With several hours to go before the opening bell, the mood is similar to yesterday, which saw selling (a very, very rare occurrence for a Monday).
The euro is getting hammered. According to ForexLive, a major US bank is doing monster selling.
Futures are looking a bit soft as well. Here’s the action following yesterday’s close.
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The SMH reports that electric bikes might get greater encouragement from the local regulators – RTA changes could be boost for electric bikes
ELECTRIC bikes could be the answer to traffic congestion, the obesity crisis and our carbon footprint. But over-regulation and a cycling culture that looks down on battery-assisted bikes as “cheating” have slowed their take-up in Australia, enthusiasts say.
However, changes proposed by the RTA could allow more powerful models on our roads.
The bikes do not need to be registered as long as their maximum power is 200 watts or less. But some models can have throttle control and resemble mopeds, with users being booked for riding them without registration.
”The beauty of this is people who are way past riding a bike can suddenly ride again. It integrates casual exercise into people’s daily lives,” says Mike Rubbo, 71, a filmmaker and e-bike enthusiast who runs the blog situp-cycle.com. ”It’s the ideal urban transport vehicle.”
Overseas, e-bikes with up to 1000-watt motors are permitted in some jurisdictions. European e-bikes are typically 250 watts. In response to a growing push to allow e-bikes without registration to be used in Australia, the RTA has submitted a report to the federal government proposing changes to regulations.
“Times have changed and bikes have changed so they need to bring the law into line with Europe, which is what they’re proposing,” said Paul van Bellen, co-owner of Gazelle Bicycles Australia, a “bikes for transport” shop in Matraville.
The SMH also has a report on haggling over a Sydney light rail plan (probably a fantasy, like most state government transport initiatives) – Bureaucrats want light rail stops every 700m – passengers or not.
The Sydney Metro Authority folded last month after the Premier, Kristina Keneally, abandoned the controversial $5.3 billion, seven-kilometre underground line between Central and Rozelle and announced instead an extension of the light rail to Dulwich Hill and a line between Central and Barangaroo.
Under a proposal the Herald understands the department is considering, there would be no light rail stops at Lewisham train station and New Canterbury Road, which several popular bus services – including 428 between Canterbury and the city and the 444 and 445 between Campsie and Balmain – use.
”This makes no sense,” the deputy mayor of Leichhardt, Michele McKenzie, said. ”The light rail stops should be at the quickest interchange point with other modes of transport. In our case, stops need to be at the main western [train] line and Canterbury Road.”
Cr McKenzie and public transport experts fear the proposal will prevent the light rail reaching capacity.
The minister’s spokesman said work was under way on a pre-construction study for the light rail extension, which would take three months. ”No decision has been made on the exact locations of stops for the light rail,” he said.
Garry Glazebrook, an urban planning expert at the University of Technology, Sydney, who was invited to sit on the government’s transport planning taskforce, said light rail was a flexible form of transport that could fit around existing land use and encourage new, more dense land use and improve street life. ”The stops can be 200 metres apart or a kilometre apart,” he said.
”Your aim, when designing a system, is to pick up the major catchments of people.”
Jillian Michaels is livid that she’s been misquoted as having told the May 2010 issue of Women’s Health that she wants children, but doesn’t plan on getting pregnant because the weight gain will “ruin” her stunning physique.
The tough-as-nails fitness guru created a stir with bloggin’ mamas when she reportedly told the lifestyle mag that she’s planning to adopt kids because she doesn’t want to ruin her super-fit figure by getting pregnant.
There’s only one problem: Jillian claims she never explicitly made such a remark.
“I never ever said that,” she emphatically told NBC’s Access Hollywood on Monday.
The portly-preteen-turned-kick-ass trainer says all she actually told the mag was: “I’m going to adopt,” and, “I can’t handle doing that [pregnancy] to my body.”
“The word ‘won’t’ and the word ‘ruin’ are not even in the article,” Jillian said emphatically. “It’s amazing, everybody’s asking about this and I’m like, ‘Did you read the article?’ ‘No I didn’t read the article.’”
