She was startled by what happened next. When she swiped her debit card at the grocery store, it was declined. It turned out Capital One Bank had taken $224.25 from her paycheck, a quarter of her wages for two weeks of work at a retail chain, and her bank account was overdrawn. ‘They’re kicking somebody who’s already in the dirt, she said. One of the worst economic downturns of modern history has produced a big increase in the number of delinquent borrowers, and creditors are suing them by the millions. Concern is mounting in government and among consumer advocates that the debtors are not always getting a fair shake in these cases. Most consumers never offer a defense, and creditors win their lawsuits without having to offer proof of the debts, much less justify to a judge the huge interest charges and penalties they often tack on. After winning, creditors can secure a court order to seize part of the debtor’s paycheck or the funds in a bank account, a procedure called garnishment. No national statistics are kept, but the pay seizures are rising fast in some areas - up 121 percent in the Phoenix area […]
WASHINGTON — Oil consumption has fallen, demand from U.S. motorists for gasoline is flat at best and refiners that turn crude into fuel are operating well below capacity. Yet oil prices keep marching toward $90 a barrel, pushing gasoline toward $3 a gallon in many markets, and prompting American drivers to ask, ‘What gives?’ Blame it on the same folks who brought you $140 oil and $4 gasoline in 2008: Wall Street speculators. Experts attribute much of the recent rise in prices to flows of speculative money into oil markets. These bets are fueled by investor expectations that the U.S. and global economies are poised to return to growth and thus spark increased use of oil. Strong growth in China supports the narrative of rising oil consumption and tightening supplies. ‘The thinking goes that rising stock (market) prices implies expanding business activity, implies growing energy demand, implies rising oil prices. I think you can make that case, but it’s awfully weak,’ said Michael Fitzpatrick, vice president-energy for MF Global, a financial firm that brokers the sale of contracts for future delivery of oil. While there are signs of U.S. economic recovery, such as a slight uptick […]
David Tepper, head of Short Hills, N.J.-based Appaloosa Management, earned an estimated $4 billion last year, making him 2009’s highest-paid hedge-fund manager, according to a report published by AR magazine. George Soros, chairman of New York-based Soros Fund Management, ranked second with $3.3 billion, followed by James Simons of Renaissance Technologies in East Setauket, N.Y., who made $2.5 billion. Last year set a record for the 25 top-earning managers, who collectively made $25 billion, according to the magazine. That’s more than double the $11.6 billion the top 25 made in 2008 and about $3 billion more than the previous record of $22.3 billion set in 2007, the magazine said. Hedge funds climbed an average of 20 percent last year, the most since 1999, according to Chicago-based Hedge Fund Research. The returns came as stock and bond markets rebounded from 2008’s credit crisis. Following Simons were John Paulson, Paulson & Co., $2.3 billion; Steve Cohen, SAC Capital Advisors, $1.4 billion; Carl Icahn, Icahn Capital, $1.3 billion; Edward Lampert, ESL Investments, $1.3 billion; Ken Griffin, Citadel Investment, $900 million; John Arnold, Centaurus Advisors, $900 million; and Philip Falcone, Harbinger Capital, $825 million. David Tepper Appaloosa Management […]
Of the many heartbreaking details in the latest round of outrage over child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, one stands out as particularly emblematic: a tidy window into Church leaders’ mindsets; a bracing glimpse of what went wrong. It traces back to 1975, when the Rev. Sean Brady, now a cardinal at the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, was tending to two boys who had been molested by a priest. By Cardinal Brady’s own admission, he did not report what had happened to the authorities. It was his understanding, he said, that the church would not want that. Instead, the boys – one 14, one just 10, both surely reeling – were forced to sign an oath that such notification would never be made. It is doubtful that pledge helped them heal, or that he or anyone else in the church thought it might. It certainly did not safeguard other children, many of whom the priest went on to molest. But it served a purpose and illustrated a priority: to insulate the church from outside interference and condemnation. And it distilled the church’s profound defensiveness toward the secular world, a longstanding posture and a […]
This month, North Korea reportedly executed the Korean Workers’ Party’s economic policy director, Pak Nam Gi, for being a ‘bourgeois infiltrator’ who ruined the country’s economy. Upon his 2005 appointment to the position, a post akin to a finance minister, Pak had allegedly vowed to put an end to the ‘capitalist fantasy.’ But the 77-year-old technocrat’s disastrous currency-reform program, launched Nov. 30, 2009, ended up damaging something very real: the informal market economy that today provides for most North Koreans’ sustenance. The ‘reform’ chopped two zeros off the currency, gave citizens only a brief window to exchange their wealth, and capped the amount of old bills that North Koreans could trade in at roughly $40. So complete was the resulting economic chaos that it precipitated an unprecedented outpouring of civil disobedience. And though the sporadic protests appear to have been relatively small and uncoordinated, the reported prominence of octogenarian war veterans among the protesters was enough to unnerve the government. The fiasco was obviously self-inflicted and visibly inconsistent with the regime’s tendency to attribute all ills that befall the country to foreign ‘hostile forces.’ Pyongyang bumped up the limit for currency exchanges and in February made a historically unparalleled […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
