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Filed Under : debt out of by admin
Feb.29,2012Ray Dalio’s Pure Alpha hedge fund made $13.8 billion for its investors last year, while John Paulson lost clients almost $10 billion after an unsuccessful wager that the U.S. economy would recover, according to a report by LCH Investments NV.
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In order to receive the most amount of scholarships for the 2012-2013 academic year, The Daily provides six helpful tips to completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. March 1 is the priority deadline.
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Filed Under : debt out of by admin Feb.27,2012New Zealand unexpectedly posted a trade deficit in January as exports fell and an airline imported a large aircraft, weakening the local currency.
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Tags : Aircraft, Airline, Currency, deficit, finance, Imports, January, N.Z., New Zealand, posts, Trade, trade deficit, Unexpectedly
Yangon, Myanmar (IRIN) – Lack of access to anti-retroviral therapy (ARV) to treat HIV has left thousands of patients in Myanmar with deteriorating immunity and increased vulnerability to tuberculosis (TB), say health workers.
“The situation is dire,” said Peter Paul de Groote, head of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Myanmar. “The gap between the treatment that is needed and what is received is unacceptably high.”
ARV providers in Myanmar – of whom MSF is the largest – are concentrated in Yangon and Mandalay divisions, and Shan and Kachin states, which account for more than 60 percent of the country’s 133 ART distribution sites, according to UNAIDS Myanmar.
“The unfortunate case is that many people have to travel far to access treatment. This country has the potential to treat more people, save more lives and prevent transmission by expanding service provision,” Sung Gang, the UNAIDS Myanmar country coordinator, told IRIN from Yangon.
But according to MSF, funding is the biggest problem.
When donors did not deliver on pledges, the Global Fund to Fight HIV, Tuberculosis and Malaria canceled its Round 11 funding in late November.
While a Transitional Funding Mechanism has been established to provide emergency relief to current recipients, which will run out of money before 2014, it only covers essential services such as HIV treatment, care and prevention, leaving ARV providers unable to expand to other needed areas, notes MSF.
Scale-up interrupted
Funds from Round 11 were expected to treat 46,500 more patients in Myanmar, according to a recent MSF study .
Of the estimated 240,000 HIV-positive people, only 24 percent receive ARV therapy. Roughly 85,000 people need treatment but cannot access it, causing up to 20,000 preventable AIDS-related deaths annually, according to MSF.
“The Ministry of Health, MSF, and the hospitals all have the willingness and capacity to scale up. There are a lot of new donor pledges [going into Myanmar] but not for HIV,” MSF’s De Groote said.
Doctors are forced to prioritize treatment for patients in the most advanced stages of HIV/AIDS, despite proof that earlier treatment decreases transmission rates and improves health outcomes, according to the Inter-Agency Standing Committee’s (IASC) 2010 Guidelines for addressing HIV in humanitarian settings .
“Turning back patients is a difficult and impossible choice. We have to tell them, come back when you get sicker,” said Khin Nyein Chan, MSF’s deputy medical coordinator in Myanmar and a doctor at the NGO’s clinic in Yangon, one of four nationwide.
While the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends starting ARV medications when an HIV patient’s CD4 count, a specialized immune system cell measure, has dropped below 350 cells/mm3 , doctors in Myanmar administer ARVs only to those with CD4 levels below 150 cells/mm3.
“They have to wait until severe life-threatening and opportunistic infections are in their bodies before we can treat them,” said Khin Nyein Chan.
TB threat
TB is one such opportunistic infection. An HIV-positive status can increase the chance of contracting TB by up to 37-fold, according to WHO .
In Myanmar, 300,000 people are infected with TB – 60,000 of whom are also HIV-positive – according to MSF.
The increased incidence of airborne TB among HIV patients not taking ARVs raises the likelihood that it will spread among the general population, said Maria Guavara, MSF’s medical coordinator.
“HIV/AIDS and TB are a lethal combination. Treatment of HIV drops the instance rate of TB.”
At Phoenix Association, a Yangon-based social support center for HIV-positive people, patients seek solace from debt and disease.
One patient from Phyuu Township of Bago Division in the country’s south, Sai Hlaw Aung, 33, told IRIN in 2011 that battling HIV and TB had made him too weak to continue working as a bamboo cutter.
“Now I am not as strong as before. I have no idea how I could earn household income when I go back home,” said Sai Hlaw Aung.
The association allows out-of-town patients to sleep in the office while undergoing treatment in Yangon. Space is tight.
“Currently we need shelter to accommodate the people,” said Thiha Kyaing, head of the association told IRIN. Little has changed since.
“We don’t just want to bridge the treatment gap and walk away. We need sustainable programs, and the sooner the better,” De Groote said. “If we don’t treat people now we will lose them,” he added.
dm/pt/mw
– Provided by Integrated Regional Information Networks.
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Filed Under : debt out of by admin Feb.25,2012The number of Americans filing first-time claims for jobless benefits last week held at a four- year low and consumers became more confident, indicating an improving labor market may boost household spending.
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Tags : Claims, Consumers, Economy, finance, four, FourYear, hold, household spending, Jobless, jobless benefits, number, time claims, U.S., week
Japan is attending the “Friends of Syria” peace summit in Tunisia, which is seeking answers to relieve the suffering of the Syrian people and to put an end to Assad’s crackdown
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Filed Under : business debt by admin Feb.24,2012United States (ProPublica) – by Lois Beckett
You bought your house when the market was high and then lost your job. In order to avoid foreclosure, you negotiated a short sale for half of what you paid, ruining your credit rating for years and draining your bank account. But there is a tiny silver lining: Thanks to a 2007 law, you don’t have to pay taxes on the $100,000 of debt your bank forgave as part of the short-sale agreement.