She added: “I can’t understand how people can judge or question something that they haven’t even bothered to find out if it’s real or not.”
Jillian’s Biggest Loser spinoff, Losing It with Jillian Michaels, will premiere on The Peacock this summer.
Technology Review has an article on GE and Siemens adopting direct drive wind turbines – Wind Turbines Shed Their Gears.
Wind turbine manufacturers are turning away from the industry-standard gearboxes and generators in a bid to boost the reliability and reduce the cost of wind power.
Siemens, the world’s largest turbine manufacturer by volume, has begun selling a three-megawatt turbine using a so-called direct-drive system that replaces the conventional high-speed generator with a low-speed generator that eliminates the need for a gearbox. And last month, General Electric announced an investment of 340 million euros in manufacturing facilities to build its own four-megawatt direct-drive turbines for offshore wind farms.
Most observers say the industry’s shift to direct-drive is a response to highly publicized gearbox failures. But Henrik Stiesdal, chief technology officer of Siemens’s wind power unit, says that gearbox problems are overblown. He says Siemens is adopting direct-drive as a means of generating more energy at lower cost. “Turbines can be made more competitive through direct-drive,” says Stiesdal.
Siemens’s plans hinge on a new design that reduces the weight of the system’s generator. In conventional wind turbines, the gearbox increases the speed of the wind-driven rotor several hundred fold, which radically reduces the size of the generator required. Direct-drive generators operate at the same speed as the turbine’s blades and must therefore be much bigger–over four meters in diameter for Siemens’s three-megawatt turbine. Yet Siemens claims that the turbine’s entire nacelle weighs just 73 metric tons–12 tons less than that on its less powerful, gear-driven 2.3-megawatt turbines.
Spotify spent most of its first year saying it would refrain from adding “social” features and concentrate on just serving music. But the ice in Stockholm has thawed lately and today the music service added just that, amongst its first significant product updates since launching in late 2008.
—New profiles: Users can friend each other by Spotify username or via Facebook graph and send tracks to each other with a new Inbox. New activity appears in a “feed”. Users can share a web link to their in-app profile and add profile details to their blogs.
—Library changes: Spotify’s no longer just a cloud player – now users can play local files, like iTunes. Tracks and albums can be “starred”, popping them in a favourites folder. Spotify will also wirelessly sync music files to mobile without USB sideloading.
Spotify SVP Paul Brown tells paidContent:UK:-
“Today’s upgrade is all about driving discovery and enabling users to build their playlist libraries. To then access these libraries across multiple platforms, we feel will be a major attraction for people looking to sign up as a premium customer.
“We have shown, since rolling out premium mobile access to our users, that the ability to access your music in a very simple, exciting and absorbing way, across multiple platforms, is a big reason to subscribe and today’s features only increase the stickiness of Spotify as a music platform. There is a lot more to come but this is a significant step in Spotify’s evolution as music access and management platform.”
The features are available to both free and paying users. Spotify has over seven million users and 320,000 of the latter. Little of this seems to affect that dragging issue of entering the U.S. market. But, assuming Spotify’s economics are scaleable, these additions will likely yield higher dwell time and attract more users, because they’re all about propagating extra engagement.
Twelve months ago, Brown told us about social prospects: “I don’t think that’s the path that a company like Spotify will take. It’s about a core experience – others may do interesting things off the platform, that’s where the social features thing will come, I think.” But Spotify has come a long way since then, and these features had been requested by users.
Spotify has long let users “scrobble” song listens to Last.fm profiles. That feature remains, but now Spotify is taking more ownership of the social music experience at a time when Last.fm is stopping playing full on-demand tracks to concentrate mainly on the social experience. Likewise, this could be a challenge to Mog.com, the social music site that’s looking to bring its music subscription service to the UK at a price undercutting Spotify.
But Spotify isn’t just flexing social muscles here. The local files feature means users who had been using Spotify for cloud streaming but retaining iTunes or Windows Media Player for their existing library, can finally ween themselves off those clients. The Spotify app is a slicker, slimmer homage to iTunes itself, and the files even sync to Spotify’s smartphone app.
