Barclays, BofA, JPMorgan Sued by FHFA Bank of America Corp. (BAC), Citigroup Inc. (C), JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Barclays Plc (BARC) were sued by the Federal Housing Finance Agency over residential mortgage-backed securities. In lawsuits filed today in Manhattan federal court, the agency, representing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, also named as defendants Nomura Holdings Ltd., HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA) and Credit Suisse Group AG. (CSGN) The FHFA has been demanding refunds from banks for loans sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that were based on false or missing information about borrowers and properties. The agency said in today’s filings that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bought $6 billion in securities from Bank of America; $24.8 billion from Merrill Lynch & Co., which Bank of America bought; and $3.5 billion from Citigroup. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have operated under U.S. conservatorship since 2008, when they were seized amid subprime mortgage losses that pushed them toward insolvency.
Top 10 Common Faults In Human Thought Humans The human mind is a wonderful thing. Cognition, the act or process of thinking, enables us to process vast amounts of information quickly. For example, every time your eyes are open, you brain is constantly being bombarded with stimuli. You may be consciously thinking about one specific thing, but you brain is processing thousands of subconscious ideas. The Gambler’s fallacy is the tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality, they are not. Reactivity is the tendency of people to act or appear differently when they know that they are being observed. Pareidolia is when random images or sounds are perceived as significant. Interesting Fact: the Rorschach Inkblot test was developed to use pareidolia to tap into people’s mental states. Self-fulfilling Prophecy Self-fulfilling prophecy is engaging in behaviors that obtain results that confirm existing attitudes. Interesting Fact: Economic Recessions are self-fulfilling prophecies.
The Internet Is Ruining Your Brain [INFOGRAPHIC] Admit it: As you're reading this, you have tunnel vision — that feeling that the world is closing in on you after surfing the Internet for eight straight hours. Web dead head (yes, I made that up) is a growing concern for today's connected generation, which collectively spends 35 billion hours on the Internet every month. But we're not just talking one online shopping experience at a time. SEE ALSO: Your Desk Job Makes You Fat, Sick and Dead [INFOGRAPHIC] Turns out, multi-tasking online doesn't positively exercise our brains or mental state. Scared? Thumbnail courtesy of iStockphoto, Firstsignal
List of banks sued over mortgage securities sales By The Associated Press A federal agency on Friday sued 17 financial firms, including the largest U.S. banks, for selling Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac billions of dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities that turned toxic when the housing market collapsed. Here is a list of those named in the lawsuits and the amount in securities the institutions are said to have sold to the government mortgage buyers: -- JPMorgan Chase & Co., $33 billion -- The Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC, $30.4 billion -- Countrywide Financial Corp. -- Merrill Lynch & Co. -- Deutsche Bank AG, $14.2 billion -- Credit Suisse Holdings (USA) Inc., $14.1 billion -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc., $11.1 billion -- Morgan Stanley, $10.6 billion -- HSBC North America Holdings, Inc., $6.2 billion -- Ally Financial Inc., formerly known as GMAC LLC, $6 billion -- Bank of America Corp., $6 billion -- Barclays Bank PLC, $4.9 billion -- Citigroup Inc., $3.5 billion -- Nomura Holding America Inc., $2 billion -- Societe Generale, $1.3 billion
WORLD RANKINGS-TOTAL DEATHS 1. Cause of Death Column to the left is in World Rank Order. 2. Select a Country from the list on the right. Click on it to place it in the Grid. 3. 4. 5. 6. Entering a Country into the Grid will cause these instructions to disappear. Time Management Beyond the Task List — Online Collaboration Imran recently pointed out a great comic from The Oatmeal called “Why Working from Home is Both Awesome and Terrible.” The panel titled “Degradation of Social Skills” really resonated with me. It’s not that I’m scared I’m no longer able to converse with others (no, really, after a year in the cave, I still talk good! Me talk good!) but, it does raise interesting questions about how remote workers balance social time, colleague time and our own personal time. I’m curious: how do you manage this? Social Time To me, “social time” is time I spend outside work hours with friends. One remote worker I know engages in very little face-to-face social time — he might see friends once a fortnight, or less. Colleague Time Let’s call “colleague time” the time we spend dealing in person with colleagues or clients. In a typical week, I might have one client meeting, but some remote workers I know average a meeting a month. Personal Time Managing Balance This is roughly how I manage my time.
Federal Reserve Policy + Extreme Weather = Revolution + World War III By David DeGraw Federal Reserve Policy Mixed With Extreme Weather Has Put The World On A Fast Track To Revolution And War. There are many factors that clearly demonstrate why it would be disastrous for the Federal Reserve to repeat their vicious Quantitative Easing (QE) policy. If you want to know a significant reason why they cannot get away with another round of QE, here is an equation for you: (Quantitative Easing + Extreme Weather = Revolution + World War III) From the very beginning we knew that the Federal Reserve’s QE program was going to cause the cost of food to rise and the dollar to decline in value, and that these intended results would lead to an increase in poverty and civil unrest. Are food prices approaching a violent tipping point? In other words, if the Fed engages in another round of QE, the global unrest that they have already ignited will go hyperbolic. Put all these factors together and you have, “The Road Through 2012: Revolution [and/or] World War III.”
3D displays Keigo lizuka Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering 35 St. George Street University of Toronto Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1A4 Contents Abstract 1. Abstract We present a novel, inexpensive, stereoscopic technique for generating 3D images from cellophane on a liquid crystal displays which are most typically used for a laptop screen or a camera phone screen. A distinct advantage of our technique is its simplicity; either a laptop screen or a camera phone screen can be converted into a 3D display with minimal knowledge of optics. 1. Let us begin by examining the properties of cellophane. As a result, the component polarized in the x direction propagates through the medium faster than the component polarized in the y direction. One of the most important functions of a half-waveplate is its ability to rotate the direction of polarization of the transmitted light. 2. Figure 1 explains the basic principle of a 3D display based upon the parallax effect1. 3. 4. 4.1 Using a laptop computer