This week, real estate columnist Kenneth R. Harney pointed out that this important tax break will expire at the end of 2012 — and, because of opposition from conservative members of Congress, might not be renewed.
The Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act of 2007 ensures that homeowners who restructure their mortgages or short-sell their homes don’t have to pay taxes for reducing part of their debt.
Without the law, any cancelled debt typically counts as income. So an underwater homeowner who negotiated a principal reduction on her mortgage would have to pay taxes on that amount of “income.”
The law creates an exemption for up to $2 million of forgiven debt on a taxpayer’s primary residence.
Harney pointed out that the debt relief act provides a crucial underpinning to last month’s $25 billion mortgage settlement, which requires five of the country’s largest private loan servicers to provide $17 billion in principal reduction and other forms of foreclosure avoidance.
And given the importance of mortgage modifications and principal reductions to the Obama administration, you might think that the law would be on the fast-track towards further extension. (It was extended once before in 2008.)
But Harney reported that some conservative members of Congress may not approve of the program’s $2.7 billion price tag, or of provisions they might perceive as a federal “bailout” of underwater homeowners.
“It’s going to be an uphill fight” to get the law extended, economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former McCain adviser, told Harney.
The debt forgiveness act originally had broad bipartisan support: It passed in the House of Representatives on a 386-to-27 vote. But among the Republicans who voted against the law in 2007 was now-Speaker of the House John Boehner. Boehner’s office has not yet responded to a request for comment.
We’re also waiting for comment from New York Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel, who sponsored the law.
The National Association of Realtors, which supported the original bill, is planning to make a “strong push” to get it re-extended.
“In light of how hard home owners were hit in the market downturn, it was unrealistic to expect households to pay tax on tens of thousands of dollars on forgiven debt when they lack money to pay their mortgage without a modification,” Robert Freedman wrote on the association’s Realtor Magazine blog.
In a video interview on the site, NAR’s director of tax policy, Linda Goold, said there would be “very, very serious economic repercussions” if lenders and borrows remained uncertain about whether the law would be extended.
She said that the mortgage provision would be one of many tax laws expiring at the end of 2012, creating “an environment of remarkable chaos.”
“Congress has always lumped the expiring conditions into one big package,” Goold said. “That package has usually been, if not one of the very last things Congress did in December, pretty much close to the last thing Congress has done.” She noted that it was unlikely that Congress would pass a single tax exemption separately from the others.
“It’s the inability to get the process rolling that’s our biggest obstacle,” she said.
– Provided by ProPublica.org
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Filed Under : debt out of by admin Feb.23,2012Citigroup Inc., which last week admitted breaking Federal Housing Administration rules and paid a fine, also violated regulations for home loans sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, according to a whistle-blower’s complaint.
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Filed Under : debt elimination by admin Feb.21,2012United States (ProPublica) – by Cora Currier
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Securities and Exchange Commission has warned a top banker that it may bring civil charges against him for his role in creating a risky collateralized debt obligation, or CDO, that exploded spectacularly as the housing market crashed. It’s the first public evidence that the SEC is considering charges against a top banking executive involved in CDOs, which fueled the financial crisis.
The CDO, from the end days of the boom in 2007, was one of dozens that had been created with the help of the hedge fund Magnetar. As we reported with This American Life and NPR, Magnetar often pushed for riskier assets to be included in CDOs, and placed bets against many of the same investments so that it would profit if those risky assets went sour. (Magnetar has never been charged with any wrongdoing, and has always maintained that it did not have a strategy to bet against the housing market.)
The banker warned by the SEC, Alexander Rekeda, helped create a $1.6 billion CDO for Japanese bank Mizuho called Delphinus CDO 2007-1. Investigators allege that investors were not told Magnetar stood to profit if the investments failed. (Here’s the pitchbook for Delphinus.)
Delphinus is not the first deal involving Mizuho and Rekeda that the SEC has looked into. As the Journal reported last year, the agency has been investigating another CDO that Magnetar created with Mizuho called Tigris. That CDO was a collection of the riskiest bits of other CDOs — as we described it, they were “bundling up the dregs of a CDO,” a “rare, if not unprecedented” strategy. The Tigris deal has not yet resulted in charges.
We’ve reached out to Rekeda, who no longer works at Mizuho, but have yet to hear back. A spokesman for Mizuho told the Wall Street Journal that it “has been asked by the SEC to provide related documents and information, and it’s currently dealing with it.” (We also have reached out to Mizuho.)
The warning sent to Rekeda, called a Wells notice, says that the SEC has made a “preliminary determination…to recommend charges based on alleged misrepresentations in connection with the structuring of a CDO.”
As we noted last fall, the SEC has also warned ratings agency Standard & Poor’s that it also may face civil charges in connection with the Delphinus CDO. Standard & Poor’s abruptly downgraded Delphinus just a few months after the security was issued and received a top rating.
Other banks have been charged by the SEC and settled allegations involving CDOs. In 2010, Goldman Sachs settled with the SEC for more than $500 million. Last June, J.P. Morgan agreed to pay $153 million and in October, Citigroup reached a $225 million settlement.
– Provided by ProPublica.org
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British Prime Minister David Cameron faced opposition calls to abandon his health-service revamp and cut sales tax as scrutiny of the coalition government’s deficit- cutting policy intensified before next month’s budget.
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