For those of you in countries that can’t yet access the new or old Spotify, here’s a video and our slideshow…
Greece is blaming speculators for the falling confidence in its financial situation, rather than its own financial management over the last decade.
Now U.S. states are doing the same.
Credit default swaps have existed for U.S. municipal bonds for years. Now that the financial health for many states is in question, CDS’s are being used to short states such as California or Ohio.
The proliferation of the derivatives is angering treasurers around the country, who say the derivatives are sending a negative message and possibly driving up their costs of borrowing at a time when they need all the help they can get. California planned to send out letters as soon as this week to big Wall Street firms that sell its bonds, seeking in-depth information about their roles in selling derivatives.
“Firms that are underwriting our bond sales are then telling the purchasers maybe they need to buy a CDS reflecting some risk,” California Treasurer Bill Lockyer said in an interview. “They are speaking with two tongues, and we want to find out whether that impacts us in an adverse way.”
Ha, so now it’s nefarious to offer insurance protection on a bond.
“Like other states, the Ohio Treasury is concerned about the increase in CDS’s and other shorting instruments,” Simone Wilkinson, the state’s press secretary, said in an email. In Connecticut, Treasurer Denise Nappier has been monitoring whether CDS are affecting the price of the state’s bonds.
Some observers say the swaps don’t have an impact. Brian Yelvington, a trader at Knight Securities, is among experts who have offered advice to state officials seeking information about whether the instruments are being used for manipulation, which he says isn’t happening. “It takes a 10-minute tutorial for them to understand,” he says, that the bets aren’t nefarious and that they are traded too thinly to affect the market for bonds or a state’s bond rating.
You know it’s bad news when U.S. states start sounding like Greece, shooting the market ‘messenger’ rather than focusing on why people are shorting state securities. The day that U.S. federal government start attacking federal debt CDS speculators is the day it’s all over for America’s finances.
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Sharp was first out the door with its parallax barrier technology, which is apparently being used in the Nintendo 3DS, to skirt around wearing glasses when viewing 3D. Toshiba’s now got similar a 21-inch display which also doesn’t require glasses. More »
Are drugs behind the early Monday morning arrest of former UFC champion Tito Ortiz, who now faces domestic violence charges for assaulting porn queen Jenna Jameson?
The martial arts star claims his ex-porn star girlfriend of four years is addicted to the powerful prescription painkiller OxyContin, and he blames Jenna’s continued drug use for his arrest inside the couple’s Huntington Beach, California home on charges of suspicion of domestic violence on Monday.
Ortiz and his lawyer Chris Matthews accuse Jameson of drug addiction and claimed Ortiz never struck her.
“Jenna Jameson has been fighting an ugly battle with an addiction to Oxycontin for well over a year, and this morning, she had a relapse,” lawyer Chip Matthews said. “We’re here because Tito was trying to help her. Tito Ortiz never laid a hand on Jenna.”
Matthews claims Tito, the 35-year-old son of recovering addicts himself, found drugs in their home Monday morning, leading to the confrontation that ended with his arrest. Matthews also claimed the 36-year-old Jameson has made 911 calls threatening suicide over the past year.
Jenna gave birth to the couple’s twin sons, Jesse and Journey, in March 2009.
Honda’s History
All about Honda’s History
Honda Motor Company, Ltd. is a Japanese multinational corporation primarily known as a manufacturer of automobiles and motorcycles.
Honda is the world’s largest manufacturer of motorcycles as well as the world’s largest manufacturer of internal combustion engines measured by volume, producing more than 14 million internal combustion engines each year.
Honda surpassed Nissan in 2001 to become the second-largest Japanese automobile manufacturer. As of August 2008, Honda surpassed Chrysler as the fourth largest automobile manufacturer in the United States.
Honda is the sixth largest automobile manufacturer in the world.
Honda was the first Japanese automobile manufacturer to release a dedicated luxury brand, Acura in 1986. Aside from their core automobile and motorcycle businesses, Honda also manufactures garden equipment, marine engines, personal watercraft and power generators, amongst others.
