The $42 Billion Debt Trap That Putin Has Three Years to Escape (BusinessWeek)

For the state of Russia’s finances, consider places like Chukotka, the territory separated from Alaska by a narrow strait.

The government there has racked up debt equal to 144 percent of its revenue, the highest in Russia, according to Standard & Poor’s. Regions from Belgorod near Ukraine to three North Caucasus republics are also prompting concern with ratios topping 100 percent. The premium investors demand to hold Russian municipal bonds over sovereign securities is the highest in more than a month and 103 basis points more than last year’s average, according to UralSib Capital data.

The clock is ticking for President Vladimir Putin to defuse a situation he set off in 2012 with decrees to raise social spending. That contributed to a doubling in the debt load of Russia’s more than 80 regions to 2.4 trillion rubles ($42 billion) in the past five years. Strains on their finances will grow critical in two or three years, raising the risk of bailouts from a federal budget already running a deficit for the first time since 2010, according to S&P.

“A default by a large region could block market access for the Finance Ministry itself,” said Karen Vartapetov, associate director of S&P’s Moscow office. “Right now the federal center has an opportunity to help regions. In three years, there may be fewer resources, while regional debt may be bigger, and that will result in greater risks.”

The Finance Ministry in Moscow didn’t reply to a request for comment on the risks facing regional governments.

Yawning Gap

Threats to municipal finances are snowballing as sanctions over Ukraine choke access to capital markets, forcing local governments to fund social outlays with costlier bank loans.

While regional debt sales are down 53 percent so far this year, Moody’s Investors Service estimates borrowing will grow as much as 25 percent in 2015, driven by spending on health care, education and utilities.

The government there has racked up debt equal to 144 percent of its revenue

The squeeze is putting regions in jeopardy. They’re facing “an increasing likelihood of defaults,” S&P warned in June. At least one non-rated local government delayed a principal repayment on a bank loan in the first quarter, it said.

Local administrations are running a 625 billion-ruble deficit, up 42 percent from 2014, according to S&P. Seventy-five regions had a budget gap last year, the Higher School of Economics in Moscow said in a May report.

Refinancing Issues

Belgorod, a region of 1.5 million people, is one of only five municipal borrowers this year, placing 5.3 billion rubles of sinkable five-year notes this month at a coupon of 12.65 percent. That compares with a 8.3 percent coupon on seven-year bonds sold in 2013. The yield on Belgorod’s notes due June 2020 has fallen three basis points to 13.15 percent since trading began July 8.

The authorities in Moscow want to ease the crisis by helping regions replace bonds and commercial loans with subsidized loans from the federal budget, offered at a 0.1 percent annual rate. Russia will allocate 310 billion rubles to this in 2015, according to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who’s backed converting some foreign-currency debt into rubles.

Even so, local governments continue to rely on commercial loans, increasing bank debt by a quarter since the start of 2014 to 1 trillion rubles on March 1, central bank data show.

Risks of imbalances in regional budgets will probably grow this year as the economy shrinks, the central bank said in June.

“Because of the high debt burden, access to market sources of financing may be partly closed for some regions,” it said. “In addition, these regions may have difficulties with refinancing existing debt because banks are becoming more selective in assessing regional risk.”

Feds can read every email you opened last year without a warrant

Lawmakers want the FBI and NSA -- and other federal agencies -- to get a warrant first.

It's no longer a surprise that the government is reading your emails. What you might not know is that it can readily read most of your email without a warrant.

Any email or social networking message you've opened that's more than six months old can also be accessed by every law enforcement official in government -- without needing to get a warrant. That's because a key provision in a law almost three decades' old allows this kind of access with a mere subpoena, which doesn't require a judge.

That includes every email or message you opened last year, and earlier. (Anything under that six-month period still requires a warrant, however.)

It's therefore no surprise that in the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks, hundreds of lawmakers are calling for change. But there's a problem. The committee that would get the bill, dubbed the Email Privacy Act, to the House floor for a vote hasn't yet picked it up.

The warrantless email search reform bill was originally introduced in 2013, but stalled in a bureaucratic session despite passing the various congressional committees. The proposed law aims to fix the outdated Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which is still in effect despite falling behind the curve of the digital age, and has the support from privacy groups and major technology companies alike.

