Free Republic

U.S. to send $4.5 billion more to Ukraine for budget needs

<p>Democrat Rep. Marcia Fudge had been a potential candidate for House speaker. Now she’s backing Nancy Pelosi for the job.</p> <p>Fudge says she wanted to “ensure diversity, equity and inclusion at all levels” in the House and she’s “now confident” they can “move forward together.”</p>

Attorney General Eric Holder said a federal probe found discrimination against at least 200,000 qualified African American and Latino borrowers from 2004 to 2008, during the height of the housing market boom. He said that minority borrowers who qualified for prime loans were steered into higher-interest-rate subprime loans.

Municipal borrowers defaulted at three times the typical rate even as the pace fell from records the past two years when Jefferson County, Alabama, and Lehman Brothers Holding Inc.’s failure sustained historic levels. Thirty-five municipal bond issues totaling $1.5 billion defaulted in the first six months of 2010, the Miami Lakes, Florida-based Distressed Debt Securities Newsletter reported in its July edition. That annualized $3 billion pace is triple the rate of $1 billion or less a year going back to 1983, Richard Lehmann, publisher of the newsletter, said in a phone interview today. The rest of the story...