Since 1986, Honda has been involved with artificial intelligence/robotics research and released their ASIMO robot in 2000. They have also ventured into aerospace with the establishment of GE Honda Aero Engines in 2004 and the Honda HA-420 HondaJet, scheduled to be released in 2011.
Honda spends about 5% of its revenues into R&D!
From a young age, Honda’s founder, Soichiro Honda had a great interest in automobiles. He worked as a mechanic at a Japanese tuning shop, Art Shokai, where he tuned cars and entered them in races.
A self-taught engineer, he later worked on a piston design which he hoped to sell to Toyota. The first drafts of his design were rejected, and Soichiro worked painstakingly to perfect the design, even going back to school and pawning his wife’s jewelry for collateral.
Eventually, he won a contract with Toyota and built a factory to construct pistons for them, which was destroyed in an earthquake. Due to a gas shortage during World War II, Honda was unable to use his car, and his novel idea of attaching a small engine to his bicycle attracted much curiosity. He then established the Honda Technical Research Institute in Hamamatsu, Japan, to develop and produce small 2-cycle motorbike engines.
Calling upon 18,000 bicycle shop owners across Japan to take part in revitalizing a nation torn apart by war, Soichiro received enough capital to engineer his first motorcycle, the Honda Cub.
This marked the beginning of Honda Motor Company, which would grow a short time later to be the world’s largest manufacturer of motorcycles by 1964.
Read more about Honda
For those of you new to my blog, you should know that I’ve got a serious lazy streak when it comes to cooking, so anything that is fast, easy, and quick will get my attention immediately.
Even though, I got the laziness streak going, I cook more at home because my desire to eat healthier and save money outweighs my laziness to pay extra to eat out all the time. So, I gotta work with my inner nature of cooking laziness. Fortunately to my excitement, modern day grocery shopping has many conveniences like pre-cut, pre-packaged, and pre-cooked foods in order to make cooking easier and faster.
I’m no food purist, but I am conscious of the kinds of pre-made stuff I do buy and read the labels. I lean toward the organic and all-natural. In today’s recipe, and as part of “I tried something new,” I used items I got at Trader Joe’s. I’ve never tried their bagged green beans or sweet chicken sausage before. If you don’t have a TJ’s, you can easily replace the items with ones from your local grocery stores.
Ingredients (serves 2-3):
Let’s get cooking:
Note: If you threw in the green beans raw thinking you wanted crunchy, but then changed your mind upon tasting and want softer beans, add a couple tablespoons of water to the pan and let simmer covered for a few minutes.
I like this recipe because it combines a veggie with a protein. To make the dish vegetarian/vegan, you can you tofu or a meat alternative like Gimme Lean ground sausage made with soy protein.
For breakfast yesterday, I wanted oatmeal. My inner 8-year-old wanted to use chocolate rice milk instead of water and plain rice milk, so I obliged because, well, I haven’t had chocolate flavored oatmeal in ages, and it sounded fun. For some potassium, I throw on some fresh banana. Deliciously chocolatey!
Andy Xie unflinchingly describes China’s economy as overheated.
And if the country wants to avoid a banking crisis, he thinks it needs to crank interest rates ASAP.
Recent attempts to cool the economy have meant little since money is still too cheap for banks. The only way to truly cool things down is to make money more expensive, thus removing liquidity from the system.
Further, prolonged negative real interest rates – that is, rates below inflation – are the driving force of the bubble. Unless this is corrected, after a brief pause, the bubble will grow big again. Such a vicious cycle only ends when banks have insufficient liquidity – that is, households don’t increase their deposits but want to borrow as much as possible. Indeed, recent data suggests this scenario is coming.
The most effective actions for containing the bubble are: one, raising interest rates to above the expected inflation rate; and, two, raising capital requirements for banks. China should quickly raise interest rates by 2 percentage points; current rates are ridiculously low. When this is the case for too long, it leads to a property bubble, resource misallocation, and, eventually, a financial crisis.
