Word: johnings
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Bank analyst John McDonald of Wall Street firm Bernstein Research says most people are focused on how the lack of loans will hurt bank earnings. Lending is, after all, how banks make money. But in the past year or so, banks have had to sock away more and more cash into their reserves to account for their growing number of bad loans. That's caused earnings to plummet. With loans falling, reserve ratios - the measure of reserves to loans - are growing. That means banks will be able to divert less profit into those rainy-day accounts, which should boost bottom...
...John Burns, president of John Burns Real Estate Consulting, is a bit more bearish, predicting foreclosure notices will rise to 3.1 million this year. Foreclosure notices include default notices, auction-sale letters and bank-repossession notices. But those notices may produce a far more damaging result than last year's. "I think 50% more people will lose their homes to a bank this year than they did last year," predicts Burns. (See questions and answers about retirement...
...Certainly, Congress is as polarized now as it has ever been. With the retirements last year of longtime Republicans John Warner of Virginia, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Mississippi's Trent Lott, there's hardly a Republican left who is willing to reach out across the aisle. The punishment for such comity is tea-party declarations of being a traitor: witness Lindsey Graham's second censure this week by a South Carolina County Republican Party for his bipartisan work on climate change. On the Democratic side, the death of Massachusetts' Ted Kennedy, the retirement of John Breaux of Louisiana...
...fall is that they keep all five vulnerable seats in the Senate and lose only 15 seats in the House. There may even be a shot at picking up a couple of new seats to help offset any losses. After all, House Republicans are defending nine open seats (which John McCain either lost or won with less than 60% of the vote in 2008), while Democrats are defending seven seats (which Obama either lost or won with less than 60% of the vote). And in the Senate, Dems have strong candidates for the open GOP seats in Ohio, New Hampshire...
...this stinks. Normally, when you repatriate [detainees] to a government that is competent, they keep an eye on them. In Yemen, the government has less capacity [to do so]. We'd be negligent if we were ignoring that." And the Administration hasn't. Barack Obama's top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, took direct control of the Yemeni-detainee issue, traveling to Yemen twice last year to push the U.S. counterterrorism agenda...