Word: midlands
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...MIDLAND. Conceived as a cooperative venture that would supply Michigan's Consumers Power Co. with electricity and a neighboring Dow Chemical plant with steam, the two-unit, 1,300-MW project on Michigan's Tittabawassee River was launched in 1969. It then carried a $267 million price tag. The problem-plagued development is currently nine years behind schedule and egregiously over budget. Company officials say that construction, now 85% complete, has al ready cost $3.4 billion...
...Michigan, Attorney General Frank Kelley publicly urged the state's largest utility, Consumers Power, to follow Indiana's example and abandon construction of the Midland atomic power plant. Proposed in 1967 at an expected cost of $260 million, Midland will probably reach $6 billion, says Kelley. Midland came under additional criticism last week from federal inspectors, who announced that the floors in one of Midland's buildings were filled with cracks. Those fissures seemed symbolic of the whole nuclear power industry...
...borrowers fondly regarded the 93-year-old institution as Mother Midland, in tribute to its practice of sometimes extending credit on faith alone. It was known for "handshake" loans on long-shot oil and gas ventures. Says Texas Governor Mark White: "Midland helped a lot of people to make a lot of money." So last week when the troubled First National Bank of Midland was about to collapse under the burden of energy loans gone sour, the community staged a pep rally to stem a run on its deposits. About a thousand citizens gathered in Midland's Civic Center...
...Dallas' Republic Bank (deposits: $11.9 billion). Republic assumed the bank's estimated 76,400 accounts and planned to reopen its doors this week; the FDIC will collect First National's bad loans. The passing of the institution into the hands of out-of-towners left some Midland residents gloomy. Said Mayor Thane Akins: "I feel like hanging a black wreath on my door." The merger was one of the largest commercial bank failures in U.S. history, based on the institution's deposits of $622 million. The biggest bank to go under was New York City...
...Texas, anxious depositors withdrew $447 million during the first half of the year from the First National Bank of Midland (assets: $1.5 billion), whose loans to oil and gas producers turned sour. Earlier this month, the bank reported a second-quarter loss of $109.3 million. Many banks are now teetering on the brink of collapse. At the end of July, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation listed 540 "problem" banks, ranging from small state-chartered ones with too many weak agricultural loans to nationally chartered banks with bad business loans. Among the 540, the FDIC secretly lists dozens as likely...