China’s interest rates are probably five percentage points too low. Yuan appreciation expectations have provided money holders with a substitute for interest rates. Indeed, such expectations have driven up yuan demand so rapidly that the central bank has increased its foreign exchange reserves three times, to US$ 2.4 trillion, in the past five years. China’s asset prices have risen by about the same magnitude. Inflation has followed.
It’ll be painful in the near-term, but has to be done he argues. Read the full piece here >
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If you are on a gluten-free diet due to coeliac disease, you must always check with your doctor prior to taking any vitamin supplements, either in the form of pills, or tablets.Some supplements may contain gluten, so this must be carefully checked by a health care professional.
In many cases, people suffering from coeliac disease may have some form of vitamin, or nutrient deficiency, especially relating to iron, vitamin D and vitamin K. Some doctors have found that once a patient’s body becomes accustomed to a gluten-free diet, the situation may rectify itself. In other cases, however, the doctor will prescribe vitamin supplements.
If you are on a gluten-free diet, you must be in regular contact with both your doctor and your dietitian. Both of these health care professionals will monitor your situation. If you choose to follow a gluten-free diet out of your own accord, be sure to inform your doctor about this decision.
Amy Winehouse was admitted to hospital on Sunday following a drunken fall which left her with cuts and bruising to her face and ribs, according to a report.
The “Back To Black” hitmaker was taken to the private Hadley Clinic in London over the weekend after taking a tumble in her Camden home, which left her with bruised ribs and a cut to her forehead.
“She’d had a few (drinks). At first she thought she had broken something, so got her security to take her to hospital. The doctors were worried she might be concussed because she had a big bump on her head and a cut above her eye,” a tipster close to the 26-year-old divulged to The Sun on Tuesday.
But in typical Amy Fashion, the “Rehab” hitmaker seems to be causing mayhem even behind hospital walls.
“Amy was running up and down the corridors with her top off and reeking of booze. She has been heard complaining of pain caused by bruising on her breasts and around her ribs. The nurses had to step in and ask her to calm down. Eventually she had to be taken back to her room. The ward sister was absolutely fuming,” the source added.
The Australian has a look at interest in unconventional (shale) gas in Australia – Explorers target shale gas for Australia’s next energy boom.
A POTENTIALLY vast gas resource trapped in Australia’s outback by dense rock formations could fuel another boom in the energy sector, at least according to companies like Beach Petroleum and Santos with acreage there.
But others are skeptical that shale gas locked in Australia’s Cooper Basin can be produced economically like the Barnett and Haynesville shales in the US, or coal seam gas in Australia’s northeast.
Innovative drilling techniques that can shatter rock with high-pressure bursts of water have made shale gas competitive with more conventional supplies in North America, where people typically pay more for gas. Citigroup says shale gas accounts for 13 per cent of the US’s proven gas reserves and energy companies are staking out positions in European deposits.
They’re being driven to unconventional fuels by a shortage of oil in countries that are politically stable and open to private investment.
Rough estimates suggest there are tens of trillions of cubic feet of shale gas in the Cooper Basin, which straddles Queensland and South Australia. Shale gas deposits are present in other regions like Western Australia, where AWE has plans to drill a test well.
While there’s plenty of shale gas to plunder, the cost equation in Australia may not stack up for decades. “We remain unconvinced that the economics of the play will be able to compete with the significant coal seam gas volumes consistently being proven up in Eastern Australia,” Merrill Lynch analyst Mark Hume says of Beach’s Cooper resource.
Paul Balfe, managing director of energy consultancy ACIL Tasman, says coal seam gas costs about $2-$4 per gigajoule to produce, comparing favourably with Australian east coast domestic gas prices of $3-$4 a gigajoule and at least $7 a gigajoule in Western Australia.
The most optimistic cost estimates for shale gas are around $5 a gigajoule, with the more pessimistic at $8. Mr Balfe says a lack of drilling technology and expertise in mining shale gas in Australia may push production costs higher. “I suspect that $5-$8 might look more like $7.50-$10 here,” Mr Balfe says.
To paraphrase from words often attributed to Josef Stalin — a million bank foreclosures is a statistic, but a single family losing its home is a tragedy.
