Word: firmness
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Another bet that didn't pay off for Freddie was on interest rates. The firm's managers bought derivatives that would pay out if interest rates rose. Instead, a global financial meltdown has caused interest rates to plummet. That resulted in a $15 billion loss for Freddie from its hedges...
...price similar bonds are trading for in the market, the company's net worth would sink by an additional $65 billion. But Freddie's bottom-line woes may run even deeper. Freddie has $38 billion in losses it has yet to acknowledge in its investment portfolio. The firm also has $48 billion in nonperforming loans that it either holds or has guaranteed against. In a painful stroke of irony, there is a $15.4 billion line item for deferred taxes on the asset side of Freddie's balance sheet. That means Freddie is still hoping to claim $15 billion in write...
...middle of decrying the misdeeds of the financial firm AIG, President Barack Obama cracked a joke. "Excuse me," he said Monday, after coughing into the microphone. "I am choked up with anger here." There were laughs all around the gilded East Room of the White House because he didn't sound angry...
...promised weeks ago to stop the excessive bonuses on Wall Street, at a time when the existence of the coming AIG bonuses had already been disclosed by the excellent reporting of Bloomberg News. Obama's staff vowed more recently that the further infusion of taxpayer money into AIG, a firm now 80% controlled by the Federal Government, was appropriate and necessary. And now Obama was faced with the fact that his new executive-compensation policy, which applied to only a narrow subset of executives at a few institutions, was powerless to stop the worst violators at AIG from getting their...
...recent editorial for The Guardian newspaper: "Our politicians have been pathetic at increasing democratic engagement, even with the power of the media at their fingertips." According to Jury Team advocates, that could be deliberate. "There's never been a time when political parties have had such a firm grip on the windpipe of our democracy," says Martin Bell, a British UNICEF ambassador and former Independent...