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September 03, 2010
AP Asserts : "Combat in Iraq is not over, and we should not uncritically repeat suggestions that it is"
Follow up to President Obama’s Address on Iraq via Poynter Online - AP: 'Combat in Iraq is not over, and we should not uncritically repeat suggestions that it is', Memo from the AP's standards editor, Tom Kent, Thursday, September 02, 2010
" Many AP staffers are producing content that refers to the situation in Iraq. It might be a local story about Iraq veterans, an international diplomatic story that mentions the Iraqi conflict or coverage on the ground in Iraq itself. Whatever the subject, we should be correct and consistent in our description of what the situation in Iraq is. This guidance summarizes the situation and suggests wording to use and avoid. To begin with, combat in Iraq is not over, and we should not uncritically repeat suggestions that it is, even if they come from senior officials. The situation on the ground in Iraq is no different today than it has been for some months. Iraqi security forces are still fighting Sunni and al-Qaida insurgents. Many Iraqis remain very concerned for their country's future despite a dramatic improvement in security, the economy and living conditions in many areas. As for U.S. involvement, it also goes too far to say that the U.S. part in the conflict in Iraq is over. President Obama said Monday night that "the American combat mission in Iraq has ended. Operation Iraqi Freedom is over, and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country. However, 50,000 American troops remain in country. Our own reporting on the ground confirms that some of these troops, especially some 4,500 special operations forces, continue to be directly engaged in military operations. These troops are accompanying Iraqi soldiers into battle with militant groups and may well fire and be fired on..."
Pew Report: Cell phones and American adults
Cell phones and American adults - They make just as many calls, but text less often than teens - by Amanda Lenhart, Senior Research Specialist, 9/2/2010
"Texting by American adults has increased substantially over the past year, but still does not approach the magnitude of text messages exchanged by adolescents. Some 72% of adult cell phone users send and receive text messages now, up from 65% in September 2009. Fully 87% of teen cell users text. Teens text 50 messages a day on average, five times more than the typical 10 text messages sent and received by adults per day. Still, for most adults, voice calling is their primary use of the phone. They make and receive about 5 calls per day on average."
Google says it is simplifying and updating privacy policies
Official Google Blog: "Long, complicated and lawyerly — that's what most people think about privacy policies, and for good reason. Even taking into account that they’re legal documents, most privacy policies are still too hard to understand. So we’re simplifying and updating Google’s privacy policies. To be clear, we aren’t changing any of our privacy practices; we want to make our policies more transparent and understandable. As a first step, we’re making two types of improvements:
- Most of our products and services are covered by our main Google Privacy Policy. Some, however, also have their own supplementary individual policies. Since there is a lot of repetition, we are deleting 12 of these product-specific policies. These changes are also in line with the way information is used between certain products—for example, since contacts are shared between services like Gmail, Talk, Calendar and Docs, it makes sense for those services to be governed by one privacy policy as well.
- We’re also simplifying our main Google Privacy Policy to make it more user-friendly by cutting down the parts that are redundant and rewriting the more legalistic bits so people can understand them more easily. For example, we’re deleting a sentence that reads, “The affiliated sites through which our services are offered may have different privacy practices and we encourage you to read their privacy policies,” since it seems obvious that sites not owned by Google might have their own privacy policies..."
Census Bureau Reports 16 Percent Increase in Federal Domestic Spending in 2009
News release: "The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that obligations for federal domestic spending increased 16.0 percent in fiscal year 2009 to $3.2 trillion. The 2009 spending total is equivalent to $10,548 per person living in the United States. The annual percentage change (16.0 percent) is the largest since the Census Bureau began compiling these data in 1983. The increase is in part from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. Entitlement programs Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security comprised 45.7 percent of all funding, or $1.5 trillion. Social Security alone accounted for $709.7 billion of that total. The one-year increase ($136.0 billion) in spending for these three programs was approximately $401 for every person in the United States. States that had the highest per capita federal spending were Alaska ($20,351), Virginia ($19,734) and Hawaii ($19,001). States with the lowest were Nevada ($7,148), Utah ($7,435) and Georgia ($8,538).
These new figures come from Consolidated Federal Funds Report: 2009, which describes the distribution of federal funds by department and agency, and by state and county. A companion report also released today, Federal Aid to States: 2009, shows federal grants to state and local governments. These reports do not include interest paid on the federal debt and foreign aid. Although federal expenditure and obligation totals for fiscal year 2009 in these reports include money from the ARRA, specific dollar amounts are not identifiable for all programs."
Census Bureau Reports State and Local Government Employment Remains at 16.6 Million
News release: "The nation's 89,526 state and local governments employed 16.6 million full-time equivalent employees in 2009, statistically unchanged from 2008, according to government employment data released by the U.S. Census Bureau. Part-time employees numbered 4.7 million, not statistically different from 2008. Local governments accounted for 12.2 million full-time equivalent employees, and state governments had 4.4 million. (Local governments include counties, cities, townships, special districts and school districts.) Most full-time equivalent state and local employees worked in education (8.9 million), hospitals (1.0 million), police protection (963,139) and corrections (759,513). Education included employment in elementary and secondary education, employment in higher education, and employment in support of special programs primarily for adult, vocational or special education that operate outside school systems."
