Did You Miss These? (June 21 Edition)
Saturday, June 21st, 2008A recap of the week’s equity news
“Midwest floods expose aging, weak protection,” - Chicago Tribune
With rumbling force, the Cedar River on Wednesday ripped through the eastern Iowa city of Cedar Rapids toward a historic crest while unleashing floodwaters into businesses and homes.
With thunderstorms looming, thousands of people quickly evacuated the downtown area as state officials warned the levee barely holding back the river could burst overnight and inundate city streets with water for miles around.
“LA can benefit from a state bill that doles out money based on smart-growth ideas,” - New York Times
Environmental leadership, or growth and opportunity? For three decades, it seemed that California could only have one or the other: Responsible stewardship of our resources coupled with slow growth — and a resulting shortage of housing and jobs; or continued economic power — with the degradation brought by traffic and sprawl.
Now the state is finding its way toward a model in which environmentalism and growth complement each other. Lawmakers weighed in with AB 32, the landmark bill to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Voters approved infrastructure bonds such as Proposition 1C, which encourages builders to focus on transit corridors or empty or degraded spots in urban areas.
“The Bubble: How homeowners’ missed mortgage payments set off widespread problems and woke up the Fed.,” - Washington Post
The mortgage executives who gathered in a blond-wood conference room in Southern California studied their internal reports with growing alarm.
More and more borrowers were falling behind on their monthly payments almost as soon as they moved into their new homes, indicating that some of them never really had the money to begin with. “Nobody had models for that,” said David E. Zimmer, then one of the executives at People’s Choice, a subprime lender based in Irvine. “Nobody had predicted people going into default in their first three mortgage payments.”
“Report faults F.D.A. action for safe food,” - New York Times
The Food and Drug Administration has failed to carry out much of its own plan to protect the nation’s food supply, Congressional investigators say in a report that is to be released on Thursday.
The report, by investigators for the Government Accountability Office, is expected to tell the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday that the agency has done little to put into operation its “food protection plan,” which the F.D.A. released in November.
The series has critically examined what it looks like to be poor in America today, by telling stories as varied as the young, African American, single mother of two children who lost her job at Enron only to find herself making less than $10,000 a year as a nursing assistant; a young married couple, graduate student and carpenter, trying their best to sustain a family of five on the land by growing a community garden; and the Ethiopian immigrant working full time at a meat packing plant, and part time as a child care provider in rural Minnesota.