Japan Spends Heavily to Keep Whaling Industry Afloat, Report Says

TOKYO — A wildlife conservation group said in a report on Wednesday that Japan has been propping up its whaling industry with nearly $400 million in tax money in recent years, stepping up subsidies even as consumption of whale meat here has slumped.

The report, compiled by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, in Yarmouth Port, Mass., challenges assertions by the Japanese government that whaling is a tradition with wide support among Japanese consumers.

Instead, government figures tallied in the report paint a picture of a struggling industry employing fewer than 1,000 people and dependent on public handouts, including money meant for reconstruction after the devastating earthquake and tsunami of March 2011.

Most Japanese consumers have turned away from whale meat. The industry shipped just 5,000 tons in 2011, compared with 233,000 tons at the peak in 1962, according to data from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. Demand this year is so low that the industry has cut its planned shipments by half, to 2,400 tons.

“Whaling is unprofitable, and survives only with substantial subsidies, something cultural and nationalist arguments for whaling obscure,” said Patrick Ramage, the director of the animal welfare fund’s whale program. He said the country would be better off economically and ecologically if it promoted whale-watching tourism instead of hunting whales.

Japan’s Fisheries Agency declined to comment on the report, saying it had not yet studied its contents.

But an official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said there was “nothing wrong with these subsidies, which fund an important program,” though it was “not the government’s responsibility to make whaling economically viable.”

A world moratorium on commercial whaling took effect in 1986, but Japan has taken advantage of an exception allowing whaling for research purposes to continue hunting, though environmental activists who chase whaling boats have made those hunts increasingly difficult. Japan has captured and killed more than 14,000 whales since the moratorium began.

The meat from the whales is sold off as “byproducts” of research, and it makes its way to supermarkets, restaurants and even school lunches. A government Web site says the most popular whale dishes are fried whale, whale sashimi and medium-rare whale steak.

According to figures from the Institute of Cetacean Research, the nonprofit organization set up to run the whaling program, income from whale meat has failed to cover the costs of whaling for the past five years. So subsidies have been increased, and some disaster aid has been diverted to the industry, prompting a public outcry.

The dire financial picture prompted the government to announce a plan last year to cut costs by reducing the annual catch and to sell more whale meat directly to schools for lunches. But experts doubt that those measures will make the whaling industry self-sufficient again. 

“The Japanese government has desperately defended whaling for years, but the question has increasingly become: for what?” said Yusuke Saskata, a professor of environmental economics at Kinki University in Osaka. “Supporting whaling culture is one thing, but maintaining whaling at this scale makes no sense.”

Hisako Ueno contributed research.

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Economic Scene: Immigration Reform Issue: The Effect on the Budget

The stars could hardly have shone brighter on the prospects for immigration reform than in the early months of 2007.

The coalition pushing for change included the oddest of bedfellows — roping together business groups like the United States Chamber of Commerce with the Service Employees International Union, the fastest-growing union in the country. It had an impeccable bipartisan pedigree, including President George W. Bush and Senator Jon Kyl, a staunchly conservative Republican, as well as the Democrats’ liberal lion, Senator Ted Kennedy.

The economy was growing. The unemployment rate was at its lowest level since the dot-com bubble burst six years before. And the flaws of our immigration laws — impotent to stop a river of unauthorized immigrants drawn across the border by job opportunities — were obvious to all.

Immigration reform, however, was not to be.

Immigrants’ rights groups balked at the hurdles put in immigrants’ path toward legalization. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. hated a provision creating temporary work visas, arguing that it was a license for businesses to bring in cheap foreign labor. Then, a Senate Democrat, Byron Dorgan, offered the coup de grâce with an amendment to phase out the worker visa program after five years. Though proposed at the behest of organized labor, the amendment got the support of some of the most anti-union Republicans in the Senate. And it killed the entire enterprise, stripping away corporate America’s main reason to support a deal.

Today, the economy is not growing much. Unemployment remains stubbornly high. Yet President Obama thinks the stellar alignment may be  better than six years ago. He is proposing a wholesale change to the same flawed immigration laws. He trusts that Republicans, who lost the Hispanic vote by an enormous margin in November, cannot afford to further alienate Hispanics by voting against their top priority.

Despite the strong case for an overhaul, however, changing our immigration laws may be tougher than the president appears to believe. While we may have overcome some of the obstacles of 2007, reform will probably face deep-seated opposition from many Americans — including most conservative Republicans — to what they will view as a potentially large expansion of welfare.

President Obama’s proposal is based on principles similar to those of the 2007 attempt: a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants in the country, a legal channel for future immigrant workers and their families, and a plan to better enforce the nation’s borders and immigration laws.

Yet immigration reform today means something quite different than it did in 2007. Notably, the elements needed to stop the flow of illegal immigrants north are much less important to the enterprise. The Obama administration has already spent huge amounts of money on border enforcement. Today, border policing costs about $18 billion a year — nearly 50 percent more than it did in 2006. And deportations have soared. What’s more, illegal immigration has slowed to a trickle, as Mexico has grown more robustly than the United States. The illegal immigrant population has even been shrinking in the last few years. And it may continue to do so as the Mexican population of prime migration-age people stops growing.

