Word: banking
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...time the tower opened on Jan. 4 with a lavish fireworks display, though, the showmanship had faded. Weeks earlier, Dubai's biggest state-owned development company had declared it was unable to pay its debts. Officially, Dubai owes its creditors $80 billion, though a recent report by regional investment bank EFG-Hermes estimates that the city may be in the hole for as much as $170 billion. After Sheik Khalifa al-Nahyan, the oil-rich ruler of neighboring Abu Dhabi, stepped in with $10 billion to stave off an embarrassing default, the skyscraper's owners changed the building's name...
Other countries in the gulf are spinning the same line: cherry-picking the best of Dubai while avoiding the worst. Saudi Arabia, the region's behemoth, has ambitious plans for new development, and Riyadh, its capital and biggest city, is bound to host the central bank for a proposed future gulf single currency. But for all its shopping malls and skyscrapers, Riyadh will never be the region's financial center so long as there is no place for investment bankers to celebrate their deals by popping champagne corks. Most global professionals don't want to live in a country where...
That Parliament members chose to take a stand on the bank data issue is a little surprising. The Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP) has always been a controversial initiative. It was secretly set up after the Sept. 11 attacks, allowing CIA agents and U.S. Treasury officials to sift through the European financial messaging data collected by SWIFT, an international bank transfer consortium based in Belgium. When the arrangement came to light in 2006, it outraged civil liberties advocates and prompted the European Union to outline certain conditions under which the U.S. could access the information - the precursor to the arrangement...
European governments said the bank data legislation, while not perfect, at least required U.S. authorities to abide by several European demands on data protection and improved oversight. Yet despite their pressure - and last-minute pleas by such high-ranking U.S. officials as Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner - the European Parliament voted down the measure on Feb. 11 by a hefty margin of 378-196. After the vote, the Obama Administration called it "a setback for U.S.-E.U. counter-terror cooperation." (See who's who in Barack Obama's White House...
Furthermore, the Federal Government's big loan-modification effort - abbreviated as HAMP - does little to help such borrowers since in many cases lenders will recoup more by foreclosing (the test any loan modification must pass). A recent Bank of America Merrill Lynch study of loan modifications at IndyMac, which provided the template for broader modification efforts, found that about 20% of subprime loans had been rewritten, while fewer than 8% of option ARMs got reloaded. (See pictures of TIME's Wall Street covers...