Survey of Credit Underwriting Practices 2010
Survey of Credit Underwriting Practices 2010, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, August 2010
"The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) conducted its 16th annual underwriting survey to identify trends in lending standards and credit risk for the most common types of commercial and retail credit offered by national banks. The survey covered the 12-month period ending March 31, 2010. The 2010 survey included examiner assessments of credit underwriting standards at 51 of the largest national banks with assets of $3 billion or more. Examiners reported on loan products greater than 2 percent of the company’s committed loan portfolio or more than $10 billion in committed exposure. The OCC recognizes that banks not meeting these thresholds may offer a full suite of products; because of the size of the product portfolios, examiners did not gather information on them for the purposes of this report. The survey covered loans totaling $4 trillion as of December 31, 2009, which represented approximately 93 percent of total loans in the national banking system at that time. Large banks discussed in this report are the 14 largest banks by asset size supervised by the OCC’s Large Bank Supervision Department; the other 37 banks are supervised by the OCC’s Midsize/Community Bank Supervision Department."
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September 02, 2010
Fed Chairman Testifies on Causes of the Recent Financial and Economic Crisis
Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, Causes of the Recent Financial and Economic Crisis Before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, hearing, Too Big to Fail: Expectations and Impact of Extraordinary Government Intervention and the role of Systemic Risk in the Financial Crisis, Washington, D.C., September 2, 2010
"If the crisis has a single lesson, it is that the too-big-to-fail problem must be solved. Simple declarations that the government will not assist firms in the future, or restrictions that make providing assistance more difficult, will not be credible on their own. Few governments will accept devastating economic costs if a rescue can be conducted at a lesser cost; even if one Administration refrained from rescuing a large, complex firm, market participants would believe that others might not refrain in the future. Thus, a promise not to intervene in and of itself will not solve the problem."
Via New Yorker, commentary on this testimony by John Cassidy, author of How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities
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SEC Adopts Temporary Rule Requiring Municipal Advisors to Register With Agency
News release:" The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that it has adopted a temporary rule requiring municipal advisors to register with the SEC by October 1, a deadline established by the newly-enacted Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Municipal advisors provide advice to state and local governments and other borrowers involved in the issuance of municipal securities. The advice typically relates to municipal derivatives, guaranteed investment contracts, investment strategies or the issuance of municipal securities. Municipal advisors also solicit business from a state or local government for a third party. Municipal advisors can now access and complete the new registration form (Form MA-T) on the SEC's website. Municipal advisors are encouraged to begin the registration process as soon as possible because of the impending registration deadline and the requirement that applicants first obtain an ID and password."
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Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Preliminary Staff Report Too-Big-to-Fail Financial Institutions
Preliminary Staff Report, Governmental Rescues of 'Too-Big-To-Fail' Financial Institutions, August 31, 2010
"The purpose of this preliminary staff report is to describe governmental rescues of financial institutions during the decades leading up to the financial crisis and during the crisis itself. Section I provides an executive summary of the report. Section II describes how federal regulators justified their rescues of large, failing commercial banks prior to 1991 by invoking a rationale commonly referred to “too-big-to-fail” or TBTF. Section III discusses how Congress attempted to narrow the scope of the TBTF rationale in the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991 (FDICIA), and how TBTF considerations continued to affect the banking system despite FDICIA. Section IV focuses on two government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie and Freddie, and explains why those enterprises were viewed as presumptively TBTF prior to the financial crisis. As Section V explains, interventions by federal regulators in the capital markets between 1970 and 1998 raised questions about whether the federal government might be prepared to support large, nonbank financial institutions during a systemic crisis. Section VI describes how federal regulators and Congress greatly expanded the application of the TBTF policy and created new policy instruments to support large banks, Fannie, Freddie, and major nonbank financial institutions during the peak of the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009."
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EPIC Challenge to Airport Body Scanner Program Moves Forward in Federal Court
Follow up to previous postings on government implementation of whole body scanning technology at airports, via EPIC: "The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has set a briefing schedule for EPIC v. DHS, No. 10-1157, EPIC's challenge to the airport body scanner program. EPIC has alleged that that the Department of Homeland Security has violated three federal laws (the Administrative Procedures Act, the Privacy Act, and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act) and that the body scanner search itself is unconstitutional, given what the courts have said about the permissible scope of airport screening procedures. EPIC's initial brief will be due November 1, 2010. Subsequent briefs from DHS and EPIC will be due by December 15, 2010. In earlier open government litigation against DHS, EPIC obtained evidence that the devices are designed to store and record images."
