Dimon: About 100 US Local Governments Not Going to “Make It”

04/01/11 Stockholm, Sweden – Meredith Whitney, CEO of the Meredith Whitney Advisory Group, has been beating the drum for some time that state and local governments continue to spend far beyond their means. More recently, she added that this year hundreds of billions in US municipal bonds are likely to default.

Against this backdrop, JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon has now publicly declared that somewhere around 100 US municipalities are going to fail in renegotiating the terms of their bond payments. While he doesn’t expect the bankrupt local governments to “shatter America,” he’s clear that the downturn in the credit cycle still has plenty of casualties to grind out.

More details from Bloomberg:

“’I wouldn’t panic about what I’m about to say,’ Dimon, 55, said today at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce event in Washington. ‘ You’re going to see some municipalities not make it. I don’t think it’s going to shatter America, I just think it’s a part of the credit cycle.’

“Speculation about widespread municipal-bond defaults intensified in December when bank analyst Meredith Whitney predicted that ‘hundreds of billions’ of dollars of municipal bonds may default in 2011 amid pressure to balance budgets.

“JPMorgan, the second-biggest U.S. bank by assets, said in February its commercial bank’s municipal-debt holdings are diversified enough to handle a likely increase in defaults. The number of issuers that can’t manage debts may be about a hundred, Dimon said today.

“’It’s not going to be thousands,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be maybe a hundred. It’s going to be a small number’ out of roughly 14,000 municipalities.”

New York University professor and Roubini Global Economics chairman Nouriel Roubini had also remarked that US municipalities will default on roughly $100 billion of debt within the next five years. As Dimon expressed, “We’re starting to add up a whole bunch of things which are negative for America.”

You can read more details in Bloomberg’s coverage of how Dimon said one hundred municipalities in the US won’t make it out of debt.

Best,

Rocky Vega,
The Daily Reckoning

Rocky Vega is publisher of The Daily Reckoning. Previously, he was founding publisher of UrbanTurf and RFID Update, which he operated from Brazil, Chile, and Puerto Rico, and associate publisher of FierceFinance. He specialized in direct marketing at MBI, facilitated MIT Sloan School of Management programs, and has been featured on CBS. Vega graduated with honors from Harvard University, where he was on the board of Let’s Go Publications and directed business programs involving McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Harvard Business School faculty. He is also enrolled at the Stockholm School of Economics.

View articles by Rocky Vega

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Dimon: About 100 US Local Governments Not Going to “Make It”

04/01/11 Stockholm, Sweden – Meredith Whitney, CEO of the Meredith Whitney Advisory Group, has been beating the drum for some time that state and local governments continue to spend far beyond their means. More recently, she added that this year hundreds of billions in US municipal bonds are likely to default.

Against this backdrop, JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon has now publicly declared that somewhere around 100 US municipalities are going to fail in renegotiating the terms of their bond payments. While he doesn’t expect the bankrupt local governments to “shatter America,” he’s clear that the downturn in the credit cycle still has plenty of casualties to grind out.

More details from Bloomberg:

“’I wouldn’t panic about what I’m about to say,’ Dimon, 55, said today at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce event in Washington. ‘ You’re going to see some municipalities not make it. I don’t think it’s going to shatter America, I just think it’s a part of the credit cycle.’

“Speculation about widespread municipal-bond defaults intensified in December when bank analyst Meredith Whitney predicted that ‘hundreds of billions’ of dollars of municipal bonds may default in 2011 amid pressure to balance budgets.

“JPMorgan, the second-biggest U.S. bank by assets, said in February its commercial bank’s municipal-debt holdings are diversified enough to handle a likely increase in defaults. The number of issuers that can’t manage debts may be about a hundred, Dimon said today.

“’It’s not going to be thousands,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be maybe a hundred. It’s going to be a small number’ out of roughly 14,000 municipalities.”

New York University professor and Roubini Global Economics chairman Nouriel Roubini had also remarked that US municipalities will default on roughly $100 billion of debt within the next five years. As Dimon expressed, “We’re starting to add up a whole bunch of things which are negative for America.”

You can read more details in Bloomberg’s coverage of how Dimon said one hundred municipalities in the US won’t make it out of debt.

