The Cessna 208 was carrying nine passengers and two crew
members. No information was available on the causes of the
crash, the Civil Aviation Authority of Botswana said in a
statement.Survivors are being treated for burns.
* First long-term debt sale after Fitch, Moody’s downgradesBy Valentina ZaMILAN, Oct 13 (Reuters) - Italy’s five-year debt costs fell
at auction on Thursday helped by a more optimistic outlook for
the euro zone debt crisis but there were signs investors are
still wary of Italian bonds after two ratings downgrades in less
than a week.The country’s towering debt pile and ailing growth rates
have made it a focus of the crisis and Moody’s and Fitch cut
Italy’s credit-ratings last week following a similar move by
Standard & Poor’s in September.Domestic politics has created further uncertainty with Prime
Minister Silvio Berlusconi facing a confidence vote in his
government on Friday.Italy sold 6.19 billion euros of debt at the auction, close
to the top of its target range.Despite solid demand at the sale, yields remained under
pressure in the cast bond market and the European Central Bank
stepped into the secondary market after the auction, buying
Italian debt to cap rising yields.”Overall, then, a reasonably positive outcome but with the
still relatively elevated level of borrowing costs underlining
the imperative of continued support from the ECB,” said Richard
McGuire, a rate strategist at Rabobank in London.Requests for the four bonds on offer totaled more than 9
billion euros. The auction yield on a five-year BTP bond eased
to 5.32 percent from a euro lifetime high of 5.6 percent Italy
paid a month ago.Market pressures have pushed Italian bond yields over the
summer towards levels that could in the long-term threaten the
sustainability of the country’s 1.9 trillion euro debt.In a sign of continued tensions, the yield on the 10-year
BTP bond on the secondary market rose to its highest level in
over two months ahead of Thursday’s auction.Selling a 15-year bond for the first time since mid-July at
Thursday’s auction, Italy tested market appetite for a long
maturity which traders say is not covered by the ECB’s bond
buying programme.It sold nearly 1 billion euro of an off-the-run 2025 bond.”The bid/cover of the 2025 looks OK,” said David Schnautz, a
rate strategist at Commerzbank in London.”But I don’t feel very encouraged looking forward for the
ultra-long supply, especially towards year-end from Italy.”ECB’s purchases target mainly the five- to ten-year area,
traders say.Italy last sold a 30-year bond in May.Italy plans to issue around 75 billion euros in the last
quarter of the year, roughly equally split between short-tem
bills and bonds.Rome has raised more than 16 billion euros this week.With a make-or-break summit of European leaders on Oct. 23
at which a comprehensive new Franco-German crisis plan is
expected to be discussed, Italian domestic political turmoil has
taken less prominence in investors’ minds.Friday’s confidence vote comes after Berlusconi’s
centre-right government lost a key vote in
parliament.Analysts said the government was unlikely to fall
immediately but its ability to take action would be constantly
hampered by internal disputes.
* “We are the 99 percent” is the rallying cry of
protesters, who believe the top 1 percent of Americans hold too
much of the country’s wealth and should face higher taxes.The top 1 percent of the population held 35.6 percent of
the nation’s wealth in 2009, according to a study released in
March by the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The
same report showed that more than a decade earlier, in 1998,
the top 1 percent held more than 38 percent of the wealth — a
few percentage points more.A similar study by the nonpartisan Levy Institute of
Economics at Bard College found the wealthiest 1 percent of
Americans held 34.6 percent of the wealth in 2007.* There is too much income inequality in the United States,
dividing the country into a small number of haves and many have
nots.The gap between rich and poor has been gradually widening
for decades. The top five percent of families by income
accounted for 21.7 percent of total aggregate income in 2009,
according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The top 20 percent of
families accounted for 50.3 percent of total income. Whereas in
1970, the top five percent held 16.6 percent of income, and the
top 20 percent held 43.3 percent of income.The bottom 20 percent of households by income accounted for
3.4 percent of income in 2009, down from 4.1 percent in 1970.A United Nations report showed income inequality was
greater in the United States than in some other major developed
economies such as Japan and Germany, but inequality was not as
great as in some less-developed countries such as Brazil.The percentage of Americans living in poverty reached 15.1
percent in 2010, up from 14.3 percent in 2009, the fourth
consecutive annual increase and the largest number in the 52
years that estimates have been published.* Too many people are out of work and even well-trained
people are unable to find jobs.The national unemployment rate was 9.1 percent in
September, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. As
late as April 2008 the unemployment rate was only 4.9 percent,
but after the financial crisis it quickly doubled to a peak of
10.1 percent in October 2009. It has held near double digits
ever since.The United States lost 8 million jobs during the 2007-2009
recession and only about 1.4 million of those have been
regained.The lack of jobs is particularly acute among young people,
with the unemployment rate for ages 20-24 at 14.7 percent in
September. The unemployment rate also is higher for minorities
such as Hispanics and African Americans, and for military
personnel returning from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.Unemployment also is higher for less-skilled workers than
for those with a college degree.The unemployment figures compiled by the government do not
include people who have become discouraged and have stopped
looking for work.* Banks caused the global financial crisis and were bailed
out by the U.S. government. Now they are making huge profits
and are back to getting fat bonuses.The U.S. government spent $413 billion on its bank bailout
fund, called TARP, after the 2008 crisis, of which $314 billion
has been recovered by taxpayers, according to the U.S. Treasury
Department. The government spent another $245 billion investing
in 700 troubled financial institutions to prop them up and
received $256 billion back, so it made a profit on that
program.Bank profits were $28.8 billion in the second quarter of
2011 at FDIC-insured banks, up 37.9 percent from the previous
year and the eighth consecutive quarter that industry profits
improved year-over-year, according to the FDIC.Profits are expected to be up about 2 percent in the third
quarter compared with a year earlier, according to Thomson
Reuters Proprietary Research. Banks begin reporting quarterly
results on Thursday.Cash bonuses paid to Wall Street employees for work done in
2010 declined 7.5 percent to $20.8 billion, according to a
report released by the New York State Comptroller on Tuesday.
Bonuses for work done in 2011 are expected to fall again,
according to the report.SOURCES: U.S. Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S.
Treasury Department, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
(FDIC), Levy Institute of Economics, Economic Policy Institute,
United Nations, Thomson Reuters Proprietary Research, New York
State Comptroller.
Last week, we saw how the Federal Housing Finance Agency was above the law, with the government seemingly having no ability to tell it what to do. This week, it’s the FDIC. In the wake of its obstreporous obstructionism upon receipt of FOIA requests, the FDIC’s smug above-the-law impunity is now coming to light:
JunketSleuth worked for months with an attorney from the Office of Governmental Information Services, which mediates disputes between federal agencies and people requesting public records under FOIA.
The attorney was able to help persuade a number of other agencies to provide JunketSleuth with electronic and paper travel records. But she was unable to get the FDIC to provide the exact same types of records…
Federal agencies routinely violate FOIA, as they’ve done since the law was created decades ago. Still, few agencies have rejected requests identical to those that others have granted, especially when the government’s own attorneys (in this case at OGIS) have worked with the agencies to secure access to the records.
This letter, in particular, from the FDIC simply drips with contempt and condescension for anybody daring to file a FOIA from the FDIC. And the long history of correspondence in this case clearly exhibits an utter lack of goodwill at the FDIC, or any desire at all to comply with the spirit of the FOIA law.
In general, it’s the financial agencies within the government — the FHFA, the FDIC, the Federal Reserve (especially the NY Fed, which considers itself not to be a public entity at all), and of course Treasury — which are by far the worst when it comes to transparency and disclosure. We’re constantly told that certain information is commercially sensitive, for example, only to discover when it finally does get disclosed that there’s nothing commercially sensitive about it.
I’m not sure how to fix this. The White House doesn’t seem to be able to change anything: Barack Obama, for instance, released an executive memo on his inauguration day, making it clear that the Freedom of Information Act “should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails.” The financial arms of government barely blinked, and continued in their secretive ways.
But in this one particular case, at least, I think it might help if a sympathetic journalist started asking for the FDIC’s travel records independently from JunketSleuth. The FDIC doesn’t consider JunketSleuth a legitimate news organization, and seems to be treating it with especial prejudice. Would they send these kind of letters to an established mainstream news outlet which asked for the exact same information? There’s only one way to find out.