So Richard Zombeck has set out help people tell those stories — one at a time — at a Web site named ShameTheBanks.org.
There's Diane Casella from Florida, who says she can pay a considerable amount towards her mortgage, but needs a break because of sinking income and property value.
"I have never asked for mortgage help in my life, but now that I just need a mortgage that is 31 percent of my gross income, the bank acts like I do not even exist," she writes on the site. "It was so easy to reach them five years ago, but now they have turned a deaf ear to my family's plight."
And there’s Mike Dillon from Manchester, New Hampshire
"No one can live in a situation like this, for this long without breaking down. Because of being in legal limbo for all this time, my fiancée and I have postponed our wedding and been unable to start the family we both want," he says. "This has ruined me financially… I can't even refinance away from them. I go through large bottle of antacid like you wouldn't believe. I am stuck in limbo, I can't sell the house without taking a huge loss, I couldn't buy a new house because they destroyed my credit."
Zombeck's raw Web site, which encourages consumers to name names and be as specific as possible about their mortgage woes, has quickly garnered attention around the ranks of frustrated homeowners. He's also gotten at least some attention from Congress, and Zombeck is now part of the lobbying effort by consumer groups this week who are advocating for the controversial financial reform legislation currently being considered by the U.S. Senate.
On Tuesday, the Massachusetts resident is meeting with staff from Sen. John Kerry's office to share his own story and stories from ShameTheBanks.com as part of a visit by The Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group (PIRG). He's also trying to personally deliver his package of first-person tales to his state's other senator, newly-elected Republican Scott Brown. But PIRG attorney Elizabeth Weyant, who is arranging the meetings, says Brown's office has yet to reply to requests.
"Richard has done a really good job of making himself an expert on the issue," she said. "It's really personal for him. He gives a face to the need for financial reform."
Weyant said one compelling element of Zombeck's site, in addition to the number of struggling homeowners who tell their tales, is the similarity of their sagas.
"Even if we're talking about different banks, it's the same story, again and again," she said. Collectively, the tales show how badly the mortgage modification process is working, she said. "To a bank, a mortgage looks like a pile of money. To a person, that's their home."
Among the sagas with similar storylines is the tale of Angie Burke, of Reading, Penn., who first contacted her bank about a possible mortgage modification in December 2008.
"I was fully unprepared for the duration and insanity this process can bring," she writes in her story. After a year of filling out paperwork and waiting for bank response, she received this dismal proposal concerning one of the two loans on her home:
"The best they could do for us was lower the interest rate from 6.75% fixed to 6% fixed, saving us a whole whopping $90 a month! How is that going to help?! Our income is half of what it used to be."
While the site invites complaints from any consumer who is frustrated with any bank lending practices, nearly every story Zombeck has collected so far deals with the paperwork madness that has engulfed participants in the Making Home Affordable program. When announced last year, the program was designed to help up to 4 million struggling borrowers, but currently only 230,000 mortgages have been permanently modified.
The complains have led to a series of revisions in the program, including sweeping changes announced by the Obama administration last month — still, another 900,000 foreclosure notices were received in the first three months of 2010, according to RealtyTrac.
MSNBC.com's John Schoen has been chronicling the woes of the Help for Homeowners program (HAMP) for months. In January, I wrote about a woman named Deb Franklin, whose three-month trial modification had turned into a 10 month waiting game that included a foreclosure notice.
But Zombeck's Web site shows that Franklin's Kafka-esque nightmare is hardly an exception.
"Those stories are not unique," he says. "It is depressing and goes further…300,000 foreclosures a month further," he added referring to the estimated number of homes that will receive a foreclosure notice this month.
Virginia W., from Morgan Hill Calif, didn't want to share her last name. She's also at wit's end after being rejected, again, for a modification based on something called a "gross eligibility."
"After calling for the past two weeks to find someone at the bank who knows what 'failed gross eligibility' means and spending hours on the phone I am now being told they are going to review my package again since everyone I have talked to cannot see why we were denied,” she says. “Back at square one 8 months later all the while getting no help and slowly racking up credit card bills the whole time just trying to stay afloat and not wanting to walk away."