Its popularity has rocketed. The House version of the bill, introduced by Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-KS, 3rd), has more than 280 co-sponsors, more than half the entire House of Representatives. That includes big names like Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY, 4th), whose election was won on supporting privacy matters. It also includes Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI, 5th), who was a key figure in bringing the Freedom Act to a final vote.

Sensenbrenner chairs the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security where the bill was referred to. But, as reported by The National Journal, the bill remains on the parent House Judiciary Committee chairman's "to-do list" for the time being.

Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA, 6th) reportedly told Yoder, speaking to the publication, that he may "have some potential modifications to the end product." A committee spokesperson also told the publication that ECPA reform is a "top priority" and expects some movement soon.

Naturally, the federal agencies who rely on keeping ECPA intact are not pleased. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which regulates the banks and financial institutions, cannot issue warrants but instead issues subpoenas for emails and messages older than six-months. The agency has been accused of standing in the way of meaningful legislative reform in order to keep its somewhat limited powers.

The bill as it stands today would almost certainly pass if it headed to a House vote. A Senate version has been read twice and was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), earlier this year.

The support from Congress is there, but until the two chairmen set a date, meaningful reform to warrantless searches is as good as stalled.

Putin Calls U.S. Debt ‘Serious Problem’ as He Defends Greece (BusinessWeek)

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks at a news conference after the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Ufa, Russia, on July 10, 2015

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned of dangers to the global economy from U.S. borrowing while saying Greece isn’t solely to blame for its debt crisis.

“It’s a serious problem not just for the United States but for the whole world economy,” Putin told reporters Friday in the Russian city of Ufa in response to a question on the prospects of the biggest developing nations. “Debt exceeds gross domestic product there.”

Putin said he’s concerned about Greece and hopes its crisis will be resolved soon, reiterating that Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras hasn’t asked him for financial aid. Even so, he said Russia has the resources to help its partners.

Putin is battling his own economic woes after sanctions over Ukraine and a drop in oil prices triggered Russia’s first recession in six years. This isn’t the first time the Russian leader has attacked U.S. economic policy: he’s previously derided the “dollar monopoly” that allows the U.S. to act like a “parasite” on the global economy.

The ruble is the second-worst performer against the dollar in the past year among more than 150 global currencies tracked by Bloomberg, with a 40 percent dive. Russia’s central bank resumed purchases of foreign-currency assets in May, planning purchases of $100 million to $200 million a day to replenish reserves.

The U.S. ratio of government debt to GDP will fall to 104 percent in 2018 from 105 percent in 2014, the International Monetary Fund predicts.

‘Big’ Numbers

Russia drained its foreign-currency stockpiles as fighting raged in Ukraine and global energy prices plunged. That hasn’t left the government in a position where it can’t assist its allies, according to Putin. Russian reserves were $359.6 billion as of July 3.

“Russia, of course, is able to offer help to its partners regardless of today’s difficulties with the economy,” he said after a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. “We’re helping some countries.”

Putin said Russia and Greece, both of which are majority Orthodox Christian, have a special relationship. Being a euro member, the government in Athens is unable to take measures such as devaluation to help revive its economy, according to Putin.

“Greece is a European Union country and within its obligations is conducting rather difficult negotiations with its partners,” he said. “Mr. Tsipras hasn’t approached us regarding aid. And that’s generally understandable because the numbers are big and we know what’s at stake.”

Public Knowledge: How to support Net Neutrality Rules

The House of Representatives is gearing up to vote on an Appropriations bill, a must-pass piece of funding legislation, as early as next week.  Unfortunately, some members of Congress are using this to yet again try and attack the FCC's recent landmark net neutrality decision, by attaching a number of sneaky riders deep in the bill that would defund the FCC's use of the new rules to protect consumers from ISP abuse. The public clearly demanded strong net neutrality rules leading up to the FCC passing the rules in February. Now it's time to let the Commissioners do their job. However, these extra provisions in the bill are just retaliation that will prevent the FCC from enforcing the strong net neutrality rules we fought so hard for, and from protecting the open Internet. We are hopeful that net neutrality advocates in Congress will take a stand and remove these harmful provisions, but we need your help. Contact your representatives here and tell them to strike down the language in the bill that will prevent the FCC from enforcing net neutrality. Tweet this: Tell Congress not to kill #NetNeutrality in funding bill! @publicknowledge bit.ly/1gqbYPV Public Knowledge http://publicknowledge.nationbuilder.com/

Photos: 12 startups that are disrupting education

EduKart

EduKart is a New Delhi-based company that has recently received a lot of funding. It's India's leading education marketplace that offers more than 2,000 courses to get degrees and certificates in a variety of industries. It was founded in 2011, and there is now a global community of more than 15,000 students.

