Today, Pilgrim’s Pride announced that it was laying off approximately 115 of its administrative staff. The eliminated positions were mostly at the company’s corparate headquarters in Pittsburg, TX.
Archive for April, 2009
Pilgrim’s Pride Lays Off More Workers
Friday, April 3rd, 2009Today’s News
Friday, April 3rd, 2009As Crisis Loomed, Geithner Pressed But Fell Short – In September 2005, Timothy Geithner made one of his most visible moves as a supervisor of the U.S. banking system. He summoned the nation’s top financial firms and their regulators to streamline an antiquated system that threatened Wall Street’s boom.
Jobless Rate Hits 8.5% After 663,000 Jobs Lost in March – The American economy shed another 663,000 jobs in March, the government reported Friday, bringing the toll of job losses during the recession to 5.1 million.
Palin Wants Senate Do-Over In Alaska – Gov. Sarah Palin and the head of the Alaska Republican Party said Thursday that Sen. Mark Begich should give his Senate seat up to a special election now that prosecutors have abandoned their case against Ted Stevens.
Obama Calls Out European “Anti-Americanism” And American “Arrogance” – Urging a common effort to restructure the world economy and rebuild international alliances, President Barack Obama did not hesitate on Friday to call out his own country for “arrogant” patriotism and Europe for “insidious” anti-Americanism.
Unanimous ruling: Iowa marriage no longer limited to one man, one woman – “The Iowa statute limiting civil marriage to a union between a man and a woman violates the equal protection clause of the Iowa Constitution,” the justices said in a summary of their decision.
Too Many Cars, and They’re Not on the Road – “There was a car bubble,” Steven Rattner, who President Obama recruited to head a Treasury Department group charged with finding solutions to the mountain of problems facing the American auto industry, said in an interview last month. “We had this artificially high sales rate.”
AIG May Have Received Bailout Funds Illegally
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009The Institutional Risk Analyst has put together a great article on how AIG got into the Credit Default Swap business.
Basically, AIG, Gen Re and others used reinsurance to fraudulently transfer Liability from ceding companies (lowering the ceding company’s reserve requirements, increasing the ceding company’s capital, etc) by using “side letters” which absolved AIG from actually paying on any losses it reinsured.
“It was easy for AIG to become addicted to the use of side letters. The firm, which had already encountered serious financial problems in 2000-2001, reportedly saw the side letters as a way to mint free money and thereby help the insurer to look stronger than it really was. AIG not only helped banks and other companies distort and obfuscate their financial condition, but AIG was supplementing its income by writing more and more of these reinsurance deals and mitigating their perceived exposure via side letters.”
When the AIG managers realized “that state insurance regulators and the FBI where on to the reinsurance/side letter scam”, AIG moved the reinsurance/side letters model to create Credit Default Swaps (CDS) for finance firms; unregulated “insurance” for securities of derivatives and sub-prime mortgages.
The article concludes that AIG received bailout funds illegally from the Fed and Treasury, because AIG then gave those funds to counter-parties like Goldman Sachs to make them whole on losses that were a result of illegal AIG CDS contracts.
The entire article is worth reading.
Eric Cantor: Dems “Overreacting” To The Economic Crisis
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009From Politico:
“GOP Whip Eric Cantor thinks his party can retake the House in next year’s midterm elections — and accused Democrats like Rahm Emanuel of “overreacting” to the economic crisis by embarking on a federal spending spree.”
DNC response from spokesman Hari Sevugan: “On the day we learned that jobless claims rose to their highest levels in 26 years, Eric Cantor’s charge that anyone is ‘overreacting’ to this economic crisis typifies the Republican just say ‘NO’ approach. Whether it’s because they are simply out of touch with the pain American families are feeling, or they understand but are choosing to play politics instead, the lack of urgency shown by the Republican party at this time of crisis is appalling.”