Also, many employers have already gotten some of what they wanted: the number of workers entering the United States on temporary visas for low-end jobs in agriculture and other industries has increased sharply.

“The discussion is in a different environment,” said Gordon H. Hanson, an expert on the economics of immigration at the University of California, San Diego. “The flow of new immigrants is not the story anymore.”

This might help the cause of reform in some ways. It could allow the discussion about work visas to focus on the highly educated workers coveted by technology companies and pre-empt the kind of argument between business and labor over visas for cheap immigrant workers that sank reform in 2007. The A.F.L.-C.I.O., for instance, has heartily embraced President Obama’s plan.

But what supporters of an overhaul of immigration law seem to be overlooking is that these very changes could also make it more difficult to build a coalition across the political divide. If reform is mainly about granting citizenship to 11 million mostly poor illegal immigrants with relatively little education, it is going to land squarely in the cross hairs of our epic battle about taxes, entitlements and the role of government in society.

It’s hard to say with precision what impact offering citizenship would have on the budget, but the chances are good that it would cost the government money. Half to three-quarters of illegal immigrants pay taxes, according to studies reviewed in a 2007 report by the Congressional Budget Office. And they are relatively inexpensive, compared with Americans of similar incomes. Their children can attend public schools at government expense — putting a burden on state and local budgets. But they are barred from receiving federal benefits like the earned-income tax credit, food stamps and Medicaid. Only their American-born children can get those.

Government revenue might not change much with legalization. Most illegal immigrants who don’t pay taxes probably work in the cash economy — as nannies or gardeners — where tax compliance among citizens is low. Costs, of course, would increase. Once they became citizens, immigrants would be entitled to the same array of government benefits as other Americans. For Social Security and Medicare alone, offering citizenship to illegal immigrants would mean losing a subsidy worth several billion dollars a year in payroll taxes from immigrants who can’t collect benefits in old age.

The White House and other backers of reform have made much of a 2007 Congressional Budget Office analysis concluding that the failed immigration overhaul would have increased government revenue by $48 billion over a decade while adding only $23 billion to direct spending on entitlements and other programs. But the report also said that including the costs of carrying out the new law would actually increase the budget deficit by $18 billion over the decade and several billion a year after that. What’s more, it noted that most of the expected new tax revenue came from new immigrant workers, not from the newly legalized population.

Our history suggests we could have much to gain by turning illegal immigrants into citizens and putting an end to unauthorized immigration. The last time we permitted illegal immigrants to legalize, in 1986, incomes jumped for those who took advantage of the opportunity. Their children became more proficient in English and completed more years of school — becoming more productive and paying more taxes over their lifetimes.

But the same history underscores how immigration sets off fears about further sharing of government resources. Ten years after the immigration reform of 1986, reeling from some public anger, Congress passed a law barring legal immigrants from means-tested government services. The same issue is likely again to be a major flash point. Professor Hanson pointed to “the older white man who sees his entitlements at risk because of the demands placed by legalization on our fiscal resources.”

Conservative Republicans set on cutting government spending share those concerns. And for all their reasons to reach out to Hispanics, they might not find making illegal immigrants legal politically advantageous. On Tuesday, Republicans in the House argued against granting citizenship to illegal immigrants at all.

Hispanics are more liberal than the general population on economic matters, polls suggest, and more supportive of Big Government initiatives. Granting them citizenship would give them the vote.

As Steven A. Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, an advocacy group in Washington that favors more limits on immigration, said, “They will see legalization as a voter-registration drive for Democrats.”

E-mail: eporter@nytimes.com; Twitter: @portereduardo

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 5, 2013

An earlier version misspelled the first name of one of the two United States senators from Arizona.  His name is Jon Kyl, not John.

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Vote This Week May Close Long Island College Hospital

State university trustees will vote this week on whether to close Long Island College Hospital, officials of the Brooklyn hospital said on Tuesday, despite protests from doctors and nurses that northern Brooklyn would lose an essential source of emergency care.

Dr. John Williams, president of SUNY Downstate Medical Center, which runs Long Island College Hospital, said on Tuesday that he would formally recommend closing the hospital at a SUNY meeting in Manhattan on Thursday, followed by a public hearing that same day.

An executive committee of the SUNY board will vote on the recommendation on Friday and is expected to approve it, which would clear the way for the state Health Department to make the final decision, based on whether comparable care is available to people now served by the hospital. About 2,000 doctors, nurses and other employees would be in danger of losing their jobs.

Dr. Williams said that after five months on the job, he had concluded that the financial losses at LICH, as the hospital is called, threatened to sink SUNY Downstate, which includes a medical school that he said had trained one out of three doctors practicing in Brooklyn and one out of nine doctors practicing in New York City.

He said it was necessary to sacrifice LICH to save the rest of the enterprise. “I have to put on the big hat when I look at the campus and say what works and what doesn’t work,” Dr. Williams said in an interview on Tuesday. “The last thing I want to do is have people lose their jobs, but LICH could bring down SUNY Downstate and that’s something I’m trying to prevent.”

