Word: californianess
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IndyMac will soon earn the first half of its name back. The Federal Government, which seized the failed bank last summer, is expected to close a deal in the next week that would return the California mortgage lender to private ownership. For IndyMac, the deal means independence in less than eight months. For the government, the IndyMac sale provides a shining example of how takeovers can work, at a time when the Obama Administration may soon begin pushing for more nationalizations. (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis...
...FDIC also has a public-policy mission with IndyMac, which had made many risky mortgages. Many of those loans went to borrowers in California, where home prices have fallen sharply. The FDIC tried to show it could keep many of those borrowers in their homes and still turn the bank around. In all, IndyMac modified the loans of more than 10,000 of its borrowers in less than eight months, in many cases eliminating the chance that those borrowers would face foreclosure. (See pictures of Americans in their homes...
...many observers agree, never the best use of taxpayer money. And now, with so many states facing major budget crises, it looks like it won't continue at the same pace much longer. California's prisons are so overcrowded and underfunded that a federal judge recently ruled that the state must release roughly a third of its 158,000 prisoners by 2012. The New York State legislature is close to scrapping the draconian Rockefeller drug laws that, by imposing mandatory sentences rather than rehab treatment, have kept many otherwise law-abiding drug users in prison for years. Other states, such...
...time to parole officers or failing drug tests. Parole and probation officers are typically funded just enough to be able to detect violations but not enough to offer help, say, for drug rehabilitation. This revolving door is very expensive; it adds $1 billion a year in costs to California's overburdened penal system...
After Tim Robbins' character in 1992's The Player gets away with murdering a screenwriter in a Los Angeles alley, the frazzled Hollywood exec absconds with Greta Scacchi into southern California's empty desert. There, in the candlelight of a cloistered getaway motel, Scacchi asks her homicidal flame, "Do places like this really exist...