Word: last
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...housing crisis, too, is a political sore point. Last week Treasury announced the initial results of its program to rewrite troubled residential loans. So far, of the more than 3 million past due loans at banks participating in the government's $75 billion loan-modification program, just slightly more than 30,000 have been permanently adjusted so the mortgage holders can make lower, government-subsidized payments. That means millions of troubled homeowners and millions of potential bad loans still on banks' books, perpetuating the uncertainties and fears that can undermine any economic recovery. Obama wants the banks to move faster...
...Obama will also criticize the banks for trying to derail financial-regulation reform, which passed the House last week but faces multiple battles after Christmas in the Senate. And he'll scold them for continuing to distribute high bonuses, especially when they reward excessive risk-taking. The senior bank executive at one of the banks meeting with the President Monday describes the process as a "public spanking" and says other than the public humiliation the Administration has little leverage. (See the top 10 crooked CEOs...
...Obama has made some attempts to play hardball with Wall Street, however. Last summer, JPMorgan tried to lowball the Administration on warrants it wanted to buy back from the government. JPMorgan's chief, Jamie Dimon, called Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in July personally to pressure him to sell at the low price. Geithner held out and auctioned the warrants off last week for tens of millions more than Dimon had offered, sources familiar with the negotiations tell TIME...
Chileans have had macabre reminders this month about how vicious the country's political right once was. Last week saw the reburial ceremony for Victor Jara, a popular 20th century Chilean folksinger. His remains were exhumed recently to help determine just how he was killed in 1973, after he had been arrested by the brutal right-wing dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, who ruled from 1973 to 1990. (An autopsy revealed that Jara was tormented in a game of Russian roulette and then executed by machine-gun fire.) This week, a Chilean judge ruled that former President Eduardo Frei Montalva...
...Chile far back to the right. The recent exhumations indicate how nervous many Chileans are that the rightward shift will enervate the robust human-rights apparatus established since Pinochet stepped down after a 1988 referendum rejected his continued rule. Piñera himself opposed Pinochet in that plebiscite. But last month he told a gathering of retired military and police officials who served under Pinochet that he'll work to rein in the trials - "proceedings that go on ad eternum," he remarked - that have convicted a number of their colleagues for murders and other abuses committed during the dictatorship. Some...