Best,

Rocky Vega,
The Daily Reckoning

Rocky Vega is publisher of The Daily Reckoning. Previously, he was founding publisher of UrbanTurf and RFID Update, which he operated from Brazil, Chile, and Puerto Rico, and associate publisher of FierceFinance. He specialized in direct marketing at MBI, facilitated MIT Sloan School of Management programs, and has been featured on CBS. Vega graduated with honors from Harvard University, where he was on the board of Let’s Go Publications and directed business programs involving McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Harvard Business School faculty. He is also enrolled at the Stockholm School of Economics.

View articles by Rocky Vega

The articles and commentary featured on the Daily Reckoning are presented by Agora Financial.

Sign Up for The Daily Reckoning e-letter and receive a copy of our newest report How to Survive the Fall of Social Security… at NO CHARGE.

We Will Not Share Your Email.
We Value Your Privacy.

View the original article here

Dimon: About 100 US Local Governments Not Going to “Make It”

04/01/11 Stockholm, Sweden – Meredith Whitney, CEO of the Meredith Whitney Advisory Group, has been beating the drum for some time that state and local governments continue to spend far beyond their means. More recently, she added that this year hundreds of billions in US municipal bonds are likely to default.

Against this backdrop, JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon has now publicly declared that somewhere around 100 US municipalities are going to fail in renegotiating the terms of their bond payments. While he doesn’t expect the bankrupt local governments to “shatter America,” he’s clear that the downturn in the credit cycle still has plenty of casualties to grind out.

More details from Bloomberg:

“’I wouldn’t panic about what I’m about to say,’ Dimon, 55, said today at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce event in Washington. ‘ You’re going to see some municipalities not make it. I don’t think it’s going to shatter America, I just think it’s a part of the credit cycle.’

“Speculation about widespread municipal-bond defaults intensified in December when bank analyst Meredith Whitney predicted that ‘hundreds of billions’ of dollars of municipal bonds may default in 2011 amid pressure to balance budgets.

“JPMorgan, the second-biggest U.S. bank by assets, said in February its commercial bank’s municipal-debt holdings are diversified enough to handle a likely increase in defaults. The number of issuers that can’t manage debts may be about a hundred, Dimon said today.

“’It’s not going to be thousands,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be maybe a hundred. It’s going to be a small number’ out of roughly 14,000 municipalities.”

New York University professor and Roubini Global Economics chairman Nouriel Roubini had also remarked that US municipalities will default on roughly $100 billion of debt within the next five years. As Dimon expressed, “We’re starting to add up a whole bunch of things which are negative for America.”

You can read more details in Bloomberg’s coverage of how Dimon said one hundred municipalities in the US won’t make it out of debt.

Best,

Rocky Vega,
The Daily Reckoning

Rocky Vega is publisher of The Daily Reckoning. Previously, he was founding publisher of UrbanTurf and RFID Update, which he operated from Brazil, Chile, and Puerto Rico, and associate publisher of FierceFinance. He specialized in direct marketing at MBI, facilitated MIT Sloan School of Management programs, and has been featured on CBS. Vega graduated with honors from Harvard University, where he was on the board of Let’s Go Publications and directed business programs involving McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Harvard Business School faculty. He is also enrolled at the Stockholm School of Economics.

View articles by Rocky Vega

The articles and commentary featured on the Daily Reckoning are presented by Agora Financial.

Sign Up for The Daily Reckoning e-letter and receive a copy of our newest report How to Survive the Fall of Social Security… at NO CHARGE.

We Will Not Share Your Email.
We Value Your Privacy.

View the original article here

Disaster Relief 2.0: Leveraging the power of new technologies, local media and local communities in humanitarian responses

Ed note: The report Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies analyzes how the humanitarian community and the emerging volunteer and technical communities worked together in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and recommends ways to improve coordination between these two groups in future emergencies.  The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), together with the United Nations Foundation and Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, commissioned the report, which was researched and written by a team at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

The Disaster Relief 2.0 Blog Series provides a public forum for people from both the humanitarian and volunteer and technical communities to discuss ideas in this report and the future of disaster relief.

You can follow conversations about the report on Twitter using the hashtag #DisasterTech and on the UN Foundation’s Facebook page. Readers can submit questions to the report’s authors through those channels; a transcript with answers to select questions will be published on UN Dispatch on April 11, 2011.