But doctors — many of whom heard of the plan at a meeting held Monday by Dr. Williams — said that the closing of LICH would leave more than 50,000 emergency room patients a year without a nearby hospital to go to. They accused Dr. Williams of opting to close LICH, which lies in the gentrifying Cobble Hill neighborhood, rather than more antiquated facilities in East Flatbush or Bay Ridge, because it has the most valuable real estate, and the sale could prop up SUNY Downstate’s faltering operations.

Dr. Williams said that he had chosen to close LICH, rather than facilities in lower-income areas, because Downstate’s mission was to take care of poor and underserved patients. He said that it would cost $75 million to $200 million to upgrade LICH’s aging plant. Besides, he said, in recent years, LICH had been largely abandoned by residents of the surrounding neighborhoods of Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn Heights, Red Hook and Boerum Hill, who often worked in Manhattan and preferred to go to hospitals there, forcing the hospital to reduce its beds.

But Julie Semente, a registered nurse in LICH’s intensive care unit, said Tuesday that when it came to emergencies, those patients still went to LICH; Brooklyn ambulances, she said, generally do not go to Manhattan. If LICH closed, she said, they would have to go to hospitals deeper in Brooklyn and farther from their homes and families.

“My patient who was hemorrhaging had to call an ambulance,” Ms. Semente said of one recent patient. “He lives in Brooklyn Heights. The ambulance doesn’t go over the bridge. It came to Long Island College Hospital and his life was saved because he went to the hospital in the neighborhood.”

She said that SUNY Downstate was already “in a mess” financially before acquiring LICH in 2011 from Continuum Health Partners, which also runs St. Luke’s, Roosevelt and Beth Israel hospitals in Manhattan. “LICH is being closed because it is more attractive and it will bring them more money in a sale” than other facilities, she said.

The state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, said in an audit last month that SUNY Downstate had $117 million in operating losses in 2011, of which $44 million was attributable to the acquisition of LICH. The audit said that LICH had annual operating losses for 17 years going back to 1994. A report in November 2011 by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s panel on Brooklyn hospitals identified LICH as one of six hospitals that “do not have a business model and sufficient margins to remain viable and provide high-quality care to their communities as currently structured.”

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Vote This Week May Close Long Island College Hospital

State university trustees will vote this week on whether to close Long Island College Hospital, officials of the Brooklyn hospital said on Tuesday, despite protests from doctors and nurses that northern Brooklyn would lose an essential source of emergency care.

Dr. John Williams, president of SUNY Downstate Medical Center, which runs Long Island College Hospital, said on Tuesday that he would formally recommend closing the hospital at a SUNY meeting in Manhattan on Thursday, followed by a public hearing that same day.

An executive committee of the SUNY board will vote on the recommendation on Friday and is expected to approve it, which would clear the way for the state Health Department to make the final decision, based on whether comparable care is available to people now served by the hospital. About 2,000 doctors, nurses and other employees would be in danger of losing their jobs.

Dr. Williams said that after five months on the job, he had concluded that the financial losses at LICH, as the hospital is called, threatened to sink SUNY Downstate, which includes a medical school that he said had trained one out of three doctors practicing in Brooklyn and one out of nine doctors practicing in New York City.

He said it was necessary to sacrifice LICH to save the rest of the enterprise. “I have to put on the big hat when I look at the campus and say what works and what doesn’t work,” Dr. Williams said in an interview on Tuesday. “The last thing I want to do is have people lose their jobs, but LICH could bring down SUNY Downstate and that’s something I’m trying to prevent.”

But doctors — many of whom heard of the plan at a meeting held Monday by Dr. Williams — said that the closing of LICH would leave more than 50,000 emergency room patients a year without a nearby hospital to go to. They accused Dr. Williams of opting to close LICH, which lies in the gentrifying Cobble Hill neighborhood, rather than more antiquated facilities in East Flatbush or Bay Ridge, because it has the most valuable real estate, and the sale could prop up SUNY Downstate’s faltering operations.

Dr. Williams said that he had chosen to close LICH, rather than facilities in lower-income areas, because Downstate’s mission was to take care of poor and underserved patients. He said that it would cost $75 million to $200 million to upgrade LICH’s aging plant. Besides, he said, in recent years, LICH had been largely abandoned by residents of the surrounding neighborhoods of Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn Heights, Red Hook and Boerum Hill, who often worked in Manhattan and preferred to go to hospitals there, forcing the hospital to reduce its beds.

But Julie Semente, a registered nurse in LICH’s intensive care unit, said Tuesday that when it came to emergencies, those patients still went to LICH; Brooklyn ambulances, she said, generally do not go to Manhattan. If LICH closed, she said, they would have to go to hospitals deeper in Brooklyn and farther from their homes and families.

“My patient who was hemorrhaging had to call an ambulance,” Ms. Semente said of one recent patient. “He lives in Brooklyn Heights. The ambulance doesn’t go over the bridge. It came to Long Island College Hospital and his life was saved because he went to the hospital in the neighborhood.”

She said that SUNY Downstate was already “in a mess” financially before acquiring LICH in 2011 from Continuum Health Partners, which also runs St. Luke’s, Roosevelt and Beth Israel hospitals in Manhattan. “LICH is being closed because it is more attractive and it will bring them more money in a sale” than other facilities, she said.

