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Because of large cash needs with underfunded pension plan, losses in Europe, increased capital spending plans, and plans to repurchase shares held by the U.S. government, GM is in talks with banks in 2012 to increase its $5 billion line of credit to $10 billion.

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Of 317 Members of Parliament, 117 voted against Theresa May, in a no-confidence motion within the Conservative party ranks, With a margin of 83 May survived, promising that she will not lead the party into the next election. This leaves the Conservative Party badly divided with Brexit Leave supporters, the Brexiteers, calling for May's resignation.

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In a effort to boost slowing economies in the European Union, the head of the European Central Bank, Mr. Draghi, announces interest rates will remain unchanged till 2020. He also announced a fresh stimulus, offering cheap loans to jumpstart the economy. Economic growth forecasts were cut to 1.1% for 2019 down from 1.7% earlier. Growth of just 0.2% in the last quarter of 2018 prompted action by the ECB.

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In the 2008 financial crisis Libor went up from 2.81% to 4.82% in a six week period. By contrast during the current eurozone crisis Libor has failed to reflect the problems in credit markets. Three month Libor was 0.24975% on July 14, 2011.

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How the Australian Central Bank raised rates starting in May 2002, with the key lending rate at 5.5 % in July 2005, compared to 3.25 % in the USA. The idea was to control the housing bubble which has scaled back, with the Australian economy growing at 2% and this growth coming mostly from the commodities demand in global markets. Meanwhile the US central bank under Greenspan is holding onto the view that its hard to tell when a bubble is occurring, and it would hurt a healthy economy to raise rates to cool developing bubbles. Australia's central bank holds onto the other view that it is wiser to act now before the bubble gets out of hand. Governor MacFarlane of the Australian central bank said in aspeech in early 2003 that a "scaling back" of household borrowing and property development would be in "the longer term interest of the Australian economy." And the state of New South Wales, which includes Sydney, instituted a 2.25% tax on the sale of investment properties. This move discouraged speculators who bought and "flipped" properties for quick profits. By early 2004 a glut of downtown apartment units emerged in Melbourne, and the bubble began to scale back. During the height of the boom consumer spending was growing by more than 6% ayear, in 2005 this has slowed to 3.5% a year. Because of commodity demand, Australia was able to see growth at 2%, and still avoid the longterm effects of a bubble in housing markets by scaling them back. Patrick Barta closes with a reference to Texas in the 1980's and early 1990's, and Southeast Asia in 1997, when housing prices and the economy went down in tandem hitting employment in the oil and banking industries in Texas. In the case of Asia hitting the economies of some Asian countries with the fall of their currencies. He refers to the overstretched US consumer with load of debt, and the possibility of housing and the economy going down in tandem in the USA, similiar to what happened in Texas and Southeast Asia....

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Maine is the only state in the US where the median age declined in 2021. More people from other northeastern states migrated to Maine during this pandemic leading to population growth as younger people move in. This puts Maine in the ranks of sunbelt states such as Florida and South Carolina. This has one drawback- the increase in home prices that requires the state to pitch in to make housing more affordable for locals. During the pandemic three years Massachusetts lost 100,000, New York 600,000 to out migration. Maine has some of the most spectacular scenery in the northeast with Acadia National Park near Bar Harbor on the long coastline.

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Arwa Mahdawi writes in The Guardian about issues facing the Democratic party in the US, and Labour in the UK, of turning their backs on the working class. And to the roots of their parties in the working class and rising middle class under FDR, Truman and Clement Attlee in the 1930's 40's and 50's. Woman's issues are about men's issues and issues of the people as a whole, of fairness in the economy, about correcting grossly poor misallocation of capital away from education, health, infrastructure and children, when seen in this larger and very real context.

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A Pew Research Center poll in September 2016 finds 81 percent of Indians have a favorable opinion of Narendra Modi in 2016, compared to 87 percent in 2015. Even among supporters of the opposition Indian National Congress a majority say they have a favorable opinion of Mr. Modi. The author of the poll, Bruce Stokes, says the opinion of frustration of the Indian elites and media about the Modi administration is not reflected in public opinion. Recently the Modi government passed legislation for a national Goods and Services Tax replacing overlapping state and federal taxes that are seen as holding up growth.  Issues the Indian public ranks high are corruption, unemployment and terrorism.