Zombeck has his own tale of mortgage modification "hell." He bought his house in a Boston suburb at the market's peak in September 2006. It was his first home purchase, and he followed the advice of a realtor and purchased it with no down payment, thanks to two adjustable-rate mortgages that started out at around 8 percent would climb towards 12 percent. He was promised that refinancing would be easy. It wasn't. And when his wife lost her job at Harvard University, their world began crumbling.
Two years later, he's still working on the details of his loan modification with Florida-based Ocwen Financial Corp., which is servicing his loan. During the saga, he began writing an unpaid column about his situation for The Huffington Post called the "Eyes and Ears Mortgage Specialist.” He thinks that column has helped push his mortgage modification process forward.
"I think the banks are intentionally stalling, hoping the market will turn around, so they can then kick everybody out of their homes, sell them, and turn a profit," he said
Paul Koches, Executive vice president and general counsel at Ocwen, said he couldn’t talk specifically about Zombeck’s loan, citing privacy concerns. While he acknowledged some general frustration with the loan review process among all loan servicers, he said his firm has been aggressively arranging modifications for its customers. Of 400,000 loans it services, Ocwen voluntarily modified 90,000 even before the Help for Homeowners program was announced in March 2009. Koches did not offer a specific of number of modifications since then, but said the pace had “proceeded at the same pace.”
“We're very proud of our leadership not only in HAMP but in loss mitigation in general,” he said. “We believe that keeping people in their homes is better for the homeowner and better for the owner of the loan, too.”
ShameTheBanks.com is Zombeck’s attempt to share the harsh spotlight of social media on banks and motivate them to aid other struggling homeowners.
Zombeck, a free-lance journalist and former help desk technician for software firm Adobe, has used the social media megaphone before with great success. For three years, he has run a popular Web site named SH**HEADERY.com (name intentionally obscured). It chronicles the actions of misbehaving companies and offers social criticisms. It also gives frustrated readers a place "to rant." The site also has nearly 10,000 Twitter followers.
Last year, Zombeck was involved in a dispute with AT&T over an $800 deposit the firm insisted on when he and his wife tried to save money by combining their iPhones into a discounted family plan. The deposit was required because Zombeck's credit score had plummeted, even though he'd been an AT&T customers for more than 10 years. After months of frustrating back-and-forth discussion, Zombeck tweeted about the dispute to his SH**HEADERY followers.
"Wonder if Apple knows that AT&T charges an $800 deposit to merge to a family plan," he wrote in a November 2009 Tweet, and signed the note with a profanity. Only 52 minutes later, a woman representing AT&T wrote to him and offered to help. Within a few days, the issue was resolved.
"It had taken two months, but I bypassed about 15 unreasonable people," Zombeck said. "She was very nice. Once I got to that level of customer support, (AT&T) was great."
Zombeck is hoping ShameTheBanks.com might offer similar short-cuts to "reasonable people" inside banks who are working on mortgage modifications," he said.
"I've gone from unpaid journalist, to accidental activist, to unintentional lobbyist in a matter of months," he said. Now, he hopes to collect enough tales of frustration that they will spur change in Washington. "(The) stories will serve as irrefutable evidence that Congress needs to reform the way Wall Street has been doing business."
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Billy Corgan really, really hates Courtney Love.
The couple — who split in 2007 — have been trading barbs on the Twitterverse for months now. Corganworked with the Hole star on several songs for her new album – but now wants nothing to do with her.
Corgan lit into Love in an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine last March, insisting that if Courtney releases their collaborations- as it appears she will – “it would be a real big problem, because I haven’t given my permission.”
“I have no interest in supporting her in any way, shape or form,” he added. “You can’t throw enough things down the abyss with a person like that.”
Courtney’s since apologized for upsetting Billy, but her mea culpa seems to have fallen on deaf ears. The Smashing Pumpkins singer decided to tell his ex-lover and one-time collaborator what he really thinks… along with the rest of the world. Here are some of his Court-charged Tweets:
“Thought #1: my face is my face, my heart is my heart, my money is my money. Oh, and my songs are MY songs+If you can’t write your own songs?