The state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, said in an audit last month that SUNY Downstate had $117 million in operating losses in 2011, of which $44 million was attributable to the acquisition of LICH. The audit said that LICH had annual operating losses for 17 years going back to 1994. A report in November 2011 by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s panel on Brooklyn hospitals identified LICH as one of six hospitals that “do not have a business model and sufficient margins to remain viable and provide high-quality care to their communities as currently structured.”

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DealBook: Dell Goes Private in $24 Billion Buyout, Largest Since 2007

9:22 p.m. | Updated

For Dell, a $24.4 billion deal to take itself private is a bold move out of Wall Street’s harsh spotlight as it tries to remake itself in a world where personal computers are no longer the big business in technology.

Yet the buyout — which was announced on Tuesday and would be the biggest by far since the days of the recession — is a huge gamble. It will saddle Dell with $15 billion of new debt, and it does nothing to divert the forces reshaping the technology industry and undercutting the company’s business.

Fifteen years ago, Dell made enormous profits from selling customized PCs directly to customers. Six years ago, it was the world’s leading maker of personal computers. Today, it is in third place, behind Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo, and falling.

Dell’s share of an already contracting market for PCs slipped to just 10.7 percent last year, from 16.6 percent six years earlier.

No-name rivals from Taiwan and China grind earnings to razor-thin margins. Android smartphones and iPads, not Windows laptops and desktops, are the best-selling and most moneymaking devices.

And while a shift to cloud computing has increased demand for data centers — an opportunity for Dell to sell servers — big customers like Google and Facebook build their own equipment cheaply. The rise of cloud services has also prompted many companies to forgo buying additional machines, instead relying on rented time and applications running on faraway computer networks.

Dell’s share of the market for servers, slipped about one percentage point, to 22.2 percent of 9.5 million servers sold in 2011. The greater problem in this segment is the pressure on profit margins. Shaw Wu, an analyst with Sterne Agee, estimates operating margins on servers, once about 15 percent, are now “in the high single digits, compared with the mid-single digits for PCs.” It is likely that servers will soon have PC-like margins, he said.

Michael S. Dell is betting his stake in the company and some $700 million of his fortune that he can meet those challenges and turn around a business he started in 1984 in his dormitory room at the University of Texas.

“Dell’s transformation is well under way, but we recognize it will still take more time, investment and patience,” Mr. Dell wrote in a memo to employees on Tuesday. “I believe that we are better served with partners who will provide long-term support to help Dell innovate and accelerate the company’s transformation strategy.”

Mr. Dell’s investment means he will maintain control of the company if its shareholders approve the deal. The private equity firm Silver Lake, one of the most prominent investors in technology companies, is contributing about $1 billion in cash.

And Microsoft, seeking to shore up one of its most important business partners, has agreed to lend Dell $2 billion. Microsoft itself is under pressure, with longtime suppliers flirting with rivals to its Windows operating system.

“Microsoft is committed to the long term success of the entire PC ecosystem and invests heavily in a variety of ways to build that ecosystem for the future,” the software giant said in a statement.

Despite taking on an additional $15 billion in debt, Mr. Dell and Silver Lake argue that the company will survive, thanks to the cash that the PC business still generates.

A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst with Bernstein Research, estimated that the amount of debt Dell will pay is less than what it has spent in stock dividends and share repurchases. “This debt load is manageable,” he said, “as long as the cash flow from PCs holds up.”

People involved in the transaction said that the buyers had prepared for potential further declines in the PC business, but intend on at least maintaining the company’s position. Dell’s cash from operations has held steady for four of the last five years, coming in at $5.5 billion for the most recent fiscal year.

The size of the transaction evoked the frothy deal-making days before the financial crisis. Dell would be the biggest buyout since the Blackstone Group’s $26 billion takeover of Hilton Hotels in the summer of 2007. Yet few expect a resurgence in giant leveraged buyouts. While the continued availability of cheap financing makes such deals possible, financiers caution that Dell represents a special case because of the founder’s big equity stake.

The deal is the biggest test yet for Mr. Dell, 47, who has a fortune estimated at $16 billion. After a three-year absence, he returned as chief executive of the company in 2007, vowing to restore his creation. His strategy has focused on moving into the business of data centers and corporate software services, marked by numerous acquisitions that have cost billions of dollars.

So far, that has yielded little. Dell’s shares have fallen 31 percent over the last five years, closing on Tuesday at $13.42 — below the buyout’s offer price of $13.65.

But that strategy will largely remain in place if the management buyout is completed. The company will cut its PC offerings further and buy more companies involved in corporate computing for small and medium-size businesses, said Brian T. Gladden, Dell’s chief financial officer.

Though Mr. Dell has bemoaned his company’s dismal stock performance for years, his plan to take it private began in earnest only last year. The billionaire maintains a home in Hawaii near the residences of two prominent private equity executives, Egon Durban of Silver Lake and George R. Roberts of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, and began floating the idea of a deal with them, people briefed on the matter said.