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Turkey's lira depreciates by 21% in 2013 and an additional 7% by January 24, 2014. The central bank uses up a third of its foreign exchange reserves or $19 billion in intervention to support the lira since June 2013. The intervention on June 24, 2014, did not work and the lira continued its downward slide to 2.30 to the lira. The political protests in Turkey and divisions within factions in the government about corruption probes has led to a political crisis and investors pulling back from Turkey. The central bank failed to increase interest rates as expected by investors and suggested by the IMF. Inflation is running at 7.4% for 2013. In August 2001 a currency crisis caused the banking system to collapse. The financial position is stronger than in that crisis, yet the recent political crisis and the large current account deficit has badly dented investor sentiment.

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Prime minister Ranil Wickremasinghe has assumed the finance minister position as Sri Lanka completes one phase of negotiations with the IMF. The IMF says "Since Sri Lanka's public debt is assessed as unsustainable, approval by the Executive Board of an IMF supported programme would require adequate assurances that debt sustainability will be restored." Sri Lanka facing lack of capital to pay for essential energy and other food needs suspended payment on nearly $7 billion foreign debt repayment due this year with action taken under a new central bank governor. About $25 billion is due for repayment by 2026 and total debt stands at $51 billion. The IMF comments come after reports that Sri Lanka Monetary Board at the central bank and finance ministry in 2021 failed to address the debt sustainability issue even though the IMF in April 2020 had advised Sri Lanka to go for restructuring. Discussions IMF says "focused on restoring fiscal sustainability while protecting the vulnerable and the poor, ensuring the credibility of the monetary policy and exchange rate regimes, preserving financial sector stability, and structural reforms to enhance growth and strengthen governance." ...

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Wirecard has filed for insolvency.The $2 billion missing in a bank account for Wirecard is more than all the profits it has made over 10 years. It got off the ground in 2016 after Credit Suisse and Softbank took interest in investing. This report in the WSJ shows the hazy history of the company and the details about the missing money in the bank account in the Philippines. Ernst and Young says it was deceived, and the money did not exist in the accounts, as reported in this video by the WSJ. The billions of dollars invested in companies like Wirecard, WeWork and other companies, could easily have funded the PPE equipment, facial masks, and other healthcare equipment held as a reserve for emergencies such as this pandemic, in any large region such as North America or the European Union.   For every Wirecard there are 10 others in every region of the world. Just in the last month several imploded including a coffee venture copied right off Starbucks each involving losses of billions of dollars. ...

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Food, medicine, cash, pensions, delivered on a massive scale by India Post's 400,000 workers in the world's largest lockdown of 1.4 billion people. Indian Railways 1 million employees are active in delivering essential supplies and transporting food, essential cargo. With over 150,000 branches and reaching out into every corner of the country, India Post is the largest postal network in the world. The post office has started a special service to deliver medicine. As a bank India Post has over 500 million accounts, many of these accounts having direct payments deposited by the government. Postal workers wearing masks and rubber gloves and with multiple hand sanitizers are shown on Indian television helping citizens in inspirational video of India Post. India has another advantage in being able to get money to the tens of millions in each state, and directing it to areas of the economy that have the largest need- 60% of the banking system is state owned. During the first term the government of prime minister Modi launched an effort to get every Indian a bank account in every part of the country, so that money could be directly deposited in each account. A national ID system was implemented that took the digital information of each Indian. The government is now able to get money directly into these accounts. ...

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Italy is investing the $225 billion of EU funds to modernize its economy under Mario Draghi. Draghi has shown in his first year that he can spend the funds wisely and invest in areas of the economy that need investments most. In the past year he has tackled problems including the slowness of the judicial system, modernizing an inefficient bureaucracy, and liberalizing wide parts of of the services sector. Draghi plans to invest EU grants in digital and physical infrastructure, education, environmental protection, and other needs for the long term. Before being chosen to lead the government Draghi was head of the Italian Treasury and central bank. He then headed the European Central Bank helping southern European countries tackle the debt crisis at a difficult time when Germany under Merkel pursued strict austerity policies and insisted on these policies for all eurozone countries. This report in WSJ shows the prevailing opinion in Italy is strongly in favor of Draghi staying on as prime minister till 2023 because of the confidence people inside Italy and in the European Union have in his leadership and discipline for making the investments to modernize Italy. Draghi told school children in Rome that "the most important thing is what you are doing right now," showing he understands the importance of providing Italy with the leadership it needs today.  ...

