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Back in December the unemployment rate in five of those cities - from 2.7% in Morgantown to 5.5% in Jonesboro - was not only well below the national average of 7.2%, but also lower than it had been 12 months earlier; in the sixth, Casper, the rate held steady from a year ago. That put them starkly at odds with the other 363 metropolitan areas tracked by the BLS, all of which were seeing unemployment rising, in some cases sharply. Unemployment in Boise, Idaho, for example, jumped from 3.0% to 7.1% during 2008. In Fresno, Calif., it went from...
...that's what causes the problem. Every securitization deal creates some AAA-rated bonds and some lower-quality debts. In a typical credit-card securitization, as much as 15% of the bonds created will have ratings lower than AAA. And the government plan does nothing to help banks get those riskier bonds off their books. Worse, TALF might actually discourage investors who would normally be interested in these higher-yielding bonds from buying them...
Under TALF, though, an investor has to make a down payment of just $8 million to get a loan from the government to buy $100 million in auto bonds. The loan costs 1.5% a year, or $1.5 million on $100 million, which lowers the investor's take-home return to $2 million. But remember, the investor had to put up just $8 million. That means the annual return on the much smaller up-front investment zooms to a fat 25%. Lower-rated auto loans can pay as much as 30%, but they have a much higher rate of default...
...said that the scaling back of contracts was necessary in response to the University’s unprecedented fiscal challenges. The move “comes after we have frozen salaries for faculty and non-union staff this year and offered a voluntary early retirement program in order to lower compensation costs,” he said. Additional confusion has arisen after various custodial workers reported that they had been notified of their termination—even though they were not on preliminary lists of workers to be cut provided by the subcontractors, Becker said. But he added that...
...limelight. If current polling trends continue and if - a big if - he can avoid a fatal taint from the latest of Japan's money-politics scandals, the leader of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) could soon be Japan's next Prime Minister. An election for the lower house of the Diet has to be called by Sept. 10, but the surmise in Tokyo is that it may come as early as May 24, which is, by coincidence, Ozawa's 67th birthday. If the DPJ does indeed supplant the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and form a government, the significance...