Tuesday News Blip

Finances:Turns out when the FDIC seized the mortgage company IndyMac on July 11, the inevitable cascade of financial repercussions has started to appear.

The chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said Tuesday more banks are in danger of failing, and that the government agency expects to raise premiums to restore its reserve fund after paying out billions of dollars to depositors at IndyMac Bank.

Sure, Sheila Blair affirmed that it won't happen again:

"Based on the supervisory data and financial data I have, I would be very surprised if we had failures of that size institution or larger..."

but the instability of certain banks remains.
Blair affirms $100k consumers have in a bank (or $250k in some retirement accounts) is covered by a protection program if the bank fails...great, but what about those holding a 250k+ margin in a bank that fails?!

Blair confirms, however, that this practice of larger institutions nursing small banks back to health is common and the fact that 13% of Not the most reassuring news for those using bank services.





Weather:
Those along the Miami coast and in my beloved Yucatan peninsula of northeast Mexico are under a hurricane warning with the threat of a tropical storm turned Category 1 hurricane. The winds picked up at about 5pm on Tuesday at the storms location 165 miles south of Brownsville Texas, which, if you check out the map


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you'll see is the southern tip of Texas (northern tip of mexico), about the same longitude as Tampoco. Thanks to our beloved 1971 engineer Herbert Saffir and our meteorologist Bob Simpson, we have the Saffir-Simpson hurricane classification scale. Makes sense; assign a 1-5 on any potentially dangerous gust of wind to heed how dangerous it is. Great idea, but the problem is not everyone knows what the 1-5 tag means, so a category 4 (very dangerous) may not alarm people!

If you check the hurricane classifications, you'll notice that a category 1 is 74-95 mph winds. Therefore, because winds were reported at up to 75 miles per hour, this is just entering the lower-bracket parameter of "Cat 1 Hurricane" by a smidgen.

. Cat 1 damage is only almost always just to trees and shrubs (without building damage), but those in the -97th meridian (97°W) near the gulf of Mexico should definitely hold onto their hats!






Entertainment:

Estelle Getty, Sophia from the Golden Girls, passed away in her Hollywood Boulevard home at age 84. While she was best known for her sophia role, she made small appearances in larger films like "Tootsie".