Simplilearn

Simplilearn is a provider of professional certification courses that works with companies to address unique educational needs, particularly with business and technology courses. There are more than 2,000 trainers, 250 courses, and 40 global accreditations to choose from. Simplilearn offers online classes and self-educational courses.

Inside Track

About 300 coaches work for Inside Track to help students of all ages reach their potential by providing hourly counseling services. At the colleges it works with, it has raised graduation rates by about 15%.

Piazza

Piazza is an easy-to-use question and answer platform that is used at 1,000 schools in 68 countries. It was started by a woman who went to school for computer science in India, who was too shy to ask her male colleagues questions. She started Piazza for all the students, male or female, who want questions answered but don't want to ask them aloud, so they ask online to their peers later.

USEED

USEED is a crowdfunding platform for higher education. It enables students, faculty, and alumni to raise money for the educational initiatives they care about the most. It makes fundraising more interactive and social by allowing people to be more personal with their fundraising campaigns. Right now, the company is looking to schedule demos with students and universities.

The Minerva Project

The Minerva Project is reinventing the university experience for undergraduates. It's an elite university that incorporates "reinvented curriculum, rigorous academic standards, cutting-edge technology, and an immersive global experience." In 2013, the project established Minerva Schools at KGI, an accredited four-year undergraduate institution.

Udacity

Udacity offers online courses and nanodegrees to become web developers or data analysts. Nanodegrees help people master skills so they can apply for particular jobs in demand in the tech sector right now. Companies can also use Udacity to ensure their employees have the most up to date skills.

EdX

EdX offers free online courses from the world's best universities, like MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, and more. Most of them are self-paced, and offer subjects such as creative problem solving, programming, and management accounting.

Quizlet

Quizlet offers simple learning tools to help you study for free. There are flashcards, tests, and study games in all kinds of subject areas, and you can access them via smartphone apps or on your computer. There's also an awesome live map of what people around the world are studying at any given time.

Rafter

Rafter was made for course material management. It's cloud-based software that students and institutions use to find more affordable textbooks, and a technology platform designed to manage physical and digital content for campuses. Basically, Rafter is trying to create the campus of the future.

CreativeLive

CreativeLive aims to help people unleash their creative potential by offering free livestreamed course in photography, art, video, design, and more. To save the courses for later, viewers can pay to download them. They can also interact with instructors and the CreativeLive community.

Coursera

Coursera is an educational company that offers online courses from universities. More than 13 million people use it to take courses in a variety of fields, from cryptography at Stanford to social psychology at Wesleyan.

A New Wall Street Memoir Full of Hookers, Cocaine, and Other Cliches (BusinessWeek)

John LeFevre, of @GSElevator fame, is back with a book full of Wall Street anecdotes we've seen before

John LeFevre never worked at Goldman Sachs. It says so on the carefully argued jacket flap of his memoir, Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery, and Billion-Dollar Deals. He almost worked at Goldman but was derailed by a “contractual issue.” Yet he had the bright idea of using the Twitter handle @GSElevator to broadcast comments supposedly overheard in the bank’s elevators. Most were snobby, racist, sexist, or otherwise unpleasant: “If my wife offers me a blow job, I know it’s time to check my Amex statement,” or “Hermès ties are like Air Jordans for white people.” Cool, cool.

I used to work at Goldman. I never heard anything like this in the elevators. My colleagues were nice people, but also, an elevator is a dumb place to say vile things. These comments came from LeFevre or fans who submitted them; Gawker reported last year that some of the jokes suspiciously resembled ones from another comedic Twitter feed. Whatever their source, the tweets became wildly popular, and it’s obvious why: Since the financial crisis, people have been searching investment banks, and especially Goldman, for villains. LeFevre and his elevator made great villains.

Now there’s a book. It’s not as relentlessly villainous as @GSElevator, though each chapter starts with a selection of tweets to remind the reader of its provenance. Mostly, it’s a memoir of LeFevre’s seven years at Citigroup in New York, London, and Hong Kong. It owes a lot to Liar’s Poker, the Michael Lewis classic that spawned so many Wall Street careers and memoirs. LeFevre himself confesses that he wanted to work on Wall Street after reading Liar’s Poker in boarding school (Choate), and he proudly went to work for Lewis’s old firm, Salomon Brothers. By the time LeFevre got there in 2001 it was called Citigroup, but that doesn’t stop him from referring to it as Salomon. There’s a carefully argued footnote about that, too.