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Trump campaign manager, Paul Manafort, gets a more lenient sentence of 4 years for tax and bank fraud from a judge doing the sentencing. Prosecutors had asked for 13 to 24 years. Separately another sentencing takes place on a different charge next week.

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The crisis in Eastern Europe where 13 countries have accumulated close to $1 trillion in collective debt to western European banks or in foreign currencies. The need for a fund like the one proposed by Hungary, with roughly $240 billion, to bailout the Eastern European countries.

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Kaushik Basu, economist at Cornell University, and Chief Economist at the World Bank, says the U.S. Federal Reserve should consider the current low labor participation rate and low inflation in its rate policy setting decisions in 2015. Basu points out that in the recent past unemployment has gone below the current 5.5% without increasing the risks of inflation. He cites the period from July 1997 to August 2001 when inflation was below 5%, and at some points below 4%, yet inflation in 2002 was close to 2%. The large number of discouraged workers in this economic cycle has placed the unemployment rate below what it really is, says Basu.

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Matt Dickinson says in The Times that Pep Guardiola goes at it with fascination for the game, and with a singular drive and curious search to find the best he can in his players. It is not just that he has players like Kevin Bruyne, Foden and Mahrez. It is not just the money that backs the team. There is he says an extraordinary amount of creativity that Guardiola brings to his coaching efforts. Manchester City are now in the finals of the Champions League ready to face either Chelsea or Real Madrid.

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The Bush administration's and Paulson's thinking that letting the government buy parts of the banking system was unthinkable, as recently as late September, may have led to squandering of valuable time. Now Paulson is following Gordon Brown's lead in planning an injection of capital in banks in return for equity stakes, using much of the $700 billion Congress has authorized, and Paulson says the package that passed Congress gives Treasury all the authority it needs to do so. The failure to be open to this thinking earlier may have cost valuable time in addressing this crisis. And now there are second thoughts on whether it was wise to let Lehman fall into bankruptcy, because the Administration had not correctly anticipated or calculated the true cost of the Lehmann bankruptcy in terms of the way it created a crisis in the rest of the financial system. Paulson has still not taken Gordon Brown's lead in guaranteeing lending between the banks which the British are doing as part of their plan. Is the administration too slow in its response and a bit wrongheaded or stubborn headed as each step of the crisis has moved faster than its ability to respond, and its response being one step behind. Frederic Mishkin of Columbia University a former Fed Governor says, "if you delay and create uncertainty, the amount of money you have to put up goes up." It appears from Paulson's remarks over time first turning down proposals for capital injection into banks for equity stakes, and now in making that route central to his plan, that Paulson and Bernanke simply did not anticipate the shutting down of credit markets and the collapse of stock market prices that occurred, and they had no backup plan prepared for a situation such as this. And on top of this the backup plan they went out to sell to Congress turned out to be short on details and in this sense naive for the amount requested. And then by refusing to consider alternatives such as capital injection for equity stakes, it was wrong headed, if not closed minded. William Poole who retired in August as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, says that " I am not aware that Treasury presented any evidence on auctions that have been successful when they are used for assets that are so heterogenous", referring to the reverse auctions that would take weeks to set up and would be terribly complicated to buy up troubled assets, as part of the plan presented to Congress in but 3 pages. Now the plan appears to be to let Fannie and Freddie, which were given $100 billion by the Treasury as authorized by Congress, to move ahead with the purchase of troubled mortgage securities, something for which Fannie and Freddie have the capabilities. In the end the crisis in confidence and near panic generated in the markets and the climate of fear may go way beyond the actual losses incurred from debt securities, and some of this may be the result of a clumsy and poorly thought out approach by Bernanke and Paulson. The cost of fixing the problem will be higher and the recession more prolonged because of this. It is a situation of capable people blinded by ideological reasons to see what is happening and in Bernanke's case not making enough of a case to Treasury about his reservations and his own thinking that capital injection was the right approach, as people familiar with the early planning say Bernanke argued that it would be easier and more efficient to inject capital directly into banks. ...