Leveraging the power of new technologies, local media and local communities in humanitarian responses

By Jacobo Quintanilla

In Haiti, local citizens and communities affected by the Jan 2010 earthquake participated in the relief effort in unprecedented ways. Through social media and communication tools, this local participation was a revolution in humanitarian aid. Despite the many question marks and variables still to be addressed on this front, there are two main outcomes that deserve to be highlighted.

One is that for the first time ever the volunteer and technology communities engaged in a very significant and permanent manner in a humanitarian operation. Ushahidi, Crisis Mappers, Crisis Commons and OpenStreetMap engaged volunteers from around the world to connect with responders and individuals on the ground through mobile and online tools. This level of input was new and valuable, and deserves the attention and inclusion that it is already getting from the more “traditional” aid community.

Secondly, and even more importantly, the humanitarian community is progressively realizing that responses to crises are too often undermined by a lack of information among the affected population. When a crisis hits, outside aid agencies simply don’t know enough about the local context, the local media landscape, or how information is consumed, to be able to disseminate life-saving information immediately and gather critical feedback from affected communities. Understanding and utilizing that information ecosystem is precisely what Internews, in partnership with local media, local populations and the humanitarian community, tries to do in all our humanitarian media projects around the world.

Two of the most important channels for communicating information during crises are the existing local media, known and trusted by the local population, and the emerging mobile Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). We saw this in Haiti, documented in the report “Lessons from Haiti: Media, information Systems and Communities.

However, despite a great display of potential in the response to the earthquake in Haiti, new technologies, humanitarians, local media and affected populations have yet to connect in a predictable, reliable, and sustainable manner to improve the effectiveness of relief operations and increase community resilience. The lack of communication also undermines transparency and accountability of humanitarian actors and makes the people we serve feel further disengaged from the aid response.

As a community, we need to invest energy, expertise and resources into increasing the capacity of local media and local communities to prepare and respond to disasters effectively. In today’s 2.0 context, this includes understanding the effective utilization of a variety of new technology and social media tools to ensure that local media and local communities are better equipped to be the first responders in any emergency or disaster. Internews efforts to connect community radio stations by mobile network in Central Africa Republic and enable journalists in Kenya to use FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi outside of crisis situations are ways we’re working to build this capacity locally.

Emergencies are not the best time to experiment with untested initiatives. We learned in Haiti that trying to introduce new technologies during an active operation can be unnecessarily frustrating, ineffective, and even a disruptive exercise. This was highlighted, along with many of the important achievements and opportunities for partnership and dialogue between the humanitarian and the technology community, in the report Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies.

We need to know what tools work and what processes they can improve. The key component is still to figure our how communication tools and processes can be further localized to serve the needs of local communities. This effort takes specific investments of time and resources in advance of the next disaster.

We may never be truly ready for an emergency, but we can help local communities and local media to be better prepared. We also need to keep in mind that we still need to get the low-tech solutions right first. At the end of the day, everything goes back to basics: human interaction.

Jacobo Quintanilla is Humanitarian Director at Internews, an international media development organization, and Board Member of the infoasaid project, an Internews/BBC World Service Trust joint initiative that aims at improving how aid agencies communicate with disaster affected communities. Jacobo was part of the Internews Emergency Response Team to the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and later became the first Coordinator of Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities (CDAC) in Haiti. In 2011, Internews launched a new Center on Media, Innovation, Research & Learning aimed at maximizing the potential of digital technologies and innovative approaches to solve new challenges in the rapidly changing global information and communication landscape.

View the original article here

Disaster Relief 2.0: Leveraging the power of new technologies, local media and local communities in humanitarian responses

Ed note: The report Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies analyzes how the humanitarian community and the emerging volunteer and technical communities worked together in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and recommends ways to improve coordination between these two groups in future emergencies.  The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), together with the United Nations Foundation and Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, commissioned the report, which was researched and written by a team at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

The Disaster Relief 2.0 Blog Series provides a public forum for people from both the humanitarian and volunteer and technical communities to discuss ideas in this report and the future of disaster relief.

You can follow conversations about the report on Twitter using the hashtag #DisasterTech and on the UN Foundation’s Facebook page. Readers can submit questions to the report’s authors through those channels; a transcript with answers to select questions will be published on UN Dispatch on April 11, 2011.