By August, Mr. Dell formally approached the board with a proposal to take the company private, prompting directors to form a special committee to study alternatives to a deal, these people said. One priority was keeping the process devoid of conflicts of interest to head off potential legal challenges, including the hiring of JPMorgan Chase to provide advice and Evercore Partners to solicit other suitors.

The committee considered ways to keep the company public, including borrowing money to buy back shares, but concluded that the management buyout was the most attractive option.

Mr. Dell had aligned himself with Silver Lake, which he let handle virtually all of the board negotiations, these people said. Mr. Durban used his close ties with Steven Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft and to whom he had sold the video chatting service Skype for $8.5 billion, to bring in Microsoft as a partner.

Microsoft was wary of getting involved, fearing fracturing relationships with other partners, according to a person briefed on its deliberations. The software company insisted on providing a loan instead of taking equity in the newly private Dell. Silver Lake also hired four banks to arrange the $15 billion in financing.

By the time word of the deal talks leaked last month, the two sides had the outline of a final proposal. But Dell’s special board committee, led by Alex J. Mandl, battled with the buyers on price until Monday night, pressing for the highest possible bid.

Hamstringing them was a lack of other potential buyers. The committee’s advisers had unsuccessfully approached both K.K.R. and TPG Capital, another big investment firm, hoping to flush out another offer. And despite the talk last month, no strategic buyer emerged as a rival.

Secrecy was important. Mr. Dell was known in talks as “Mr. Denali” — a nickname he liked so much he referred to himself by it regularly — while the PC maker was “Osprey” and Silver Lake was “Salamander.”

Nick Wingfield and Andrew Ross Sorkin contributed reporting.

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Tsunami Fear After Quake Off Solomons

AUCKLAND, New Zealand — Residents of islands from the South Pacific to Australia were alerted to the possibility of a damaging tsunami on Wednesday after an 8.0-magnitude earthquake off the Solomon Islands, according to scientists and news reports from the area, but the warnings were called off a few hours later.

Edmal Palmer, the chief reporter of the Solomon Star newspaper in Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, said in a telephone interview that reports from Lata, the capital of the Temotu province, were sketchy but indicated that the wave apparently had struck three villages.

“We have heard that a wave 103 centimeters high” — nearly three and a half feet — “has hit Lata, swamping the town, and five people are still missing at the moment,” Mr. Palmer said.

Lata, where the quake struck, is in Temotu Province, where the population is around 30,000. It is a three-hour flight from the Solomons’ capital, Honiara, which was not damaged by the earthquake or tsunami.

Mr. Palmer said Honiara residents were not concerned by the tsunami: “Most of us are getting ready for tonight’s UB40 concert.”

“Sea level readings indicate a tsunami was generated,” the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said on its Web site. The earthquake struck around 11 a.m. local time in the Santa Cruz Islands, part of the Solomon chain. There were conflicting reports as to the depth of the quake.

The center said the tsunami warning was limited to the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Tuvalu, New Caledonia, Kosrae, Fiji, Kiribati, Wallis and Futuna.

A lesser alert, a tsunami watch, was declared for American Samoa, Australia, Guam, the Northern Marianas, New Zealand and eastern Indonesia.

The earthquake was not only powerful but also “shallow,” giving it significant potential to do damage, said Barry Hirshorn, a geophysicist with the National Weather Service in Hawaii. Moreover, it was a thrust earthquake, he said, meaning that the sea floor moved up or down, not sideways, contributing to the potential for a dangerous tsunami.

But after the earthquake, as scientists watched to see how far a tsunami might spread, there were few early indications of a major threat beyond the immediate area, Mr. Hirshorn said. A water rise of about three feet had been observed close to the quake, he said, still high enough to be potentially damaging but probably not big enough to threaten distant shores.

In New Zealand, thousands of people were at the beach, swimming in the sea on a glorious summer afternoon on Waitangi Day, a national holiday — quite oblivious to the potential for a tsunami. Tsunami sirens were set off late in the afternoon there, and people in coastal areas were being told to stay off beaches and out of the sea, rivers and estuaries.

The New Zealand Herald reported Wednesday afternoon on its Web site that tsunami sirens in Suva, the capital of Fiji, had been warning people to stay inside or go to higher ground.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported on its Web site Wednesday that the Solomon Islands’ National Disaster Management Office had advised those living in low-lying areas, especially on Makira and Malaita, to move to higher ground.

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DealBook: U.S. Accuses S.&P. of Fraud in Suit on Loan Bundles

The Justice Department late Monday filed civil fraud charges against the nation’s largest credit-ratings agency, Standard & Poor’s, accusing the firm of inflating the ratings of mortgage investments and setting them up for a crash when the financial crisis struck.

The suit, filed in federal court in Los Angeles, is the first significant federal action against the ratings industry, which during the boom years reaped record profits as it bestowed gilt-edged ratings on complex bundles of home loans that quickly went sour. The high ratings made many investments appear safer than they actually were, and are now seen as having contributed to a crisis that brought the financial system and the broader economy to its knees.

More than a dozen state prosecutors are expected to join the federal suit, and the New York attorney general is preparing a separate action. The Securities and Exchange Commission has also been investigating possible wrongdoing at S.& P.

