occupants had been rash enough to fire a cannon as he passed by, and so he burnt it. But thanks to the efforts of Georgian and Victorian divines, it recovered from the disaster and entered the 21st century as one of the most precious jewels of the Church Commissioners’ portfolio. But the Puritans are back. Despite a report two years ago by the then Bishop of Carlisle, stating that Rose Castle admirably fulfilled its purpose as a “see house”, it is now seen as surplus to requirements. Cavaliers fear its sale will be considered at a meeting this month.
We all know that the Church Commissioners have a chequered record where property is concerned….
…China itself must ultimately be a victim of this warped structure as well, and that is where we are in late 2011. Act III of the global denouement is unfolding. The world will have to lance the debt boils of Asia as well before clearing the way for another cycle of global growth.
The facts are simple. China dodged the Great Contraction of 2008-2009 by unleashing credit on a massive scale.
Zhu Min, the IMF’s deupty chief and a former Chinese official, said loans had jumped from 100pc of GDP before the crisis to around 200pc today — if you include off-books financing from letters of credits, trusts, and such like.
To put this in perspective, a study by Fitch Ratings found that credit in America rose by just 42pc of GDP in the five-year period before the housing bubble popped. It rose by 45pc of GDP in Japan from before the Nikkei cracked in 1990, and 47pc before the Korean crisis in 1998.
Until recently, Google offered discounts on many of its paid services to nonprofit organizations, including churches. This past spring, with little fanfare, the company changed its policy. It created a new suite of applications, known as Google for Nonprofits, that includes significant discounts and advantages for a range of Google products such as grants for advertising on AdWords, free licenses for Google Earth Pro and the option to raise funds through a “donate” button at Google Checkout.
Google also added a remarkable list of restrictions for eligible charitable groups and institutions. Among those not able to apply for the program are websites where people donate cars to charity; child care centers, unless the “entire” purpose is to serve a disadvantaged community; hospitals; websites “that result in a poor experience for the viewer”; and — most troublesome — “places or institutions of worship (e.g., churches, ministries, temples, synagogues).”
This last restriction caught religious groups by surprise…
“Productivity isn’t everything,” Paul Krugman once wrote in his New York Times column, “but in the long run it is almost everything.” Strange then, with Canada’s poor productivity and innovation performance compared with that of the U.S., that we remain complacent. Where’s our sense of urgency?
Anders Borg, the Swedish finance minister, said that “the politicians seem to be behind the curve all the time.” Citing a “clear need for bank recapitalization,” he added: “We really need to see some more political leadership.”
Despite the potentially grave consequences, the mood in Germany seemed to be turning increasingly in favor of letting Greece fail rather than bear the growing cost.
Dana Samuel of North Charleston lost her retail job in June.
The 27-year-old single mother has applied to numerous places for a job.
“It’s hard,” she said. “They don’t call back. They don’t respond. You hear nothing. Some say I’m not qualified for the position. Others say I don’t have the experience.”
Samuel is trying to juggle raising two children, getting a degree in criminal justice from Trident Technical College and landing a job that pays more than the $91 in jobless benefits she receives each week.
European finance ministers ended a two-day meeting here Saturday without making substantial progress toward solving the region’s debt crisis, or any pledge to recapitalize Europe’s banks.
The meetings were highlighted by the appearance by Timothy F. Geithner, the United States treasury secretary, whose advice, and warnings, drew a tepid reaction from the euro zone’s finance ministers. And Mr. Geithner’s rejection Friday of a European idea for a global tax on financial transactions prompted a debate about whether Europe should go ahead on its own.
Meanwhile, with an October deadline looming for international lenders to agree to the release of around 8 billion euros, or $11 billion, of aid to Greece, without which it could default on its debt, George Papandreou, the Greek prime minister, canceled a trip to the United States.
Christina Gustavsson says she loves school. But her teachers have had a tough time educating her.
In her freshman year at Kennett High School, 15-year-old Christina racked up five months’ worth of absences and never completed a full day of school. Sometimes, she had difficulty remembering assignments, completing homework or even waking up in time for school. Other times, she didn’t.
