By Brett Rowland, The Center Square

UBS AG and several of its U.S.-based affiliates agreed to pay $1.435 billion in penalties to settle a U.S. Department of Justice civil suit over the Swiss bank’s role in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis.

The U.S. Department of Justice sued the Zurich-based company in 2018 alleging that UBS defrauded investors in connection with the sale of 40 residential mortgage-backed securities issued in 2006 and 2007. The complaint alleged the company knowingly made false and misleading statements to buyers of these securities relating to the characteristics of the underlying mortgage loans.

The settlement raises the total amount of civil penalties paid by banks, originators, and ratings agencies to more than $36 billion. It also resolves the final case brought by a Justice Department working group dedicated to investigating conduct of banks and other entities for their roles in creating and issuing residential mortgage-backed securities leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. 

“In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, people all across the country experienced financial ruin and emotional devastation, and many are still recovering nearly 15 years later,” Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said in a statement. 

UBS said the settlement resolves “all civil claims by the DOJ in connection with UBS’s legacy [residential mortgage-backed securities] business in the U.S.” The bank also said the settlement had “been fully provisioned in prior periods.”

The Department of Justice suit alleged that contrary to UBS’ representations in publicly filed offering documents, the company knew that significant numbers of the loans backing the residential mortgage-backed securities did not comply with loan underwriting guidelines that were designed to assess borrowers’ ability to repay. The complaint also alleged that UBS knew that the property values associated with a significant number of the securitized loans were unsupported, and that significant numbers of the loans had not been originated in accordance with consumer protection laws. 

FEMA announced that federal disaster assistance has been made available to the state of Montana to supplement recovery efforts in the areas affected by flooding April 10-26, 2023.

Public assistance federal funding is available to the state, tribal and eligible local governments and certain private nonprofit organizations on a cost-sharing basis for emergency work and the repair or replacement of facilities damaged by flooding in Blaine, Daniels, Hill, Park, Roosevelt, Sheridan and Valley counties and the Fort Peck Tribes.          

Federal funding is also available on a cost-sharing basis for hazard mitigation measures statewide.

Jon K. Huss has been named Federal Coordinating Officer for federal recovery operations in the affected areas. Additional designations may be made at a later date if requested by the state and warranted by the results of further assessments

By Greg Cappis, MSU News Service

Alicia Crane wasn’t sure how she was going to be able to afford her doctor of nursing practice degree.

As an undergraduate at Montana State University, she had always hoped to earn an advanced degree so she could better serve her rural community, but she knew that raising three children while working as a registered nurse would make paying for another three or four years of school difficult.

Then she applied for MSU’s Advanced Nursing Education Workforce program scholarship. As one of 20 ANEW scholars selected annually, Crane receives a stipend each semester to help cover the costs of tuition, books and travel as she prepares for a career as a nurse practitioner working in a rural community.

“It’s been a huge blessing and help,” Crane said. “I can’t say in words how thankful I am for the scholarship.”

The ANEW program is funded by a grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. MSU received its first ANEW grant in 2019, and it was recently renewed for $2.6 million over four years, which administrators in the Mark and Robyn Jones College of Nursing refer to as ANEW 2.0.

“The ANEW grant allows us to provide the financial support to cover tuition and fees, books and supplies, and even travel,” said Sarah Shannon, dean of MSU’s nursing college. “ANEW also allows us to offer special learning opportunities to ensure that we produce not just nurse practitioners but rural-ready nurse practitioners who are already embedded in and committed to their local communities.”

The ANEW program is designed to increase access to health care for rural Montanans, a core focus of the nursing college. All but two of Montana’s 56 counties are classified as health care professional shortage areas, according to the state’s Department of Health and Human Services.

MSU offers two options in its doctor of nursing practice, or DNP, degree program. Family practice nurse practitioners serve as primary care providers with the ability, in Montana, to diagnose, prescribe and refer patients to specialists. Psychiatric mental health nurse practitioners assess, diagnose and treat acute and chronic mental health needs of their patients.