From September 2004 through October 2007, S.&P. “knowingly and with the intent to defraud, devised, participated in, and executed a scheme to defraud investors” in certain mortgage-related securities, according to the suit filed against the agency and its parent company, McGraw-Hill Companies. S.&P. also falsely represented that its ratings “were objective, independent, uninfluenced by any conflicts of interest,” the suit said.

S.& P., which was first contacted by federal enforcement officials three years ago, said in a statement earlier Monday in anticipation of the suit that it had acted in good faith when it issued the ratings.

“A D.O.J. lawsuit would be entirely without factual or legal merit,” it said, adding that its competitors had given exactly the same ratings to all the securities it believed to be in question.

Settlement talks between S.& P. and the Justice Department broke down in the last two weeks after prosecutors sought a penalty in excess of $1 billion and insisted that the company admit wrongdoing, several people with knowledge of the talks said. That amount would wipe out the profits of McGraw-Hill for an entire year. S.& P. had proposed a settlement of around $100 million, the people said.

S.& P. also sought a deal that would allow it to neither admit nor deny guilt; the government pressed for an admission of guilt to at least one count of fraud, said the people. S.& P. told prosecutors it could not admit guilt without exposing itself to liability in a multitude of civil cases.

It was unclear whether state and federal authorities were looking at the other two major ratings agencies, Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch.

A spokesman for Moody’s declined to comment. A spokesman for Fitch, Daniel J. Noonan, said the agency could not comment on an action that appeared to focus on Standard & Poor’s, but added, “we have no reason to believe Fitch is a target of any such action.”

The case against S.& P. is said to focus on about 30 collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s, an exotic type of security made up of bundles of mortgage bonds, which in turn were composed of individual home loans. The securities were created at the height of the housing boom. S.& P. was paid fees of about $13 million for rating them.

Prosecutors, according to the people briefed on the discussions, have uncovered troves of e-mails written by S.& P. employees, which the government considers damaging. The firm gave the government more than 20 million pages of e-mails as part of its investigation, the people with knowledge of the process said.

Since the financial crisis in 2008, the ratings agencies’ business practices have been widely criticized and questions have been raised as to whether independent analysis was corrupted by Wall Street’s push for profits.

A Senate investigation made public in 2010 found that S.& P. and Moody’s used inaccurate rating models from 2004 to 2007 that failed to predict how high-risk residential mortgages would perform; allowed competitive pressures to affect their ratings; and failed to reassess past ratings after improving their models in 2006.

The companies failed to assign adequate staff to examine new and exotic investments, and neglected to take mortgage fraud, lax underwriting and “unsustainable home price appreciation” into account in their models, the inquiry found.

“Rating agencies continue to create an even bigger monster — the C.D.O. market,” one S.& P. employee wrote in an internal e-mail in December 2006. “Let’s hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of card falters.”

Another S.& P. employee wrote in an instant message the next April, according to the Senate report: “We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows and we would rate it.”

The three major ratings agencies are typically paid by the issuers of the securities they rate — in this case, the banks that had packaged the mortgage-backed securities and wanted to market them. The investors who would buy the securities were not involved in the process but depended on the rating agencies’ assessments.

Although the three agencies tend to track one another, each has its own statistical methods for assessing the likelihood of a bond default. That has led to speculation that S.& P. analysts knew their method yielded unrealistic ratings, but issued the ratings anyway.

In its statement on Monday, S.& P. said it had begun stress-testing the mortgage-backed securities it rated as early as 2005, trying to see how they would perform in a severe market downturn. S.& P. said it had also sent out early warning signals, downgrading hundreds of mortgage-backed securities, starting in 2006. Nor was it the only one to have underestimated the coming crisis, it said — even the Federal Reserve’s open market committee believed at the time that any problems within the housing sector could be contained.

The Justice Department, the company said, “would be wrong in contending that S.& P. ratings were motivated by commercial considerations and not issued in good faith.”

For many years, the ratings agencies have defended themselves successfully in civil litigation by saying their ratings were independent opinions, protected by the First Amendment, which guarantees the right to free speech. Developments in the wake of the financial crisis have raised questions about the agencies’ independence however. For example, one federal judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, ruled in 2009 that the First Amendment did not apply in a lawsuit over ratings issued by S.& P. and Moody’s, because the mortgage-backed securities at issue had not been offered to the public at large. Judge Scheindlin also agreed with the plaintiffs, who argued the ratings were not opinions, but misrepresentations, possibly the result of fraud or negligence.

The federal action will be the first time a credit-rating agency has been charged under a 1989 law intended to protect taxpayers from frauds involving federally insured financial institutions, which since the financial crisis has been used against a number of federally insured banks, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Citigroup.

The government is taking a novel approach in this instance by accusing S.& P. of defrauding a federally insured institution and therefore injuring the taxpayer.

The government is expected to cite the demise of Wescorp, a federally insured credit union in Los Angeles that went bankrupt after investing in mortgage securities rated by S.& P. Wescorp will be showcased as an example of the contended fraud, and as a way to bring the case in California, people with knowledge of the proceedings said. The suit was filed in Federal District Court fore the Central District of California.

By bringing a civil suit, as opposed to a criminal case, the Justice Department’s burden of proof will be less, perhaps lowering the bar for a successful prosecution.

Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.

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Well: Expressing the Inexpressible

When Kyle Potvin learned she had breast cancer at the age of 41, she tracked the details of her illness and treatment in a journal. But when it came to grappling with issues of mortality, fear and hope, she found that her best outlet was poetry.

How I feared chemo, afraid
It would change me.
It did.
Something dissolved inside me.
Tears began a slow drip;
I cried at the news story
Of a lost boy found in the woods …
At the surprising beauty
Of a bright leaf falling
Like the last strand of hair from my head

Ms. Potvin, now 47 and living in Derry, N.H., recently published “Sound Travels on Water” (Finishing Line Press), a collection of poems about her experience with cancer. And she has organized the Prickly Pear Poetry Project, a series of workshops for cancer patients.

“The creative process can be really healing,” Ms. Potvin said in an interview. “Loss, mortality and even hopefulness were on my mind, and I found that through writing poetry I was able to express some of those concepts in a way that helped me process what I was thinking.”

In April, the National Association for Poetry Therapy, whose members include both medical doctors and therapists, is to hold a conference in Chicago with sessions on using poetry to manage pain and to help adolescents cope with bullying. And this spring, Tasora Books will publish “The Cancer Poetry Project 2,” an anthology of poems written by patients and their loved ones.

Dr. Rafael Campo, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, says he uses poetry in his practice, offering therapy groups and including poems with the medical forms and educational materials he gives his patients.

“It’s always striking to me how they want to talk about the poems the next time we meet and not the other stuff I give them,” he said. “It’s such a visceral mode of expression. When our bodies betray us in such a profound way, it can be all the more powerful for patients to really use the rhythms of poetry to make sense of what is happening in their bodies.”

On return visits, Dr. Campo’s patients often begin by discussing a poem he gave them — for example, “At the Cancer Clinic,” by Ted Kooser, from his collection “Delights & Shadows” (Copper Canyon Press, 2004), about a nurse holding the door for a slow-moving patient.

How patient she is in the crisp white sails
of her clothes. The sick woman
peers from under her funny knit cap
to watch each foot swing scuffing forward
and take its turn under her weight.
There is no restlessness or impatience
or anger anywhere in sight. Grace
fills the clean mold of this moment
and all the shuffling magazines grow still.

In Ms. Potvin’s case, poems related to her illness were often spurred by mundane moments, like seeing a neighbor out for a nightly walk. Here is “Tumor”:

My neighbor walks
For miles each night.
A mantra drives her, I imagine
As my boys’ chant did
The summer of my own illness:
“Push, Mommy, push.”
Urging me to wind my sore feet
Winch-like on a rented bike
To inch us home.
I couldn’t stop;
Couldn’t leave us
Miles from the end.

Karin Miller, 48, of Minneapolis, turned to poetry 15 years ago when her husband developed testicular cancer at the same time she was pregnant with their first child.

Her husband has since recovered, and Ms. Miller has reviewed thousands of poems by cancer patients and their loved ones to create the “Cancer Poetry Project” anthologies. One poem is “Hymn to a Lost Breast,” by Bonnie Maurer.

Oh let it fly
let it fling
let it flip like a pancake in the air
let it sing: what is the song
of one breast flapping?

Another is “Barn Wish” by Kim Knedler Hewett.

I sit where you can’t see me
Listening to the rustle of papers and pills in the other room,
Wondering if you can hear them.
Let’s go back to the barn, I whisper.
Let’s turn on the TV and watch the Bengals lose.
Let’s eat Bill’s Doughnuts and drink Pepsi.
Anything but this.

Ms. Miller has asked many of her poets to explain why they find poetry healing. “They say it’s the thing that lets them get to the core of how they are feeling,” she said. “It’s the simplicity of poetry, the bare bones of it, that helps them deal with their fears.”

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Have you written a poem about cancer? Please share them with us in the comments section below.

Read More..

Well: Expressing the Inexpressible

When Kyle Potvin learned she had breast cancer at the age of 41, she tracked the details of her illness and treatment in a journal. But when it came to grappling with issues of mortality, fear and hope, she found that her best outlet was poetry.

How I feared chemo, afraid
It would change me.
It did.
Something dissolved inside me.
Tears began a slow drip;
I cried at the news story
Of a lost boy found in the woods …
At the surprising beauty
Of a bright leaf falling
Like the last strand of hair from my head

Ms. Potvin, now 47 and living in Derry, N.H., recently published “Sound Travels on Water” (Finishing Line Press), a collection of poems about her experience with cancer. And she has organized the Prickly Pear Poetry Project, a series of workshops for cancer patients.

“The creative process can be really healing,” Ms. Potvin said in an interview. “Loss, mortality and even hopefulness were on my mind, and I found that through writing poetry I was able to express some of those concepts in a way that helped me process what I was thinking.”

In April, the National Association for Poetry Therapy, whose members include both medical doctors and therapists, is to hold a conference in Chicago with sessions on using poetry to manage pain and to help adolescents cope with bullying. And this spring, Tasora Books will publish “The Cancer Poetry Project 2,” an anthology of poems written by patients and their loved ones.