Christina has chronic fatigue syndrome, a condition whose symptoms have long confounded many medical professionals and now pose peculiar challenges for educators as more adolescents are diagnosed with it. In a time of tight budgets, public schools must consider how far to go to accommodate students with CFS and a range of so-called hidden disabilities that are difficult to observe, evaluate or understand.
Retirement plans and living standards for nearly half a million South Carolinians are in the hands of state politicians.
On the line are cost-of-living increases, the number of years public employees must work before they earn retirement pay and future contribution rates, all of which stand to change as the state’s top elected officials try to figure out a way to deal with the retirement system’s $17 billion funding mess.
Risky investment strategies and too-generous retirement benefits over the years coupled with the recession have been blamed by fiscal watchdogs as the reason the state’s pension plan has long-term stability problems.
(Before you read the full article, guess the answer to this question: What percentage of public sector employees in Italy have lifetime tenure?).
With only 960 residents and a handful of roads, this tiny hilltop village in the arid, sulfurous hills of southern Sicily does not appear to have major traffic problems. But that does not prevent it from having one full-time traffic officer ”” and eight auxiliaries.
The auxiliaries, who earn a respectable 800 euros a month, or $1,100, to work 20 hours a week, are among about 64 Comitini residents employed by the town, the product of an entrenched jobs-for-votes system pervasive in Italian politics at all levels.
“Jobs like these have kept this city alive,” said Caterina Valenti, 41, an auxiliary in a neat blue uniform as she sat recently with two colleagues, all on duty, drinking coffee in the town’s bar on a hot afternoon. “You see, here we are at the bar, we support the economy this way.”
To read between the lines here: the Treasurer of the Church, like all of the staff at 815, works for the Presiding Bishop, not for the Executive Council. When she tells him to “find money for litigation”, his job is not to ask “Where?”, but rather: “How much do you need?” And in exchange for such due obedience, she protects him from all incursions into his territory by the likes of the Executive Council — who only imagine that they run the show when General Convention is not in session.
No, this is the Presiding Bishop’s show — lock, stock, and barrel. If the Church needs money to fund her agenda, then it will jolly well have to supply it, without any interference from the Executive Council. The Church is extraordinarily wealthy, with over $140 million in unrestricted securities and investments, the gifts of innumerable donors over the centuries. And in recent years it has not been shy about borrowing against the endowment to provide it with working capital for the Presiding Bishop’s ongoing litigation agenda.
Thus it should now come as no surprise to learn that, in a face-off between the Committee’s alternatives and those explored by the Treasurer and his investment manager, the latter prevailed. The headquarters building did not have to be mortgaged; the Treasurer simply ponied up more of the endowment as collateral for two new lines of credit.
An internet security company has demonstrated a new weapon against deeply rooted malware that takes control of PCs and turns them into zombies.
McAfee said it has activated built-in security features and added software to Intel microprocessors, known as chips, to stop cyber criminals from infecting PCs via advance persistent threats, rootkits and zero-day attacks. Infected PCs can be directed to steal private identities, financial data and to send out spam.
If the new technology catches on, the pain of ensuring anti-virus software is up to date and running on a PC could become a thing of the past. It may even pave the way for similar hardware-based technology to be included in other internet-ready devices such as cars, TVs and teller machines.
Police in London have arrested a 31-year-old man in connection with allegations of unauthorised trading which has cost Swiss banking group UBS an estimated $2bn (£1.3bn).
Kweku Adoboli, believed to work in the European equities division, was detained in the early hours of Thursday and remains in custody.
It sounds like a good plan, but here’s the real risk: even after this restructuring, Greece ends up defaulting on those new EFSF-backed bonds. Remember, this is a solvency problem not a liquidity issue.
So the EFSF takes a loss, and maybe even its partner, the IMF. The debt is removed from bank balance sheets and put directly on the taxpayers of Europe and, via Washington’s 17% stake in IMF loans, Americans.
Home buyers such as Bob and Janet Zych have fueled the U.S. housing market for decades.
They have excellent credit with scores that top 800, life-long careers and investment portfolios that have set them up for a comfortable retirement, they say.
