Top officials at Chrysler Financial turned away a government loan because executives didn’t want to abide by new federal limits on pay, according to new findings by a federal watchdog agency. The government had offered a $750 million loan earlier this month as part of its efforts to prop up the ailing auto industry, including Chrysler, which is racing to avoid bankruptcy. Chrysler Financial is a major lender to Chrysler dealerships and customers. In forgoing the loan, Chrysler Financial opted to use more expensive financing from private banks, adding to the burden on the already fragile automaker and its financing company. Chrysler Financial officials denied in a statement that the company’s executives had refused to accept new limits on their pay, adding that the firm turned down the loan because it no longer needed it. But their account conflicts with a report set to be released today by the Treasury’s special inspector general for the federal bailout, saying the executives’ refusal led Treasury to withdraw the loan offer. ‘It was certainly a deal-breaker from Treasury’s perspective,’ said Neil M. Barofsky, the special inspector general, who spoke to the bailout program’s chief compliance officer about the situation […]
As the banking crisis approaches Japanese proportions, Americans can take comfort from the fact that their political culture is more capable of finding a solution. Or can they? Today’s anti-banker backlash bears a striking resemblance to the voter outrage that stymied efforts to fix Japan’s banking system in the 1990s. Indeed, an enduring lesson of financial crises is how political constraints interfere with economically efficient solutions. For example, America’s Treasury and the Federal Reserve began examining options to use public money to buy up illiquid mortgage assets and to inject capital into financial institutions shortly after rescuing Bear Stearns, a failing investment bank, in March 2008. But it was another six months before they acted on those plans. ‘There was no way we could go to Congress without the American people understanding we faced a crisis, says Henry Paulson, the treasury secretary at the time. Sure enough, not until the failure of Lehman Brothers sparked a global panic in September did Mr Paulson and Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, ask Congress to authorise an outlay of $700 billion to support the system. Some say Mr Paulson should have tried harder to acquire the funds before the Lehman crisis. […]
The Colorado River system supplies water to tens of millions of people and millions of acres of farmland, and has never experienced a delivery shortage. But if human-caused climate change continues to make the region drier, scheduled deliveries will be missed 60-90 percent of the time by the middle of this century, according to a pair of climate researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego. ‘All water-use planning is based on the idea that the next 100 years will be like the last 100,’ said Scripps research marine physicist Tim Barnett, a co-author of the report. ‘We considered the question: Can the river deliver water at the levels currently scheduled if the climate changes as we expect it to. The answer is no.’ Even under conservative climate change scenarios, Barnett and Scripps climate researcher David Pierce found that reductions in the runoff that feeds the Colorado River mean that it could short the Southwest of a half-billion cubic meters (400,000 acre feet) of water per year 40 percent of the time by 2025. (An acre foot of water is typically considered adequate to meet the annual water needs of two households.) By the later part of […]
The case of a 13-year-old Arizona girl strip-searched by school officials looking for ibuprofen pain-reliever will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court this week. The justices in January accepted the Safford school district case for review, and will decide whether a campus setting gives school administrators greater discretion to control students suspected of illegal activity than police are allowed in cases involving adults in general public spaces. The case is centered around Savana Redding, now 19, who in 2003 was an eighth-grade honors student at Safford Middle School, about 127 miles from Tucson, Arizona. Redding was strip-searched by school officials after a fellow student accused her of providing prescription-strength ibuprofen pills. The school has a zero-tolerance policy for all prescription and over-the-counter medication, including the ibuprofen, without prior written permission. ‘In this case, the United States Supreme Court will decide how easy it is for school officials to strip search your child,’ Adam Wolf, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who is representing Redding, told CNN Radio on Sunday. Wolf told CNN Radio his client was traumatized by the search. ‘School officials undoubtedly have difficult jobs, but sometimes they overreact — […]
Law enforcement officials are vastly expanding their collection of DNA to include millions more people who have been arrested or detained but not yet convicted. The move, intended to help solve more crimes, is raising concerns about the privacy of petty offenders and people who are presumed innocent. Until now, the federal government genetically tracked only convicts. But starting this month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation will join 15 states that collect DNA samples from those awaiting trial and will collect DNA from detained immigrants - the vanguard of a growing class of genetic registrants. The F.B.I., with a DNA database of 6.7 million profiles, expects to accelerate its growth rate from 80,000 new entries a year to 1.2 million by 2012 - a 17-fold increase. F.B.I. officials say they expect DNA processing backlogs - which now stand at more than 500,000 cases - to increase. Law enforcement officials say that expanding the DNA databanks to include legally innocent people will help solve more violent crimes. They point out that DNA has helped convict thousands of criminals and has exonerated more than 200 wrongfully convicted people. But criminal justice experts cite Fourth Amendment privacy concerns and […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