LeFevre alternates stories about the bond markets with self-contained vignettes of trader deviance. The writing is strenuously bro-y, and there’s a certain amount of jargon (“jumbo US$ benchmark”) and vacant corporate-speak (“proactively throw my competitors under the bus”). Still, he is a considerably more engaging memoirist than he is a pseudonymous embodiment of banker evil.

The bond market stories are pretty good. LeFevre was “one of the most prolific syndicate managers in Asia,” the book says. He worked on the bond-syndicate desk, the part of the bank that coordinates deals between corporate issuers and investors who lend money. The desks in Asia are where banks cooperate with and undermine their competitors on joint deals and adjust their ethics to foreign-market demands. These issues are the parts of Wall Street culture that affect clients and the economy, and LeFevre’s stories are eye-opening. Also I’m pretty sure he confesses to several felonies, and there’s a price-fixing conference in a Hong Kong hotel room that I hope he ran by his lawyer.

But you don’t want to read about bond deals. You want drugs and hookers. LeFevre delivers them with overwhelming force. He and his buddies are drunk seemingly every night and most afternoons. They blow a year’s bonus on a week in Saint Tropez. They make PowerPoint presentations to rank the hotness of their female colleagues. They have hotel staff kick prostitutes—sorry, “love monkeys”—out of bed for them. They scream at maids for throwing out cocaine. Genitals touch things genitals shouldn’t touch. LeFevre pays a hooker in hotel minibar bottles, crashes a Maserati, and poops on a small plane. It gets a little tedious.

In his book and on Twitter, LeFevre paints this experience as representative of a broader culture. He’s not the racist misogynist; he’s just writing down what he heard. “These are a few of my stories,” he says at the end of his book. “All bankers have stories just like them.” I don’t! Good Lord.

But the ones who do are the loudest, and they replicate themselves. LeFevre feeds the public’s hunger for proof that Wall Street is full of degenerate sociopaths, while also glamorizing that degeneracy. Those inclined to hate bankers will have their suspicions confirmed. Those inclined to whoring and cocaine will see a career opportunity. The rest of us—including many bankers—might worry that the worst bits of Wall Street’s culture are being passed down to the next generation. Teenage boys at Choate will want to be investment bankers after reading Straight to Hell. Which is probably the point.

These 10 Economies Will Be the World's Worst Performers

Ukraine will finish 2015 as the biggest loser in global growth, according to forecasts of economists surveyed by Bloomberg.

The conflict-battered eastern European nation will see its gross domestic product contract 4 percent in the fourth quarter from the same time in 2014, the worst of 47 economies polled by Bloomberg in April through June. The ill fortune will be shared by neighboring Russia, where GDP will shrink 3.5 percent by year-end amid international sanctions and depressed oil revenue. Here's how those two stack up among the 10 biggest GDP losers:

Parts of Latin America also will be struggling on the eve of 2016. Brazil and Argentina, each suffering from soaring inflation and unemployment, will see year-over-year contractions of 1.6 percent and 1.5 percent, the poll data show. Brazil saw the biggest downgrade among the 28 economies that were included in Bloomberg's January survey.  At that time, South America's powerhouse was expected to grow 1 percent this year. 

Switzerland, still reeling from the Swiss National Bank's January decision to scrap its franc-euro cap, clocked in at No. 5 on the unfavorable GDP list, expected to eke out growth of 0.1 percent. As its evolving financial crisis grabs international attention, Greece's standing at No. 8 could be precarious; economists projected in April that the country would expand 0.9 percent at the end of 2015.

Rounding out the dismal 10 were Croatia, Serbia, Italy and Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan, whose biggest trading partner is Russia, is now expected to grow 1.2 percent, having plunged from the 3.6 percent economists projected three months ago.

On the other end of the scale, Vietnam joins emerging economies India and China for the three fastest-growing economies by year-end. 

Current forecasts are the median from each country's June survey except for Croatia and Greece, for which the last survey was in April, and Serbia, which was in May. The figures at the start of 2015 come from the countries' January surveys, except for Ukraine and Kazakhstan (March), and Vietnam (December). That brought the total number of economies surveyed to 47.