ANEW scholarship recipients commit to working in rural health care. Scholars are required to perform some of their clinical work at rural hospitals or health centers. They also must join the Area Health Education Center scholars program, a two-year, nationally recognized certificate program designed to develop and improve skills to help them better serve patients in rural communities. The AHEC scholars program includes 80 extra hours of learning and access to specialty training seminars, like classes on suturing or managing diabetes in a rural setting.

Economic indicators seem to indicate that the US economy is treading water with some indicators up and others down .

American consumers continue to spend what they don’t have.

Credit card indebtedness reached a record $1.03 trillion in the second quarter of 2023, according to the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Total household debt exceeds $17 trillion, with 72.4% of that coming from mortgages and home equity lines of credit.

The Index of Consumer Sentiment ticked down from 71.6 in July  to 71.2 in August. The July reading was the best reading since October 2021. But Americans remain anxious about the economy overall.

The Small Business Optimism Index increased from 91.0 in June to 91.9 in July, the highest reading since November. Despite the uptick in sentiment, small business owners remain concerned about the economy, with the uncertainty index rising to a 25-month high. The top “single most important problem” was the difficulty in finding enough qualified labor (23%), followed closely by inflation (21%). Despite this, fewer NFIB business members plan to increase prices over the next three months… falling to the lowest rate since December 2020.

Consumer prices rose 0.2% in July for the second straight month, with 3.2% growth over the past 12 months. Excluding food and energy, core consumer inflation has increased 4.7% since July 2022, the weakest reading since October 2021.

Yet, core inflation remained stubbornly high.

Producer prices for final demand goods and services rose 0.3% in July, the strongest gain since January but driven largely by higher costs for services.

Overall, inflation continued to moderate, but even so the Federal Reserve is predicted to keep interest relatively high. They are not being predicted to make any changes in interest rates at their next meeting in September.

By Brett Rowland,The Center Square

The U.S. Postal Service reported a $1.7 billion loss in the third quarter adding to ongoing losses for the once self-sufficient agency. 

The U.S. Postal Service, an independent federal establishment that is mandated to be self-financing, said the third quarter losses were “almost exclusively to the non-cash impact of the Postal Service Reform Act in April 2022.” The act removed the Postal Service’s obligation to pre-fund retiree health benefits and eliminated all previously imposed pre-funding requirements that remained unpaid, among other changes. The law was intended to improve the Postal Service’s financial sustainability. 

“Continued rising costs in several areas of our business pose a challenge,” Chief Financial Officer Joseph Corbett said in a statement. “We continue to manage the costs within our control, such as by reducing work hours by 6 million hours compared to the same quarter last year and by focusing on transportation and other operating costs.”

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said the Postal Service continues to face inflation and other pressures.

“Our team is working hard to reduce our cost of performance which is helping to offset still sizeable inflationary and economic pressures,” he said in a statement. “We are setting the stage for long-term financial sustainability as we continue to modernize our processing, transportation, retail and delivery networks.”

Congress designed the U.S. Postal Service to be self-sustaining, but in fiscal year 2007, expenses overtook revenue. This has led to losses of $87 billion through 2020. The agency is further saddled with $188 billion in unfunded liabilities and debt, according to a 2021 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

The U.S. Postal Service is the largest postal service in the world, delivering an estimated 49% of all mail sent globally. 

A serious crime in the Biden Administration is the sale of incandescent light bulbs, the sale of which is now illegal.

The Biden administration has enacted a regulation that places retailer or online seller offering incandescent light bulbs for sale subject to severe punishment under the full enforcement of the federal government.

The crackdown on Thomas Edison’s familiar light bulb has been in the works for a long time. It started with provisions tucked into the big 2007 energy bill signed into law by then-President George Bush. These provisions created energy efficiency standards for residential lighting that incandescent bulbs would have great difficulty achieving.  The regulations were designed to get progressively more stringent in the ensuing years.

At the time, many environmental activists and some advantage-seeking light bulb manufacturers were aggressively pushing compact fluorescent lamps (CFL) as the green alternative. But those twisty CFL bulbs, with their high price and harsh glare, proved very unpopular with consumers – a backlash not unlike the one seen early this year after a Biden administration official suggested banning gas stoves.  Nonetheless the Obama administration Department of Energy (DOE), in its waning days in January 2017, finalized rules accelerating the demise of incandescent bulbs.