Leveraging the power of new technologies, local media and local communities in humanitarian responses

By Jacobo Quintanilla

In Haiti, local citizens and communities affected by the Jan 2010 earthquake participated in the relief effort in unprecedented ways. Through social media and communication tools, this local participation was a revolution in humanitarian aid. Despite the many question marks and variables still to be addressed on this front, there are two main outcomes that deserve to be highlighted.

One is that for the first time ever the volunteer and technology communities engaged in a very significant and permanent manner in a humanitarian operation. Ushahidi, Crisis Mappers, Crisis Commons and OpenStreetMap engaged volunteers from around the world to connect with responders and individuals on the ground through mobile and online tools. This level of input was new and valuable, and deserves the attention and inclusion that it is already getting from the more “traditional” aid community.

Secondly, and even more importantly, the humanitarian community is progressively realizing that responses to crises are too often undermined by a lack of information among the affected population. When a crisis hits, outside aid agencies simply don’t know enough about the local context, the local media landscape, or how information is consumed, to be able to disseminate life-saving information immediately and gather critical feedback from affected communities. Understanding and utilizing that information ecosystem is precisely what Internews, in partnership with local media, local populations and the humanitarian community, tries to do in all our humanitarian media projects around the world.

Two of the most important channels for communicating information during crises are the existing local media, known and trusted by the local population, and the emerging mobile Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). We saw this in Haiti, documented in the report “Lessons from Haiti: Media, information Systems and Communities.

However, despite a great display of potential in the response to the earthquake in Haiti, new technologies, humanitarians, local media and affected populations have yet to connect in a predictable, reliable, and sustainable manner to improve the effectiveness of relief operations and increase community resilience. The lack of communication also undermines transparency and accountability of humanitarian actors and makes the people we serve feel further disengaged from the aid response.

As a community, we need to invest energy, expertise and resources into increasing the capacity of local media and local communities to prepare and respond to disasters effectively. In today’s 2.0 context, this includes understanding the effective utilization of a variety of new technology and social media tools to ensure that local media and local communities are better equipped to be the first responders in any emergency or disaster. Internews efforts to connect community radio stations by mobile network in Central Africa Republic and enable journalists in Kenya to use FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi outside of crisis situations are ways we’re working to build this capacity locally.

Emergencies are not the best time to experiment with untested initiatives. We learned in Haiti that trying to introduce new technologies during an active operation can be unnecessarily frustrating, ineffective, and even a disruptive exercise. This was highlighted, along with many of the important achievements and opportunities for partnership and dialogue between the humanitarian and the technology community, in the report Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies.

We need to know what tools work and what processes they can improve. The key component is still to figure our how communication tools and processes can be further localized to serve the needs of local communities. This effort takes specific investments of time and resources in advance of the next disaster.

We may never be truly ready for an emergency, but we can help local communities and local media to be better prepared. We also need to keep in mind that we still need to get the low-tech solutions right first. At the end of the day, everything goes back to basics: human interaction.

Jacobo Quintanilla is Humanitarian Director at Internews, an international media development organization, and Board Member of the infoasaid project, an Internews/BBC World Service Trust joint initiative that aims at improving how aid agencies communicate with disaster affected communities. Jacobo was part of the Internews Emergency Response Team to the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and later became the first Coordinator of Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities (CDAC) in Haiti. In 2011, Internews launched a new Center on Media, Innovation, Research & Learning aimed at maximizing the potential of digital technologies and innovative approaches to solve new challenges in the rapidly changing global information and communication landscape.

View the original article here

HR transparency in local government

HR transparency in local government
Rory Meakin  •  Better Government  •  Thursday 24 March 2011

The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) recently held a consultation on its proposed ‘Code of recommended practice for local authorities on data transparency.’ The proposed code requires councils to publish information according to three key principles: demand-led, timely and open. To meet these principles, it sets out a commendable list of standards and expectations for councils to disclose data in an automatic, useful manner. For instance, it requires publication of both ‘csv’ and ‘pdf’ file types as a minimum. Pdf is more useful for viewing immediately, whereas a csv file (short for ‘comma separated values’) is a list of pure text formatted only by commas; not very user-friendly for immediate viewing but highly useful if you plan to rearrange or do any other work with it.  We very much welcomed the proposed code, but thought it could be strengthened further by removing loopholes some councils might otherwise exploit to drag their feet. You can see our full response below for our full range of recommendations.

