Is this the most outrageous quote yet from a financial analyst?
By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 13, 2013 - 0 Comments
“We rate every deal . . .It could be structured by cows and we would rate it.”
An unidentified Standard & Poor’s analyst joked in 2007 about the risky mortgage investments his company was approving, according to U.S. Justice officials. The government is now suing the firm for its part in the financial crisis.
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Maybe it’s the health-care house that’s burning, not the pension house
By Paul Wells - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 at 12:23 AM - 0 Comments
This one’s making the rounds tonight:
“Governments in large developed economies will face ‘ballooning’ debt levels and rating downgrades if they don’t act quickly to limit the impact on their budgets of rising healthcare costs, Standard & Poor’s Corp. warned Tuesday.
“…while a number of governments are taking action [on] rising pension costs, few have attempted to reform healthcare provision to achieve the same goal.
“S&P said that without any change in policy, it would start to cuts its ratings of developed-country governments from 2015, moves that would affect ‘a number of highly rated sovereigns.’…
“‘Healthcare spending represents the majority of the total increase in age-related spending in more than half of the G-20 advanced economies,’ it said.
“That group includes France, the U.K., the U.S., Japan, Canada and Italy…”
You should read the whole story. Some of it is less discouraging.
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Feuds: fightin’ words
By macleans.ca - Friday, December 9, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 2 Comments
From Google and Apple to Newfoundland and a ballooning moose population–bad blood runs deep
Getty Images; CP; iStock; Corbis; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute
Environmentalists Vs. Keystone XL Pipeline
Environmentalists and anti-oil sands groups managed to delay U.S. government approval of a $7-billion, 2,736-km pipeline that would carry oil from Alberta to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. Though pipelines are normally nothing to get excited about, TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline was singled out by those unhappy with U.S. energy policy and Canada’s development of the oil sands, a carbon-intensive source of crude. Protesters ranged from Hollywood celebrities like Robert Redford and left-leaning luminaries like Naomi Klein to concerned ranchers and residents along the pipeline’s proposed route.
Google Vs. Apple
The battle for control of the ballooning smartphone market got personal as Google’s open-source operating system, Android, overtook Apple’s iOS, which runs the iPhone. Steve Jobs, Apple’s late CEO, told his official biographer the search-engine giant didn’t play fair and accused Google of “grand theft” of the iPhone concept (among more colourful language). Google chairman Eric Schmidt, who once sat on Apple’s board, responded by saying “the Android effort started before the iPhone effort.”