Asylum Denial Rate Reaches All Time Low: FY 2010 Results, a Twenty-Five Year Perspective
"Very timely Justice Department data show that Immigration Judges are declining substantially fewer requests for asylum. Denial rates have reached the lowest level in the last quarter of a century according to a new analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). Twenty five years ago, in FY 1986, almost nine out of ten (89%) of the asylum requests in the Immigration Courts were denied. While the annual rates have gone up and down during the ensuing years, only half (50%) of the requests were denied during the first nine months of FY 2010 — a record low. One factor contributing to the improved success of the asylum seekers is that a higher proportion of the total are represented by counsel. It must be noted, however, that the number of those seeking asylum in court proceedings has fallen. These and many other findings have emerged in the fifth annual report of TRAC's monitoring series on Asylum Decisions in the Immigration Courts. The reports are based upon hundreds of thousands of case-by-case asylum records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR). The records cover asylum decisions for the last quarter century, and are current through June 21, 2010."
Birthright Citizenship in the United States A Global Comparison
Birthright Citizenship in the United States, A Global Comparison
By Jon Feere, Legal Policy Analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies
"Every year, 300,000 to 400,000 children are born to illegal immigrants in the United States. Despite the foreign citizenship and illegal status of the parent, the executive branch of the U.S. government automatically recognizes these children as U.S. citizens upon birth. The same is true of children born to tourists and other aliens who are present in the United States in a legal but temporary status. Since large-scale tourism and mass illegal immigration are relatively recent phenomena, it is unclear for how long the U.S. government has followed this practice of automatic “birthright citizenship” without regard to the duration or legality of the mother’s presence."
FEMA, the National Weather Service and other agencies are providing updates, advice and other disaster-management information on their websites
InformationWeek: "Agencies that deal with disaster-management are preparing for the arrival of Hurricane Earl, as the U.S. braces for another storm season. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has updated the homepage of its website with a Hurricane Earl Response tab, which includes a link to the National Weather Service's hurricane watches and warnings map. FEMA also has included a link to documents containing information about its Incident Management Assistance Teams, as well as posted videos and photos with information about storms."
September 01, 2010
IMF: Fiscal Space
Fiscal Space, Prepared by Jonathan D. Ostry, Atish R. Ghosh, Jun I. Kim, and Mahvash S. Qureshi, September 1, 2010, IMF Staff Position Note
"The fiscal challenges facing advanced economies are unprecedented, and bring to the fore questions about how to assess fiscal sustainability. Intertemporal solvency—the notion that governments eventually repay their debts—requires only that adjustments to bring debt dynamics back on track occur at some point in the future. Given the sovereign’s right to tax and (not) spend, changes in these variables can always make the problem of insolvency disappear. But markets are not impressed by promises that are unsupported by countries’ track record of adjustment (words unsupported by deeds), and so it is critical to examine this track record to see whether it is indeed consistent with satisfying the intertemporal constraint. In this note, we reexamine the issue of debt sustainability in a large group of advanced economies. Our hypothesis is that, when debt is in a moderate range, its dynamics are sustainable in the sense that increases in debt elicit sufficient increases in primary fiscal balances to stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio. At high debt levels, however, the dynamics may turn unstable, and the debt ratio may not converge to a finite level. Such a framework allows us to define a “debt limit” that is consistent with the country’s historical track record of adjustment in the sense that, without an extraordinary fiscal effort, any debt increment beyond this limit would cause debt to increase without bound."
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Executive Excess 2010: CEO Pay and the Great Recession
Executive Excess 2010: CEO Pay and the Great Recession, by Sarah Anderson, Chuck Collins, Sam Pizzigati, Kevin Shih: "The 17th annual executive compensation survey looks at how CEOs laid off thousands while raking in millions."
"Corporate executives, in reality, are not suffering at all. Their pay, to be sure, dipped on average in 2009 from 2008 levels, just as their pay in 2008, the first Great Recession year, dipped somewhat from 2007. But executive pay overall remains far above inflation adjusted levels of years past. In fact, after adjusting for inflation, CEO pay in 2009 more than doubled the CEO pay average for the decade of the 1990s, more than quadrupled the CEO pay average for the 1980s, and ran approximately eight times the CEO average for all the decades of the mid-20th century. American workers, by contrast, are taking home less in real weekly wages than they took home in the 1970s. Back in those years, precious few top executives made over 30 times what their workers made. In 2009, we calculate in the 17th annual Executive Excess, CEOs of major U.S. corporations averaged 263 times the average compensation of American workers. CEOs are clearly not hurting. But they are, as we detail in these pages, causing others to needlessly hurt — by cutting jobs to feather their own already comfortable executive nests. In 2009, the CEOs who slashed their payrolls the deepest took home 42 percent more compensation than the year’s chief executive pay average for S&P 500 companies. Most careful analysts of the high-finance meltdown that ushered in the Great Recession have concluded that excessive executive compensation played a prime causal role. Outrageously high rewards gave executives an incentive to behave outrageously, to take the sorts of reckless risks that would eventually endanger our entire economy."
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