02 May
2016
Puerto Rico Bankruptcy, Credit Card Chip, and More – TenCount 5.2.16
- Puerto Rico has until the end of the business day on Monday to make a $422 million Government Development Bank bond payment, but few people are holding their breath. “On Monday there will be a default,” Puerto Rico’s governor, Alejandro García Padilla, said last Wednesday. Even if it reaches an agreement to delay a default, a much bigger obstacle looms: a $2 billion debt payment due on July 1. Some $800 million of that payment is constitutionally guaranteed, giving it legal priority even over the funding of essential public services, such as police patrols or drinking water.
- Things aren’t much better in Atlantic City, where the troubled municipality could miss a bond payment of a mere $1.8 million that is also due Monday. Bankruptcy is a possibility, with Standard & Poor’s saying in January that it seemed “inevitable” that the city would default by midyear. Cash levels are so low that “we’re down to a couple million dollars on any given day,” Mayor Don Guardian told The Wall Street Journal last week.
- Indiana, which boasts of itself as the “crossroads of America,” gets all the attention of the political set this week, as voters go to the polls Tuesday to vote in the presidential primaries. A solid victory by Donald Trump could provide an insurmountable lead in the race for the Republican nomination, while among Democrats, Hillary Clinton aims to put more distance between herself and Bernie Sanders.
- By now many Americans are familiar with using a credit card with chip technology – Don’t swipe! – but what do you know about the merits, drawbacks and, most importantly, the safety of the new cards? On Tuesday at Noon the consumer education campaign Protect My Data holds a discussion on “So You Have a Chip Card, So What?”
- One day later, on Wednesday, the Hudson Institute hosts a debate looking at the legality and morality of surveillance, a consistent feature in post-9/11 America. Nadine Strossen, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, and David Rivkin, a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, will face off on “Balancing Privacy and Security in the Age of the Internet.”
- Six years ago, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act to overhaul the banking industry after the financial crisis, but regulators are still just getting around to putting some new rules in place. On Tuesday the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System meets to discuss two proposed rules aimed at restricting the actions of systemically important banking institutions. And on Thursday, the National Economists Club meets for a luncheon discussion on “Paradoxes of Banking Crises.”
- It’s quiet in Washington this week, as Congress travels home for a weeklong recess and President Obama on Wednesday travels to Flint, Michigan, to discuss the city’s drinking water crisis. The trip was prompted, the White House says, by a letter to the president from an 8-year-old Flint resident, Mari Copeny.
- In other local news, the National Transportation Safety Board on Tuesday will release its findings on the cause of a fatal Metrorail accident on Jan. 12, 2015, when smoke filled a car of a stopped train after an electrical arcing accident south of L’Enfant Plaza, killing one. The incident has the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority considering major renovations that could shut down some metro lines for months at a time.
- About 200,000 jobs were added by employers in the United States in April, analysts say, a continued sign of economic growth that has pushed the unemployment rate close to an eight-year low, at about 5 percent. The Labor Department will report the April job figures on Friday morning.
- “…And they’re off,” in the 142d running of the Kentucky Derby on Saturday, a year after American Pharoah embarked on an historic Triple Crown run. And further north, the America’s Cup sailing races return to New York City and the Hudson River for the first time since 1920. The United States, Britain, France, Japan, New Zealand and Sweden will face off in the second of six events for the chance to race in the finals in 2017.