To: Wall Street chief executives
From: Your man in Washington
Re: Embracing the status quo
Our earnings are robust, our compensation has returned to its naturally high levels and, as a result, we have very nearly regained our grip on the imaginations of the most ambitious students at the finest universities — and from that single fact many desirable outcomes follow.
Raise your hand if you can explain why anyone still believes in credit ratings.
One of the enduring questions of the financial crisis is how the credit ratings establishment got so much so wrong for so very long. How could century-old institutions like the Moody’s Investors Service give their triple-A blessings to subprime junk?
It is time — in fact, past time — for Washington to get some answers. Because despite talk of a shake-up, the companies that dominate the ratings business hope to avoid the radical overhaul their critics are calling for.
Washington, D.C. — U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken (D-Minn.) today (Thursday, May 27) announced that the cities of Elmore and Milan, in Minnesota, will receive $8,457,000 in funding to go toward water and wastewater improvements.
The projects, which are funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and with regular U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Water and Environmental Program funds (WEP), are intended to provide jobs while improving rural America’s infrastructure.
Senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken announce a new round of federal funding to go toward water and wastewater improvements. The City of Elmore will receive a $2,939,000 loan and a $2,913,000 grant to fund wastewater system improvements. The projects, which are funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and with regular USDA Water and Environmental Program funds, are intended to provide jobs while improving rural America’s infrastructure.
MINNEAPOLIS – After months of complaints by its users, Facebook is simplifying its privacy controlled. On Wednesday, the CEO of Facebook acknowledged that “a lot of people are upset with us.”
One Facebook user told FOX 9 it took 90 minutes to set up the privacy controls for his friend on Tuesday. This change is meant to be more user-friendly and give Facebook users the ability to keep their information more private.
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) today (Wednesday, May 26) signed on to legislation that would force BP or other responsible parties to reimburse the federal government for emergency spending related to the oil spill in the Gulf.
The amendment, authored by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), was introduced as an attachment to the 2010 Supplemental Appropriations Act that is being debated in the Senate this week.
Minnesota Senator Al Franken says a Sunday meeting discussing possible questions for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan went very well. Franken is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee that will start evaluating Kagan on June 28th. Sunday’s meeting included conservative and liberal members of Minnesota’s legal community. There were also legal scholars and observers from around the state. The meeting lasted two hours, but Franken says it could have gone longer. He hopes to get the group together in the future for more discussion.
While it’s always best to let the market forces of free enterprise work independently of government, society has carved out a niche of “too big to fail” that can wreck havoc with the economy.
As seen by the trigger points of the current Great Recession, parts of the economy left unregulated can pull down an entire economy.
The U.S. Senate on Thursday passed important regulatory authority to government to hopefully prevent another Great Recession or worse.
Addition of morning departure, evening return expected to boost local economy
An early morning flight out of Falls International Airport and an evening return from the Twin Cities is now guaranteed for at least the next two years under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Transportation and Delta Airlines.
U.S. Sen. Al Franken, who worked on the agreement with Sen. Amy Klobuchar and U.S. Rep. Jim Oberstar, discussed the impact of the agreement in a teleconference Wednesday with Bob Anderson, chair of the International Falls-Koochiching County Airport Commission, and Susan Baratono, commission secretary.
RON GRASSI will admit that when he decided to sue the three major rating agencies in early 2009, he was too enraged to think about his odds. A retired family law specialist who lives in California, he filed his suit in a low boil a few months after $40,000 in Lehman Brothers corporate bonds he owned all but vanished when the investment bank collapsed.
At first, he was furious at the bank. But then he decided the true villains were the rating agencies that had stamped those now-worthless bonds with high grades.
“My friends were complaining and moaning about what had happened on Wall Street, but nobody was doing anything about it,” says Mr. Grassi, 69. “By sheer coincidence, there’s a state court a few blocks from where I live in Tahoe City, and one day I walked down there, filled out a two-page form and sued.”
