Thompson and a host of other religious leaders are about to embark on a three-day fast and prayer campaign to cure the city’s daunting money woes. ... “Things that are above and beyond my control, I need God,” Thompson told WHTM TV, the region’s ABC news affiliate. “I depend on Him for guidance. Spiritual guidance. That’s why it’s really no struggle for me to join this fast and prayer.”
Senate Resolution 652, sponsored by Senator Kerry of Massachusetts, would create the American Infrastructure Financing Authority. The AIFA would require that funded projects generate revenues to repay the loan to the infrastructure bank. For the Minneapolis bridge project to be funded it would have needed to be a toll bridge rather than a free bridge (or have a government entity repay the loan). It’s a PayGo Infrastructure Bank.So, now private development interests can get government backed financing directly.
"What Meredith Whitney was trying to say was more interesting than what she was accused of saying. She didn’t actually care all that much about the municipal-bond market, or how many cities were likely to go bankrupt. The municipal-bond market was a dreary backwater. As she put it, “Who cares about the stinking muni-bond market?” The only reason she had stumbled into that market was that she had come to view the U.S. national economy as a collection of regional economies. To understand the regional economies, she had to understand how state and local governments were likely to behave, and to understand this she needed to understand their finances. Thus she had spent two unlikely years researching state and local finance."posted by yerfatma at 8:08 AM on October 13, 2011
Did other governments make generous commitments during periods of economic prosperity? Sure, it is almost impossible for political officials not to do this kind of thing. But are other governments pushing themselves to the brink by not addressing this issue? Lewis’ audience wouldn’t know, because he did not interview the mayors of any of the two-thirds of the 296 California municipalities (as surveyed by the League of California Cities) that are in the process of renegotiating changes to their retiree benefits plans. I suspect if Lewis had, he would have discovered that other cities have internalized Vallejo’s situation.You can sit back and watch government retirees and employees get squeezed to make the bond market happy (and because structural/legal factors make default/bankruptcy hard for municipalities so what else can you do?) Like the whole "peak oil" issue, any sufficiently accurate analysis is a printing press for money, so any analysis you read is likely to be not sufficiently accurate (as I hear it, technical analysis of the bond market is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than that used for options), but overall you can look at the way municpalities borrowed money in the good times (to forestall tax increases that weren't sustainable driven by structural factors in the costs of government i.e. the Reagan revolution) and say roughly, there's a lot of "bad debt" out there that can't be discharged and deleveraging is occurring by sucking money out of people's pockets and into investor pockets. A smaller version of the big story.
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posted by three blind mice at 6:04 AM on October 13, 2011