CBO: John Boehner’s debt bill comes up short (Politico)
The first installment of $900 billion is contingent on enacting 10 year caps on annual appropriations which the leadership had hoped would save well over $1 trillion. But CBO late Tuesday came back with a report showing the legislation would reduce deficits by $850 billion when measured against the agency’s most current projections for spending.
U.S. May Have Way to Cover Bills After Deadline, for Week (NYT)
Thanks to an inflow of tax payments and maneuvering by the Treasury Department, the government can probably continue to pay all of its bills for several days after Aug. 2, providing potentially critical breathing room for Congress to raise the debt ceiling, according to estimates by several Wall Street banks and a Washington research organization. The consensus is that the government will not run short of money until Aug. 10, when it would be unable to cut millions of Social Security checks without borrowing more money.
Dunkin IPO To Fuel Coffee Wars (WSJ)
Apparently McDonald’s should watch its back.
California Secures $5.4 Billion Loan From 8 Banks (DealBook)
California has lined up a $5.4 billion loan from a group of eight banks led by Goldman Sachs as an emergency cushion if the credit markets are disrupted by a failure to raise the debt ceiling, the state’s treasurer announced on Tuesday…Bill Lockyer, California’s Democratic treasurer, said in a statement that he was concerned that the state could lose access to the bond markets if President Obama and House Republicans do not reach a deal on raising the debt ceiling by early August.
Economist: If The Tea Party Likes A Debt Deal, It Can’t Pass (CNBC)
“As the Tea Partiers are showing no indications of being willing to compromise at all, the only way a deal can be done is for moderate House Republicans—those who appreciate that default would be hugely damaging for the country—to side with Democrats to pass a bill that the Senate and the president can sign,” Ian Shepherdson, chief US economist at High Frequency Economics said in a research note on Wednesday.
Elephants never forget old friends and are social network experts (DM)
Study author Dr Shermin de Silva from the University of Pennsylvania said: ‘Elephants are able to track one another over large distances by calling to each other and using their sense of smell. ‘So the “herd” of elephants one sees at any given time is often only a fragment of a much larger social group. ‘Our work shows that they are able recognize their friends and renew these bonds even after being apart for a long time.’ The study also found that some are more sociable than others and those who had few friends tended to be loyal to them, while those with a larger circle were less so.Researchers studied more than 100 female adult Asian elephants in the Uda Walawe National Park, in Sri Lanka, for 20 months. While many kept the same friends, 16 per cent changed their ‘top five’ associates, the researchers report in the journal BMC Ecology. Read more »
Remember when Lehman went bankrupt? Good times. The thing about that was that pretty much right up until the minute Lehman filed, people like Dick Fuld and Erin Callan were going around saying things like “we stand extremely well capitalized to take advantage of these new opportunities” and “[w]e have maintained our strong liquidity and capital profiles even in this difficult environment.”
