QUOTE OF THE DAY
Daily Herald: Chicago taxi drivers threatening a slowdown
Chicago taxi drivers are staging a slowdown to press their demand for a fare hike and the regulation of ridesharing operations in Illinois.
Broadcaster WBBM in Chicago reports there were few taxis at Midway Airport on Thursday, and United Taxi Drivers Community Council Fayez Khozindar is wishing “good luck” to people attempting to grab a cab Friday in the city or its airports.
Department of Aviation spokeswoman Karen Pride said the city hasn’t been notified of any slowdown. She said taxis continue to be dispatched at O’Hare and Midway airports.
Forbes: Public Pensions Are Still Marching To Their Death
Public employee pension systems have long been a source of problems. State government politicians are continually tempted to underfund pension plans in favor of using that money for something with an immediate payoff. Those same politicians also tend to grant increased pension benefits to state employees because it is a simple vote-buying scheme with no immediate budgetary cost. However, a sign of how bad the morass of public pension funds has become is that most of them have become more underfunded in the past five years. If public pensions get more underfunded in years with positive stock market gains, what hope is there for their survival?
Morningstar considers a pension plan to be so underfunded as to be declared “not fiscally sound” if it is less than 70 percent fully funded. According to Bloomberg, in 2012 there were 26 states whose pension plans met that standard. That is bad, but when you check the pattern over time, the trend is worse.
Of those 26 states in the most trouble, only one improved its funding status from 2009 to 2012. Yet those years were after the stock market drop of the recession and during a robust stock recovery. For the years from 2009 through 2012, the S&P500 index had a cumulative return of 71.1 percent. Obviously, public pension plans are not invested only in stocks and their returns were surely lower across their full portfolios. Still, one would have expected pension plans to be in bad shape in 2008-2009 at the market bottom, but to be in improved financial health by 2012 after the market bounced back.
Crain’s: Chicago takes top spot on move-in list, believe it or not
For the first time in awhile, Chicago is No. 1 in something other than murders.
In a possible sign that the local economy finally has turned the corner, a closely watched measure of what’s changed suddenly turned positive this summer, and it did so in a big way.
The measure comes from United Van Lines, a St. Louis-based moving company that each fall releases a list of metropolitan areas its clients are moving from and to during the peak warm-weather moving season. Chicago has fared poorly on the study in recent years, with considerably more people headed out of town than headed in.
Huffington Post: Deadmau5 Becomes UberX Taxi Driver In Toronto, Uses His $300,000 McLaren 650S
Deadmau5 has a whole webseries called “Coffee Run” about driving famous folks, including Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, to Tim Hortons for coffee. Well, last night the EDM superstar was ferrying people around for another reason — he was an UberX driver for the night.
Shortly afterwards additional tweets emerged showing Deadmau5’s location in downtown Toronto (579 Richmond Street West) with the musician using his McLaren 650S as the cab. One passenger tweeted the following:
Chicago Sun Times: Obama library: 2 Chicago sites cut from list; U. of C. bid lives
Obama Presidential Library Foundation chief Martin Nesbitt is poised to announce the bid finalists next week with two Chicago sites without university affiliations — at Lakeside and Bronzeville — not advancing to the next round, I am told by multiple sources. The University of Chicago is expected to be on a shortlist of bidders who will be asked to submit a very detailed proposal for the library and museum.
Nesbitt, I am told, is personally making calls to bidders to deliver the news this week.
The Lakeside site — on the former U.S. Steel South Works site on the Southeast Side of Chicago — was spectacular but it would take years for related commercial and residential development to take place.
Chicago at Brink of Swaps Fee as Bond Ratings Fall: Muni Credit
Chicago’s deteriorating credit quality has pushed taxpayers to the brink of paying almost $400 million to Wall Street banks on derivatives contracts that are backfiring.
The city and Chicago Public Schools, both at risk of rating reductions as pension obligations mount, agreed to interest-rate swaps with companies including Bank of America Corp., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Loop Capital Markets LLC last decade as part of debt sales. The accords were designed to cap expenses in case interest rates rose. The deals went awry as the Federal Reserve cut borrowing costs during the recession.
The issuers’ combined bill to exit the deals has reached about $400 million, almost two-thirds more than the metropolis spent on streets and sanitation in 2013. The contracts on the derivatives stipulate that the banks can demand payment when the issuers’ credit rating falls to a specified level. For the city, that trigger is one level away on most contracts after Moody’s Investors Service cut it to three steps above junk.
State Journal Register: Chicago taxis in slowdown over fare hike, ridesharing
Chicago taxi drivers are staging a slowdown to press their demand for a fare hike and the regulation of ridesharing operations in Illinois.
Broadcaster WBBM in Chicago reports there were few taxis at Midway Airport on Thursday, and United Taxi Drivers Community Council Fayez Khozindar is wishing “good luck” to people attempting to grab a cab today in the city or its airports.
Department of Aviation spokeswoman Karen Pride said the city hasn’t been notified of any slowdown. She said taxis continue to be dispatched at O’Hare and Midway airports.
Dealbook: Puerto Rico Finds It Has New Friends in Hedge Funds
Forget, just for a moment, depictions of sharp-elbowed hedge funds, seizing Navy ships from deadbeat nations or pushing for federal investigations into the companies they are betting against.
In Puerto Rico, the hedge funds are there to help.
A group of 28 hedge funds and other investment firms are dispensing unofficial advice, providing public relations support and offering to lend money to a Puerto Rican government wrestling with high unemployment and mistrust from municipal bond investors. The hedge funds, including Perry Capital, Fir Tree Partners and other members of the self-styled Ad Hoc Group of investors, have bought $4.5 billion of Puerto Rico government guaranteed and tax-supported bonds — or roughly 10 percent of the total — making them a financial and political force on the island.
CARTOON OF THE DAY
