Barry Wynn, Colonial Trust Company president, discusses why he has withdrawn support of Rick Perry and is now backing, Mitt Romney.
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WASHINGTON ? Ben Bernanke presided over his first meeting as Federal Reserve chairman in March 2006 believing the nation's economy could pull off a "soft landing" from falling home prices. Three months later, Bernanke had begun to grasp that he and others had underestimated the risk housing posed to the economy.
Newly released transcripts of Fed meetings during Bernanke's first year as chairman show that, among Fed officials, he often expressed the most concern about housing. But no official, according to the transcripts, recognized the extent of the damage a housing bubble would cause. A year later, the housing market's collapse helped send the nation into its worst recession since the Great Depression.
In fact, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, then a Fed official, expressed confidence in September 2006 that "collateral damage" from housing could be avoided. The transcripts released Thursday covered the eight meetings of the central bank's chief policy-making body, the Federal Open Market Committee, during 2006. That included the last meeting of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in January of that year and Bernanke's first meeting in March after he had succeeded Greenspan as chairman.
The Fed releases minutes of the FOMC discussions three weeks after the meetings but full transcripts do not come out until five years later.
The transcripts for 2006 show that at first Bernanke did not express concern about the cooling of the housing market after a boom that had pushed sales and home prices to record levels.
"I agree with most of the commentary that the strong fundamentals support a relatively soft landing in housing," Bernanke told his follow FOMC members at his first meeting as chairman in March.
Also in March, Bernanke said, "I think we are unlikely to see growth being derailed by the housing market, but I do want us to be prepared for some quarter-to-quarter fluctuations,"
At his second meeting as chairman in May, Bernanke still seemed fairly confident. "So far we are seeing, at worst, an orderly decline in the housing market; but there is still, I think, a lot to be seen as to whether the housing market will decline slowly or more quickly.
However, by the June meeting, Bernanke was expressing more caution saying that the slowdown in housing was "an asset price correction" that bore watching.
"Like any other asset-price correction, it's very hard to forecast, and consequently it's an important risk and one that should lead us to be cautious in our policy decisions," Bernanke said.
By the September meeting, Bernanke sounded even more concerned about the impact on the broader economy from the slowdown in housing.
"I don't have quite as much confidence as some people around the table that there will be no spillover effect," Bernanke said.
By contrast, Geithner, who was then president of the Fed's New York regional bank, expressed more confidence that the economy could weather the troubles in housing, saying the issue would be the impact on consumer and business spending.
"We just don't see troubling signs yet of collateral damage and we are not expecting much," Geithner said at the September FOMC meeting.
The discussion by the members of the FOMC, the Fed board members in Washington and 12 regional bank presidents, gave no indication that any of them foresaw the devastating impact that the collapse of the housing bubble would have. The country fell into a deep recession and severe financial crisis that led to the loss of more than 8 million jobs.
Bernanke and other Fed officials have said that they failed to see the severity of the shock waves from the housing bust. But the transcripts of their closed-door discussions in 2006 provide new details about how the central bank was responding to the unfolding crisis.
The transcripts of the final meeting of the year, in December, showed that Bernanke was still expecting that the economy would experience a "soft landing" in which growth would slow enough to cool inflation but not drop into a recession.
His comments came a year before the start of the Great Recession, which economists say began in December 2007 and lasted until June 2009.
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News outlets, as well as friends and family members, began confirming the arrival of Beyonce and Jay-Z's baby girl soon after she was born on Jan. 7. But it wasn't until two days later that the proud parents made their first official statement about their bundle of joy.
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For the first time, the polio virus has disappeared from the country for 12 months, but it could still be re-imported from neighboring nations that continue to fight the devastating disease
?| January 9, 2012
In the mid-2000s, when scientists questioned whether the campaign to rid the world of polio could succeed, skeptics pointed to a problem that some called pain.
That stood for Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Nigeria?the four countries that were stubbornly standing in the way of success. The four had never managed to stop the spread of polioviruses within their borders and continued to send viruses, like embers off a fire, to re-ignite outbreaks in places that had previously halted transmission.
Now it appears someone's going to need to craft a new mnemonic.
India, which once seemed likely to be the last country on Earth to rid itself of polio, appears to have succeeded ahead of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria in besting the crippling viruses. The last child paralyzed by polio in India got sick on January 13, 2011, and surveillance for wild polioviruses in sewage has not turned up the pathogen in more than a year.
If India produces 12 straight months of polio-free surveillance data, it will be removed from the list of countries where polio is considered endemic, leaving only the other three. A statement hailing that likely eventuality will be issued by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative on the one-year anniversary of the last case later this week. But with the time it takes to process pending laboratory tests, it may be mid-February before there is official word.
Still, there is the sense that India is on the threshold of a momentous achievement, one gained against tremendous odds.
"This is huge for us. It has taken more than a decade and tens of millions of health-workers, managers and a lot of mobilization to get to this point," says Hamid Jafari, project manager for the World Health Organization's National Polio Surveillance Project, based in New Delhi.
