Archive for August, 2008
Source: Bloomberg.com
Integrity Bank of Alpharetta, Georgia, was closed by U.S. regulators today, the 10th bank to collapse this year amid a surge in soured real-estate loans stemming from the worst housing slump since the Great Depression.
Integrity Bank, with $1.1 billion in assets and $974 million in deposits, was shuttered by the Georgia Department of Banking and Finance and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Regions Financial Corp., Alabama’s biggest bank, will assume all deposits from Integrity, which was run by Integrity Bancshares Inc. The failed bank’s five offices will open on Sept. 2 as branches of Regions, the FDIC said.
“Depositors will continue to be insured with Regions Bank so there is no need for customers to change their banking relationship to retain their deposit insurance,” the FDIC said.
Banks are being closed at the fastest pace in 14 years as financial companies report more than $505 billion in writedowns and credit losses since 2007. California lender IndyMac Bancorp Inc., which had $32 billion in assets, was closed July 11 in the third-largest bank seizure, contributing to a 14 percent drop in the U.S. deposit insurance fund that had $45.2 billion at the end of the in the second quarter.
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Source: Reuters
 Cash-strapped U.S. consumers could be turning their backs on two of the biggest trends in the food business — organics and convenience — in order to save money.
Food industry executives and analysts interviewed in the past week pointed to those two categories as among the most vulnerable to consumers trying to stretch food budgets. While cash-strapped consumers may be eating more at home, they are also cutting out some of the little time-saving or health- conscious luxuries to which they had grown accustomed.
These changes could be a boon to companies such as Kraft Foods Inc, General Mills Inc and J.M. Smucker Co, whose products are seen as building blocks to home- made lunches and dinners.
But forays by food producers such as Chiquita Brands International Inc and by supermarket chains such as Whole Foods Market Inc and Safeway Inc to sell pre-cut packages of fresh fruits and vegetables or prepared meals at a premium could be among the casualties.
“When the $75 doesn’t buy what it used to buy, you change what you buy,” said Bob Goldin, executive vice president at food and restaurant industry consulting firm Technomic. “Consumers really are willing to sacrifice convenience to manage their budgets.”
Demand for organic milk and meat remains strong, while purchases of packaged organic products such as crackers have dropped off, said Laurie Demeritt, president of market research firm Hartman Group in Bellevue, Washington.
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Peak oil anyone?
Source: Reuters
Crude output from Mexico’s struggling Cantarell oil field fell for the 10th month in a row in July to 974,000 barrels per day, energy ministry data showed on Tuesday.
The fading jewel of Mexico’s oil industry, Cantarell is now producing half what it was yielding at its 2004 peak, pulling down overall output in the world’s No. 6 oil-producing nation and threatening Mexico’s status as a top U.S. supplier.
The steady decline of around 15 percent annually in the field’s output has pressured the divided Congress to tweak laws in the closed energy sector. The government, with backing from centrists, hopes to push a bill through congress to allow more private participation in the state-run oil business.
The conservative government’s proposal seeks to shore up flagging output and reserves by having the national monopoly Pemex hire private companies under incentive-fee contracts, particularly in costly high-risk areas like deepwater oil.
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Source: Reuters
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) might have to borrow money from the Treasury Department to see it through an expected wave of bank failures, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The borrowing could be needed to cover short-term cash-flow pressures caused by reimbursing depositors immediately after the failure of a bank, the paper said.
The borrowed money would be repaid once the assets of that failed bank are sold.
“I would not rule out the possibility that at some point we may need to tap into (short-term) lines of credit with the Treasury for working capital, not to cover our losses,” Chairman Sheila Bair said in an interview with the paper.
Bair said such a scenario was unlikely in the “near term.” With a rise in the number of troubled banks, the FDIC’s Deposit Insurance Fund used to repay insured deposits at failed banks has been drained.
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Source: The Raw Story
 Google has becoming increasingly compliant to government requests to block purportedly sensitive information — including images of Tibet, military installations and even a General Electric research plant — according to a new report prepared by the Open Source Center for the Bush Administration’s Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and reports circulated online about areas Google has blocked or blurred.
The research report was not approved for public release but was leaked to Secrecy News (view pdf). It is prepared entirely on public information — so called “open source” intelligence. But it paints a picture of an increasingly pliant global communications juggernaut, willing to do business with authoritarian regimes and US government agencies at the expense of transparency.
China, for instance, has an “online geographical information security management and coordination group” which regularly browses online mapping sites.
“When problems are discovered, they are either raised with Google’s China headquarters or through diplomatic channels,” the report says.
“Google has been very cooperative in the course of communications,” a Chinese spokesman remarked.
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