Thought #2: if you can’t write your own songs maybe you should just be happy that you fooled someone into doing your work for you…
Or, thought #3:maybe you should go someone nice+live off your husband’s money, u know the money he made for writing all those great songs.
Thought #4: when you issue someone an apology on YOUR facebook page you might actually mean it and take responsibility for it. But…
Thought #5: the world is aware of your lack of responsibility, as seen in the gov’t taking away your parental right. Only u could abandon such a beautiful, incredible child who is smarter than u, cooler than u, and better than u. Oops, did I say too much?
Thought #6: so have your moment, burn up in the sun that laughs at u as equally as it appears to celebrate u+sleep knowing u have no honor.”
Crikey has a look at the shelving of the government’s proposed CPRS – so after a few years of Labour government we haven’t really made any progress on global warming (a messed up insulation installation scheme and slightly improved MRET aside) – CPRS into the deep freeze.
The government today wheeled its dreadful CPRS into the political deep freeze, continuing its pre-election deck-clearing of anything that doesn’t suit the narrative it wants to sell voters between now and August. …
The fact that in putting it aside until 2013 means the government will save just under $950 million between now and then shows just how nonsensical the opposition’s “great big new tax” line is. Some tax that would have pumped nearly a billion dollars into the economy — and that was just for starters.
It bears remembering just where we started from in all this — Kevin Rudd and John Howard going to the 2007 election with a shared commitment to an emissions trading scheme. After the Nelson interregnum, Howard was succeeded by a man more determined than virtually anyone else in Parliament to take action on climate change. And yet somehow, the Prime Minister and Penny Wong managed to botch it.
And they really botched it, first by letting every rent seeker in the country come in for their chop, and then by thinking climate change was a great weapon with which to split the coalition, rather than a “great moral and economic challenge”.
It’s a singular achievement for which Rudd and Wong can take credit — with some thanks to Tony Abbott and Nick Minchin and the rest of the coalition climate crazies.
The Greens, perhaps with one eye on holding the balance of power from July 1, have urged the government to again consider their interim carbon levy proposal, which would cap permit prices and slash handouts to polluters to 20% of revenue (rather than 27% of revenue, where it starts, before rising above one-third of revenue in later years).
However, that ignores the political reality that the government has gone cold on climate change because it failed to sell its CPRS properly and denialists, engaged in a systematic economic war on future generations, have leapt into the gap.
Sadly, this is the perfect time to be implementing an emissions trading scheme, with the economy again poised to enter an extended boom led by the resources sector. Any negative impacts on polluters of the scheme — and the Grattan Institute has conclusively shown that impacts will be almost trivial — would be minor compared to the benefits of strong economic growth. Australia’s emerging economic challenge is to manage high levels of growth. The introduction of an effective ETS would provide an additional tool for policy makers dealing with too much demand and unbalanced growth.
Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff believes that far more IMF European bailouts are on the way, in addition to Greece.
“It’s more likely than not that we’ll need an IMF program in at least one more country in the euro area over the next two to three years,” Rogoff, a former IMF chief economist who has co-authored studies of financial and sovereign debt crises, said in a telephone interview. “The budget cuts needed in Europe in many countries are profound.”
He sees a higher than 50% chance that other Eurozone nations will need IMF financial support. He also affirms that Greece will require far more financial support than is currently being negotiated. Note that yesterday, it was suggested that Greece could require as much as 300 billion euros.
“The stakes are very high for Europe as it wants to avoid contagion,” said Rogoff, who in 2008 predicted the failure of some large U.S. banks prior to the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
“I wouldn’t say they have to have an IMF program, but it’s possible,” said Rogoff of Spain, Portugal and Ireland. “It’s hard to say, as so much depends on political will and the numbers.”
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“Recovery will mitigate the debt problems,” Rogoff said. “It’s very hard for Europe to get a sustained recovery.”
Forget bailouts, that’s the real bomb he just dropped.
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