After more than a decade battling the virus, and heartbreaking years of seeing the numbers of paralytic cases dip tantalizingly low, only to rebound, some scientists doubted polio could be stopped in India. It was commonly observed that the eradication program had two distinct problems: In Nigeria, where some Muslim parents refused to vaccinate their kids on religious grounds, and in conflict-torn countries like Afghanistan, where safe access is a challenge, the programs were failing to vaccinate all children. In India, however, the failure was on the part of the vaccine.
Where children are well nourished and healthy, three doses of oral polio vaccine will do the trick. But malnourished children who live where sanitation is poor and diarrhea is a fact of daily life cannot mount a protective immune response so easily. In India children who had been vaccinated eight, 10 or more times would sometimes still fall prey to polio.
New vaccines that targeted first one and later two strains of polio, rather than all three, were introduced and began to make real inroads. But the country still faced enormous challenges. In India locating and vaccinating all the vulnerable children is a gargantuan task. In the two poor northern states where polio made its last stand?Uttar Pradesh and Bihar?more than half a million babies are born every month. On the twice-annual national vaccination days, 2.3 million vaccinators visit 209 million households.
"We have to get to these children, these newborns, with vaccine faster than the wild virus can get to them. It's a race against virus," Jafari explains.
In addition to introducing more effective vaccine, India got better at finding high-risk children, homing in on families that move about the country looking for seasonal work. Transit points?train stations, bus depots, busy highway intersections?are used as distribution centers during vaccination campaigns. And special efforts are made to locate and map where migrant families set up camps, to ensure their children are not missed when vaccination teams make their rounds.
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TOKYO ? A woman claiming to have lived with a senior member of the doomsday cult behind the 1995 nerve gas attack on Tokyo's subways turned herself in and was arrested Tuesday for helping him evade police for nearly 17 years.
Akemi Saito, also a member of Aum Shinrikyo, gave herself up after Makoto Hirata surrendered to police on New Year's Eve, according to police and Saito's lawyer.
Hirata has refused to explain how he managed to keep underground for so long despite being one of Japan's most-wanted fugitives.
He is suspected of involvement in a cult-related kidnapping-murder in 1995. Later that year, Aum Shinrikyo released sarin nerve gas in Tokyo's subways, killing 13 and injuring more than 6,000.
Saito's lawyer said she lived with Hirata most of the time he was on the run, and police charged her with aiding a fugitive. But the lawyer, Taro Takimoto, said she should be considered as Hirata's common-law wife, which would exclude her from that charge.
Takimoto said Saito has admitted to using an alias and moving frequently to avoid detection. She worked a number of jobs, from coffee shop waitress to health clinic receptionist.
"She said this was the first time she has used her real name in 17 years," he said.
He refused to comment further.
Hirata's sudden reapperance has shocked Japan.
Police initially brushed off Hirata when he tried to turn himself in because they did not recognize him and thought it was a hoax.
According to court testimony, cult members kidnapped, murdered and then burned the body of Kiyoshi Kariya, the brother of a follower trying to quit the group. They put Kariya's body in an incinerator inside the cult's commune and disposed of the ashes in a nearby lake.
Public broadcaster NHK said Hirata has told police he drove Kariya to the compound but has denied other allegations.
Hirata was one of the last three wanted cult members. Nearly 200 members of the cult have been convicted in the gas attack and dozens of other crimes. Thirteen, including cult guru Shoko Asahara, are on death row.
Hirata is also suspected in the near-fatal shooting of Japan's top police official, but the high-profile case was closed last year after the statute of limitations expired.
The cult, renamed Aleph, once had 10,000 members in Japan and claimed another 30,000 in Russia. It still has hundreds of members. The cult is under police surveillance and its new leaders have publicly disavowed Asahara, though he is still believed to be revered by some followers privately.
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From Derry, New Hampshire -?
Newt Gingrich continues to take aim at Mitt Romney here in New Hampshire, as his supporters admit "time is running out" to find a way to keep Romney from winning the Republican nomination.
In a stop at the Pinkerton Academy in Derry, Gingrich hammered home his theme that he is a natural heir to the conservative beliefs of President Ronald Reagan, arguing the GOP would do best with the former Speaker as the Republican nominee.
"I truly believe this is the most important election of our lifetime," as Gingrich drew a very good crowd on a Sunday night, going toe-to-toe with the final NFL playoff game of the weekend.
Speaking of must-see games, Gingrich will spend Monday night in a sports bar in Concord to watch the college football championship game between LSU and Alabama.
As for the GOP race, Gingrich once more zeroed in on Mitt Romney, this time with a new web video out on Monday that goes through a list of tax increases backed by Romney during his time as Governor of Massachusetts.
"It takes awhile," Gingrich said to list all of the new taxes by the man he's dubbed the "Massachusetts Moderate."
"You begin to realize how many different people he was taxing," Gingrich said.
As of now, the polls don't show a bump for Gingrich here in New Hampshire, as many believe the real showdown will come on January 21 with the GOP Primary in South Carolina.
Gingrich would like to avoid another fourth place finish, as he must deal again with Ron Paul and Rick Santorum, as well as Jon Huntsman, who has been camped out here in New Hampshire.
"If you want to defeat Barack Obama, you need a bold Reagan conservative," Gingrich told the crowd - saying there's only one choice - Newt Gingrich.
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