But this year, “after faxing a ream of paper” about their finances, they got so fed up applying for a home loan that they simply wrote a check for their new $85,000 vacation condo in Phoenix.
Trying to get a loan “was just a nightmare,” says Bob Zych, 65, a manager for Mohawk Industries in Omaha.
There is some similarity between the euro crisis and the subprime crisis that caused the crash of 2008. In each case a supposedly riskless asset””collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), based largely on mortgages, in 2008, and European government bonds now””lost some or all of their value.
Unfortunately the euro crisis is more intractable….
In an ordinary financial crisis this tactic works: with the passage of time the panic subsides and confidence returns. But in this case time has been working against the authorities. Since the political will is missing, the problems continue to grow larger while the politics are also becoming more poisonous.
The number of U.S. homes that received an initial default notice — the first step in the foreclosure process — jumped 33 percent in August from July, foreclosure listing firm RealtyTrac Inc. said Thursday.
The increase represents a nine-month high and the biggest monthly gain in four years. The spike signals banks are starting to take swifter action against homeowners, nearly a year after processing issues led to a sharp slowdown in foreclosures.
“This is really the first time we’ve seen a significant increase in the number of new foreclosure actions,” said Rick Sharga, a senior vice president at RealtyTrac. “It’s still possible this is a blip, but I think it’s much more likely we’re seeing the beginning of a trend here.”
Premier Wen Jiabao said his country and will play its part to “prevent the further spread of the sovereign debt crisis,” but warned that China will not sign a blank cheque for states that have failed to carry out full reform.
“Countries must first put their own houses in order,” he told the World Economic Forum in Dalian.
But the euphoria surrounding the plunging arrow sector may be short-lived, as some analysts caution that that investors’ mania for downward arrow stocks may be a bubble, with others warning that downward arrows are increasingly being manufactured in China, where the arrows are mass-produced using far cheaper labor.
For his part, though, Morgan Stanley’s Dorinson sees a silver lining in such gloomy forecasts: “Even if people wind up losing billions of dollars investing in downward arrows, you know what? There’s only one way to show that.”
The ranks of America’s poor swelled to almost 1 in 6 people last year, reaching a new high as long-term unemployment left millions of Americans struggling and out of work. The number of uninsured edged up to 49.9 million, the biggest in more than two decades.
The Census Bureau’s annual report released Tuesday offers a snapshot of the economic well-being of U.S. households for 2010, when joblessness hovered above 9 percent for a second year. It comes at a politically sensitive time for President Barack Obama, who has acknowledged in the midst of a re-election fight that the unemployment rate could persist at high levels through next year.
A man recently told me about his faith life, as people are wont to do with ministers. He said, “I’m spiritual but not religious. I want to give you my testimony about why I do not attend church….”
After marrying he joined the church in which his wife was brought up, a liberal Protestant church. He described that experience as the equivalent of getting a big warm hug. This church did not frown on dancing and drinking nor on his theological questions. He was encouraged to think critically about scripture. His questions, even his doubts, did not shock anybody. In fact, he was told that his questions made him a very good mainline Protestant.
But his marriage ended, and he began to feel that the church was more his former wife’s than his. He found himself spending Sunday mornings sleeping in, reading the New York Times or putting on his running shoes and taking off through the woods. This was his religion today, he explained. “I worship nature. I see myself in the trees and in the cicadas. I am one with the great outdoors. I find God there. And I realized that I am deeply spiritual but no longer religious.”
Mrs. [Angela] Merkel, 57, faces far-reaching decisions about how to deal definitively with the debt crisis in Europe and, more immediately, whether to allow Greece to default or even to leave the currency union. American officials fear that if she does not act more decisively, bank lending could freeze up and the result would be another sharp financial downturn on both sides of the Atlantic.
Fears of a worsening debt crisis slammed European stocks on Monday, especially shares of French banks, forcing the French government to declare its support for its three largest financial institutions. The turmoil added to worries that the Greek crisis would prove difficult to contain without more robust action from Germany and, ultimately, its taxpayers.
The project of European integration, which began in the difficult years after World War II, is also on the line. If Greece were forced to abandon the euro, as more and more voices on the German right are demanding, it would be a jarring setback for solidarity on the Continent.