One day after Chicago politicians did their part to seal the city’s financial fate, London was kind enough to give the city a preview of coming attractions.

The London agency responsible for acquiring the land on which the 2012 Olympics will be held ran up a 160 million pound shortfall as a result of poor accounting and financial controls, a report said on Friday.
The London Development Agency (LDA), the Mayor of London’s business and economic agency, created the overrun after failing to do enough to monitor spending and expenditure commitments on land purchases and compensation to companies forced off the 500-acre site in Stratford, east London.

But, undaunted, the first lady will try to close the deal by heading to Copenhagen to convince the IOC that Chicago, more than any other city, wants a crack at demonstrating responsible Olympic funding.

There is no doubt in my mind that Chicago would offer the world a fantastic setting for these historic games and I hope that the Olympic torch will have the chance to burn brightly in my hometown.”

As a native of the Windy City, she should know fire and Chicago don’t mix too well.

So what if your house was partially or completely destroyed by Hurricane Ike? If you’ve lived along the Gulf Coast of Texas for more than a week, you’ve probably done the smart thing and bought insurance to protect you from the inevitable. While that may work in theory, thousands of coastal residents are learning that insurance companies have a much easier time raising premiums after a hurricane hits than actually paying out. The problem stems from the fact that some people did not have the foresight to record a minute-by-minute photographic account of which damage on their house was attributable to wind and which was attributable to flooding. As a result, the potentially responsible parties are alternating between stalling and flat out ignoring claims.

Chip Merlin, an attorney whose firm represents more than 400 policyholders with Ike-related claims, said he’s seeing more disputes than he expected still open a year after Ike. Many of the disagreements, he said, involve less than $10,000.
“I’m surprised at the number of small disputes going on where the insurance company just says ‘We’re not paying,’ ” he said.

This kind of gives a new meaning to the term insurance fraud.
Unsettled claims and unsettled lives [Houston Chronicle]

Trading floor evacuated at RBS in Stamford. In all seriousness, how are supposed to lose the UK taxpayers money standing out in the street? Open to suggestions.

Update: All good in the hood.

They just let us back in, sprinklers went off in cafeteria. That was anti-climatic. Game on!

The budding bromance between Dmitry Medvedev and Hugo Chavez was not enough to get the Russian president fired up about the state of the economy. In fact, Medvedev sounded like he needed a drink or two to ease the pain.

“An ineffective economy, a semi-Soviet social sphere, a weak democracy, negative demographic trends and an unstable Caucasus. These are very big problems even for a state like Russia,” Medvedev wrote in the piece, which ran in several leading newspapers and on the Kremlin Web site….Medvedev condemned “centuries of debilitating corruption” and widespread paternalistic attitudes in Russia that all problems should be the responsibility of the state.

But should he want to have that drink and contemplate Russian attitudes towards the state solving everyone’s problems, he may run into a problem there. It turns out the state, Medvedev specifically, has identified a “colossal” problem in Russia: drinking. In response to the average annual per capital alcohol intake of 5 gallons of pure ethanol, the president has proposed banning containers larger than 11 ounces of low alcohol beverages. But before panic grips the nation, an executive director of the Russian Beer Producers Union set the record straight about what constitutes low.

The restriction shouldn’t affect beer, given a new definition of low alcohol beverages in the Kremlin document today, as those with less than 7 percent added ethanol, such as some canned cocktails, (executive director of the Russian Beer Producers Union Vyacheslav) Mamontov said.

1:03: Glasses, because this is a serious interview.
1:04: Get a load of that suit.
1:05: CG: “Just to clarify, when you say ‘Lloyd,’ that refers to Lloyd Blankfein, yeah?”
1:06: Tits Cabrera would like to know what it’s like being the CEO that sucks the most second only to Ken Lewis.
1:07 Tits isn’t trying to give J-Mack a hard time, but really, she wonders, when you think about how hard you’ve blown this thing over the last few years, how do you look yourself in the mirror?

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Clearly Timmy G’s patience is running a bit thin these days. Anybody who saw TG’s level of eye-rolling enthusiasm explaining his views on TARP again to Jeb Hensarling could see that the Treasury Secretary was a bit chippy- and this was before the town hall. But the economy is no longer going off a cliff and the equity markets no longer go down so you have to wonder why Timmy isn’t a bright ray of sunshine. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that he still doesn’t have any help and is a couple people removed from being a one man Treasury.
The top post in tax policy is still waiting for somebody with few enough skeletons in the closet to make it through the vetting process after Elizabeth Garrett dropped out for undisclosed reasons. When not picking up the slack there, Team Treasury is being stretched thin handling the duties of the top international post in the department, Undersecretary for International Affairs, as nominee Lael Brainard is currently playing 20 questions about some of her tax deductions. Should he ever get some help, maybe TG can finally focus on the matter at hand and come up with a way to pay for saving the economy- like getting nominees for government posts to fork over their taxes.

It seemed a bit odd that the Dutch of all people would step forward and set what some are considering to be a potential compensation model for the world to follow. Why would the Netherlands suddenly decide it needed to improve its image and cap board member bonuses at 100% of their base salary? What could possibly be going on there to induce them to assume the lead in taking the high road?

Princess Christina, one of queen Beatrix’s three sisters, has set up a second letter box company on the tax haven island of Guernsey, the Volkskrant reports on Friday…Earlier this year MPs were highly critical of the princess when it emerged she had put money inherited from her mother into the Daffodil Trust, also located on the British Channel island.They say the princess, who lives in London, is setting a bad example by using tax havens to avoid paying tax.

At least it’s better than trying to blame it on Turbo Tax.