TV News LIES

The Window Rock School District, in the heart of the Navajo nation in Arizona, is proposing the unthinkable: closing three of its seven schools as a result of the federal sequester.

The schools are among 1,600 public schools on Native American reservations and military bases that are feeling the impact of federal cuts now, months before the rest of the country’s classrooms see the effect of reduced dollars from Washington.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc is trying to find ways to keep investing in the profitable, albeit risky, business of buying and selling companies without crossing a rule that will restrict private equity investing, three sources familiar with the new business said over the past week.

The Volcker rule - named for former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law - is expected to limit bank investments in private equity funds, but not necessarily private equity-style investments outside of a formal fund structure.

One of the broad generalization you hear about the sequester is that it exempted the big programs that benefit the poor and elderly, notably Social Security, Medicare (the benefits, not the provider payments), Medicaid, CHIP and SNAP (a.k.a. food stamps).

It’s largely true, and progressive unhappiness over the erroneous belief in the White House that sequestration would never actually happen should be balanced with appreciation that the president (and more specifically, his chief negotiator Jack Lew) insisted on these exemptions.

The President’s “sequester” offer slashes non-defense spending by $830 billion over the next ten years. That happens to be the precise amount we’re implicitly giving Wall Street’s biggest banks over the same time period.

We’re collecting nothing from the big banks in return for our generosity.  Instead we’re demanding sacrifice from the elderly, the disabled, the poor, the young, the middle class – pretty much everybody, in fact, who isn’t “too big to fail.”

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), the biggest U.S. bank, plans to reduce headcount by as much as 19,000 people in its mortgage and community banking businesses by the end of next year.

The company expects 4,000 job reductions this year, the New York-based lender said today in presentations on its website. Those reductions will occur almost entirely through attrition, said Kristin Lemkau, a spokeswoman for the lender. The mortgage business will shrink by 13,000 to 15,000 jobs through 2014, while community banking excluding mortgages loses 3,000 to 4,000 jobs during that period, the presentation shows.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc will begin a fresh round of job cuts as early as this week, sources familiar with the matter said on Monday, with its equities-trading business bracing for bigger cuts than fixed-income trading.

The bank usually culls out the weakest 5 percent of its employees around now. But the cuts will likely be deeper in some businesses, particularly equities trading, where volumes and earnings are weak. The number of shares traded on major U.S. exchanges so far this year is down 7.2 percent.