Dr. Rafael Campo, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, says he uses poetry in his practice, offering therapy groups and including poems with the medical forms and educational materials he gives his patients.

“It’s always striking to me how they want to talk about the poems the next time we meet and not the other stuff I give them,” he said. “It’s such a visceral mode of expression. When our bodies betray us in such a profound way, it can be all the more powerful for patients to really use the rhythms of poetry to make sense of what is happening in their bodies.”

On return visits, Dr. Campo’s patients often begin by discussing a poem he gave them — for example, “At the Cancer Clinic,” by Ted Kooser, from his collection “Delights & Shadows” (Copper Canyon Press, 2004), about a nurse holding the door for a slow-moving patient.

How patient she is in the crisp white sails
of her clothes. The sick woman
peers from under her funny knit cap
to watch each foot swing scuffing forward
and take its turn under her weight.
There is no restlessness or impatience
or anger anywhere in sight. Grace
fills the clean mold of this moment
and all the shuffling magazines grow still.

In Ms. Potvin’s case, poems related to her illness were often spurred by mundane moments, like seeing a neighbor out for a nightly walk. Here is “Tumor”:

My neighbor walks
For miles each night.
A mantra drives her, I imagine
As my boys’ chant did
The summer of my own illness:
“Push, Mommy, push.”
Urging me to wind my sore feet
Winch-like on a rented bike
To inch us home.
I couldn’t stop;
Couldn’t leave us
Miles from the end.

Karin Miller, 48, of Minneapolis, turned to poetry 15 years ago when her husband developed testicular cancer at the same time she was pregnant with their first child.

Her husband has since recovered, and Ms. Miller has reviewed thousands of poems by cancer patients and their loved ones to create the “Cancer Poetry Project” anthologies. One poem is “Hymn to a Lost Breast,” by Bonnie Maurer.

Oh let it fly
let it fling
let it flip like a pancake in the air
let it sing: what is the song
of one breast flapping?

Another is “Barn Wish” by Kim Knedler Hewett.

I sit where you can’t see me
Listening to the rustle of papers and pills in the other room,
Wondering if you can hear them.
Let’s go back to the barn, I whisper.
Let’s turn on the TV and watch the Bengals lose.
Let’s eat Bill’s Doughnuts and drink Pepsi.
Anything but this.

Ms. Miller has asked many of her poets to explain why they find poetry healing. “They say it’s the thing that lets them get to the core of how they are feeling,” she said. “It’s the simplicity of poetry, the bare bones of it, that helps them deal with their fears.”

---

Have you written a poem about cancer? Please share them with us in the comments section below.

Read More..

Bits Blog: IBM Slims Down Its Big Data Offerings

I.B.M. is cutting the price on its least-expensive Power server computers by 50 percent, to under $6,000. The pricing move is one of a series of hardware and software announcements on Tuesday intended as a strategic push more broadly into the fast-growing market for Big Data technology and to tailor offerings for smaller businesses.

The overall market for Big Data technology — hardware, software and services — is projected to increase to $23.7 billion by 2016, from $8.1 billion last year, according to IDC, a market research firm. Every major technology company including Oracle, EMC, Microsoft, SAP Hewlett-Packard and SAS Institute, as well as an entire generation of start-ups, is chasing the opportunity to supply the tools of advanced data analysis and discovery to business.

I.B.M.’s Power servers run the company’s Power microprocessors. These chips were originally designed for big computers using I.B.M.’s proprietary version of the Unix operating system, AIX. Over the years, the company has developed specialized chips using the Power technology for other markets like video game consoles. The I.B.M. chips can be found in the game machines made by Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft.

The I.B.M. Power servers also run Linux, the open-source version of Unix. And Linux is the preferred operating system for much Big Data software, notably Hadoop, the foundation layer that manages many distributed, data analysis applications.

But the hardware challenge for I.B.M. is that most Hadoop software is running on industry-standard servers, powered by chips from Intel or Advanced Micro Devices.

The price cut helps make the case for Big Data computing on I.B.M. Power servers, which are designed to juggle many computing tasks efficiently and reliably, a potential advantage in the data-analysis market. “I.B.M. is bringing the actual price down to be very, very competitive,” said Jean S. Bozman, an analyst at IDC. “And they have to do it.”

The lower price is also a bid for the small- and medium-size business market, as these companies seek to adopt Big Data computing. “This brings the entry point down quite a bit and opens the way for more businesses to use Power technology as a preferred environment,” said Steven A. Mills, senior vice president for software and hardware systems at I.B.M.

One small company looking at using the I.B.M. technology for advanced data analysis is Westside Produce, which harvests, packs and markets cantaloupes for growers in California. The company, with 15 full-time employees and many seasonal contract workers, already runs its accounting, inventory and operations-management software on an I.B.M. Power server.

But Justin K. Porter, director of technology at Westside Produce, said his company would like to be able to more closely track and analyze all kinds of data, including harvest practices, weather patterns, shipments, melon sizes, and prices paid by specific supermarket chains and distributors. The goal, he said, would be to fine-tune operations and marketing to trim waste and improve profits.

“It’s definitely something that we’re going to look into,” Mr. Porter said.

Read More..