The housing bust that began among the working class in remote subdivisions
and quickly progressed to the suburban middle class
is now striking the upper class in privileged enclaves like Los Altos in Silicon Valley.
Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment,
the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population.
As costs have risen in China, long the world’s shop floor, it is slowly losing work to countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam and Cambodia —
at least for cheaper, labor-intensive goods like casual clothes, toys and simple electronics
that do not necessarily require literate workers and can tolerate unreliable transportation systems and electrical grids.
As millions of Americans have fallen behind on paying their bills,
debt collection law firms have been clogging courtrooms with lawsuits seeking repayment.
Few have been as prolific as Cohen & Slamowitz, a Woodbury, N.Y., firm that has specialized in debt collection for nearly two decades.
The firm has been filing roughly 80,000 lawsuits a year.
With just 14 lawyers on staff, that works out to more than 5,700 cases per lawyer.
Just a few weeks ago, we detailed the incredible array of tax breaks & subsidies the US Congress has showered on the oil industry, mostly Big Oil but some smaller outfits too.
Stephen M. Sweeney, the president of the State Senate here, glowered with disgust as he described how
one New Jersey town paid out nearly $1 million to four retiring police officers for their unused sick days and vacation time.
Mr. Sweeney, a Democrat, also scowled about the estimated $46 billion New Jersey owes in pension contributions
and its $58 billion in liabilities to finance retiree health coverage for government employees.
China, the world’s largest rare- earths producer, cut export quotas for the minerals needed to make hybrid cars and televisions
by 72 percent for the second half, raising the possibility of a trade dispute with the U.S.
Shipments will be capped at 7,976 metric tons, down from 28,417 tons for the same period a year ago,
according to data from the Ministry of Commerce yesterday.
In one of the country’s biggest infrastructure projects in its history, Australia’s five largest cities are spending $13.2 billion
on desalination plants capable of sucking millions of gallons of seawater from the surrounding oceans every day, removing the salt and yielding potable water.
In two years, when the last plant is scheduled to be up and running, Australia’s major cities will draw up to 30 percent of their water from the sea.
Protests against a recent increase in fuel prices shut down markets, schools, airports and businesses across India earlier this month,
and thousands of people were arrested as violence flared in some cities.
The effect of the demonstrations — led by political parties that oppose the governing coalition led by the Indian National Congress —
far exceeded expectations, although no official estimates of crowds were available.
It’s a tiresome cliche that small business is the backbone of economic growth in the US.
But insofar as it’s true, what happened in June makes clear why America is still in such bad economic shape.
With the expiration of stimulus provisions that made Small Business Administration loans more attractive to borrowers and lenders —
and with efforts to renew those provisions stalled in Congress —
The amount of plutonium buried at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State is nearly three times what the federal government previously reported,
a new analysis indicates, suggesting that a cleanup to protect future generations will be far more challenging than planners had assumed.
Plutonium waste is much more prevalent around nuclear weapons sites nationwide than the Energy Department’s official accounting indicates,
