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The U.S. Treasury’s sale of its remaining stake in American International Group Inc will fetch $ 7.6 billion, bringing the government a total profit of $ 22.7 billion from its bailout of the insurer in the financial crisis four years ago. The share offering will close the chapter on one of the most politically contentious rescues of 2008, which ultimately gave AIG up to $ 182 billion of government support. At one point, the government estimated that it would never recover all of the bailout money, but as AIG restructured and returned to viability, it was able to repay the [...]
You might not be too happy to find out what rules a group health plan can impose. We enlisted two industry experts to help us answer some of the most common questions from Insure.com readers regarding health plans at work: Arlene Lieberman is a principal in the employee benefits practice at Barney & Barney in San Diego, and Teagan Storck is a benefits administrator at Argus Benefits in Atlanta. Can I get out of my employer’s health plan if I already enrolled for the next year? Enrolling for the next year locks you in unless you have an “event” that [...]
NEW YORK T-Mobile USA said on Thursday it planned to stop subsidizing smartphones, the first major U.S. carrier to do so, in a move it hopes will cut costs and woo customers frustrated with restrictions on upgrades in longer-term contracts. T-Mobile USA also announced an agreement to sell the iPhone, becoming the last big carrier to sign on with Apple Inc, which will also help it win new customers and keep existing subscribers. U.S. operators typically pay phone subsidies, giving subscribers discounts in exchange for tying them into a two-year contract. While this helps retain customers, it also ramps up [...]
NEW YORK/LITTLE ROCK Central bankers appear satisfied with the impact of their latest monetary stimulus, though there is some disagreement over how forcefully to continue purchasing bonds, remarks by two top policymakers on Monday showed. Boston Federal Reserve Bank President Eric Rosengren, one of the most vocal proponents of Fed asset purchases, said there was a “strong case” for the Fed to stay the course on accommodative policies next year and continue buying a total of $ 85 billion in bonds each month. In September, the Fed announced an open-ended bond buying scheme that began with $ 40 billion per [...]
Despite changes announced last night in its contract with Zynga (ZNGA) that allows Facebook (FB) to develop its own games, the social network run by Mark Zuckerberg says it has no plans to jump into the burgeoning business. “We’re not in the business of building games and we have no plans to do so,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “We’re focused on being the platform where games and apps are built.” A source close to the matter told Business the clause in the addendum that gives Facebook the right to develop games was more a legal item, rather than a major [...]
NEW YORK The U.S. Air Force affirmed on Thursday its plans to buy 1,763 F-35 fighter jets built by Lockheed Martin Corp in coming years, as Lockheed and the government neared agreement on a multi-billion dollar contract for a fifth batch of planes. Air Force Secretary Michael Donley told an investor conference that the service remained committed to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which alone accounts for 15 percent of the service’s annual investment spending, and had no plans to revise its projected purchase of 1,763 of the new radar-evading jets. “I don’t think there’s any reason to revisit that [...]
Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro is expected to announce Monday that she is stepping down as the head of the agency, according to the SEC. “It has been an incredibly rewarding experience to work with so many dedicated SEC staff who strive every day to protect investors and ensure our markets operate with integrity,” said Schapiro. “Over the past four years we have brought a record number of enforcement actions, engaged in one of the busiest rulemaking periods, and gained greater authority from Congress to better fulfill our mission.”
LONDON BP Plc plans to spend up to 3.7 billion pounds ($ 5.9 billion) buying back its shares after agreeing last week to pay record criminal penalties over the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Britain’s Sunday Times said in an unsourced report. BP said on Thursday it would pay $ 4.5 billion to resolve criminal and civil charges over the April 2010 rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 workers and caused the worst-ever U.S. offshore oil spill. The settlement means BP will face no further U.S. federal criminal charges, but is expected to have to pay more to [...]
MADRID Spain’s Santander plans to invest in the country’s so-called bad bank in a sign that healthy domestic lenders are willing to support the entity created to clean up the aftermath of a 2008 property crash. “The bank plans on investing in the bad bank,” a spokesman for Santander, Spain’s biggest bank, told Reuters on Saturday. Spain has set up the bad bank to siphon off toxic real estate assets from bank balance sheets that date from the property crash. The bad bank’s creation is a condition of receiving up to 100 billion euros ($ 127 billion) of aid in [...]