Category: Business

Why IndyMac failed

The $4 Billion Senator – WSJ.com
The federal takeover of IndyMac Bank over the weekend could cost the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. between $4 billion and $8 billion. But Senator Chuck Schumer, who helped to precipitate the collapse by publicizing a letter to the bank’s regulator last month, has no remorse.

The Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), whose job it actually was to regulate IndyMac, took a different view. “The immediate cause of the closing,” the OTS wrote in a press release, “was a deposit run that began and continued after the public release of a June 26 letter to the OTS and the FDIC from Senator Charles Schumer of New York.” The OTS added: “In the following 11 business days, depositors withdrew more than $1.3 billion from their accounts.” I’ve also heard that at the time IndyMac wasn’t even on the Fed’s Watch List of Banks that could fail.

From the LA Times quoting John M. Reich, director of the Office of Thrift Supervision:

“Leaking his IndyMac letter to the press was reckless and grossly irresponsible. I don’t see how he can be trusted with confidential information in the future. What this incredibly stupid conduct does is put at risk the willingness of regulators to share any information with the [congressional] oversight committees. After this, you’d be crazy to share information with Schumer.”

Grim proving ground for Obama’s housing policy

Grim proving ground for Obama’s housing policy – The Boston Globe
The candidate endorsed subsidies for private entrepreneurs to build low-income units. But, while he garnered support from developers, many projects in his former district have fallen into disrepair.

As a result, some people in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods are torn between a natural inclination to support Obama and a concern about his relationships with the developers they hold responsible for Chicago’s affordable housing failures. Some housing advocates worry that Obama has not learned from those failures.

“I’m not against Barack Obama,” said Willie J.R. Fleming, an organizer with the Coalition to Protect Public Housing and a former public housing resident. “What I am against is some of the people around him.”

Jamie Kalven, a longtime Chicago housing activist, put it this way: “I hope there is not much predictive value in his history and in his involvement with that community.” Video

Brazil Gusher Bombshell

In Brazil, Another Gusher
If confirmed, a 33-billion-barrels find would trail just two larger oil reservoirs, in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Those fields were each discovered more than 60 years ago, but together still account for nearly 8% of global oil output. With a single field, Brazil could potentially top all the proved reserves in the United States, estimated at 29.9 billion barrels, according to BP’s 2007 Statistical Review of World Energy. Mexico’s 35-billion-barrel Cantarell field, discovered in 1976, was largely responsible for that country becoming the world’s fifth-largest oil producer.

“Carioca would be the third-largest oil field in the world,” said Haroldo Lima, director of ANP, at an energy seminar Monday.

Best Bread Baker in Paris is Tunisian

A Visit with Best Bread Baker in Paris
The baker with Tunisian parents will have close ties to the President with Hungarian roots and an Italian-born wife. As the officially maker of the best baguette in Paris, he is entitled to be the exclusive caterer to Sarkozy’s Elysee Palace for one year. “We’re not talking much,” says Bouabsa,” maybe around 20 baguettes a day.” Then he starts to laugh a bit hysterically thinking about Carla Bruni biting into his luscious bread. “Not bad, not bad at all.” Continue reading “Best Bread Baker in Paris is Tunisian”

A Simple, Cheap Way To Produce Hydrogen?

[ QuantumSphere, Inc. ]
If this Press Release pans out, it could bring about the Hydrogen-based Economy. The process by which electricity is used to generate hydrogen and oxygen from water is called electrolysis. Through the use of a new proprietary nano catalyst formulation, QuantumSphere has demonstrated production of hydrogen and oxygen in an alkaline electrolyzer with 85 percent efficiency under ambient conditions, making it a commercially viable replacement for fossil fuel-based production methods.

Although identified as a candidate with the potential to lower dependency on petroleum, today’s current large-scale hydrogen production techniques also produce an inordinate amount of greenhouse gases such as carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. For example, the steam-reformation process – which accounts for roughly 85% of hydrogen production using natural gas – produces four pounds of greenhouse gases for every one pound of hydrogen produced. “While hydrogen has long been promoted for its clean energy potential, the most common method of production of the gas has been a dirty little secret in terms of the amount of fossil fuels used and the greenhouse gasses generated,” said Kevin Maloney, president and CEO, QuantumSphere, Inc. Continue reading “A Simple, Cheap Way To Produce Hydrogen?”

Saving Compulsive Hoarders From Themselves

Willamette Week | “<b>The Cleaners:</b> The Organizer” | February 13th, 2008

Penelope Rose Miller’s career as a professional organizer began three years ago, at the entrance to an apartment in San Francisco.

From the doorway of the apartment, which belonged to a successful female professional, Rose Miller could see nothing but stuff. Everywhere. Each room was filled with mountains of clutter, untouched and unused for months or years. The only open spaces were narrow pathways through the mess, winding from room to room. One room was completely sealed off with hoarded items stacked from floor to ceiling.

It was time to get to work. Continue reading “Saving Compulsive Hoarders From Themselves”

Would Obama Be Good for Business?

Is Obama Good for Business?
But Obama has also taken several steps that aren’t typical of his fellow liberal senators. He has stocked his Capitol Hill staff with employees whose résumés include McKinsey, the old Andersen Consulting, and other nonpartisan business advisory firms. He joined forces with conservatives on bills designed to improve ethics and transparency in Washington. He voted for a bill in 2005 that made life harder for trial lawyers—a traditional Democratic constituency—by allowing defendants to shift cases more easily to federal court, which can be less favorable to plaintiffs. And he pushed an outside-the-box proposal that would help Detroit automakers pay legacy health-care costs on the condition they reinvest the subsequent savings into hybrids and other fuel-efficient cars.

Some of the names that might fill in the org chart in an Obama Administration are also telling. Obama—whose own father was a Kenyan economist with a PhD from Harvard University—has cultivated a group of economic advisers. They’re generally careful technocrats, and are led by University of Chicago professor Austan Goolsbee. Among the others: Jeffrey Liebman and David Cutler of Harvard and Christina and David Romer of the University of California, Berkeley. Goolsbee has shown a preference for making economic initiatives easier to understand and use, an effort Obama calls “iPod government.”

Mafia Can Still Muscle NYC

Gambino-linked mob thugs build profit with taxpayers’ dollars
The mob family busted in the FBI’s massive crackdown is involved in millions of dollars worth of contracts on some of the biggest public and private projects in the city, a Daily News investigation reveals.

The Gambino family’s tentacles reach far and wide, from the massive Manhattan water tunnel project to replacing lights across some of New York’s most heavily trafficked bridges, a review of the 170 pages of charges filed against it last week shows.

The revelations in Thursday’s bombshell indictments are even more shocking as they come years after officials declared the mob had been flushed from the city’s construction trades. Thacher said although the lock the mob had on industries like concrete production and window installation in the 1970s and ’80s has loosened, it’s been replaced by a different disease, control of trucking firms essential to smooth operation at any construction site.

World’s largest swimming pool

Make a splash in the world’s largest swimming pool | the Daily Mail
It is more than 1,000 yards long, covers 20 acres, had a 115ft deep end and holds 66 million gallons of water, took 5 years and cost $1.5 billion to build.

Yesterday the Guinness Book of Records named the vast pool beside the sea in Chile as the biggest in the world.