But we also suggested something else that wasn’t in the proposed code at all – HR transparency. We said that public bodies subject to the code should publish a complete list of job titles and job descriptions of every single member of staff. We don’t think it’s necessary to publish remuneration details of staff on junior salaries. But it is important that taxpayers know what staff are employed to do and how many there are doing certain things. Publication of this information would surely lead to more informed debate about priorities in council spending which, in turn, would lead to more care in recruitment and staff allocation.

Taking care?

Hammersmith & Fulham council have made a great step forward in this area of their own accord, publishing detailed structure charts with every single job title. A win for transparency which other councils should emulate, but even they could go further, as our proposal for including job descriptions shows. DCLG and Hammersmith & Fulham should both be congratulated for their moves toward greater openness and transparency. But we should insist on HR transparency across the board and we hope that DCLG include our proposal in their final document.

We do not manually moderate comments, but from time to time the spam filter may hold your comment for approval. To avoid this, please be sure to use good grammar, avoid submitting too many links in any one comment and refrain from excessive profanity.

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Don’t Let Crisis of Japanese Earthquake Go To Waste! Natural Disaster or Local Agenda 21 Eugenics Programme Acceleration?

By Neil Foster – The Sovereign Independent -

As if the Japanese people haven’t suffered enough from the effects of radiation contamination going back to the two criminal bombings of WW II, they’re now having to contend with a nuclear disaster on their own terms which is looming on their Eastern seaboard and which it is reported could even contaminate the West coast of America.

This is of course blamed on that well know natural phenomenon of the earthquake which is a recurring feature in this region. However, when we consider the scale of this earthquake and the consequential fallout, if you’ll pardon the pun, we perhaps need to take a closer look at exactly what’s happening here.

The earthquake in itself, for the moment, we’ll take as a natural occurrence. The reasons for questioning this will be look at later. Suffice to say that the insanity of man has the capability to cause such disasters unnaturally and has done for decades. The 35 page report below is clear evidence from many sources, including the military, that weapons are available to cause such ‘natural’ disasters as volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and severe storms. This is not science fiction and the fact that it is stated in these documents that they can cause such devastation should be taken as proof that they must have tested these weapons somewhere on this planet, conceivably more than once to determine their operational effectiveness. This being the case, where and when did they test them and are they still doing so?

[more...]

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DCLG announce review of statutory duties placed on local government

DCLG announce review of statutory duties placed on local government
Chris Daniel  •  Better Government  •  Thursday 10 March 2011

Ever found yourself dealing with employees from your council and having no idea what they actually do? Well, they could be carrying out one of 1,294 statutory duties that parliament imposes on local authorities. This week the Department for Communities and Local Government (DGLG) has announced it will perform a review of these duties, which in many cases are the result of centuries old Acts of Parliament and are no longer really necessary. Of course, conforming to them tends to cost taxpayers money.

Amazingly, DCLG acknowledge it is in no way comprehensive. Inevitably within such a huge list of duties some are necessary to perform essential functions, but surely there are many that are now surplus to requirements? DCLG are asking for your help to establish a comprehensive list of any statutory duties that are no longer necessary, which you can do here. As we outlined in our Unnecessary Jobs report last year, these statutory duties spawn whole new departments in council workforces too, such as diversity officers and climate change officers. Another problem is that councils respond differently to the same edicts – Birmingham had 28 Diversity Officers on the list while Leeds made do with just 11. Some had none whatsoever and shared the duties among existing staff.

This is an encouraging measure from the DCLG; let’s hope it removes many of the tiresome, onerous and ultimately expensive requirements Whitehall place on local authorities. Of course, this must be completed with clarity and transparency, as Glyn Gaskarth of the Local Government information Unit points out.  He states “Every councillor must be able to find out, easily, exactly what the council is legally required to do. The public must be able to access such information in a clear and accessible format. We should constantly be asking ourselves if each regulation is necessary and if the law’s requirements can be met by less bureaucratic means.”

We do not manually moderate comments, but from time to time the spam filter may hold your comment for approval. To avoid this, please be sure to use good grammar, avoid submitting too many links in any one comment and refrain from excessive profanity.

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