| Connected: Credit card receipts can leave a paper trail
On a recent business trip to Albany, my associate and I decided to go to a restaurant to relax after a hard day. After our meal, I paid with my credit card, and in the usual manner, the waiter returned two copies of the receipt -- one for me as a record and one for the restaurant -- which needed to be signed. I signed the receipt and, despite my associate's request to leave the restaurant, stayed until I could find an appropriate person to whom I could hand the restaurant's copy of the charge slip. Unlike most restaurants, this local establishment was still printing the full credit card number on the receipt, so I refused to leave it on our table for the next person to view -- and perhaps steal my credit card number. It's not a new concern to me. I've refused to leave behind my charge receipts for years -- perhaps before most people even realized it was a threat.
Fannie in Her Own Words
It just means that there are a lot of other securities below it, which will absorb initial losses. The danger is that this cushion is not much protection if the underlying collateral turns to dust... The latest Citi blow contained three scary nuggets. The first is nobody really knows where the CDO debacle will lead. The complexity of valuing these things - not just how the cash from the underlying collateral gets divvied up but how the the default rates of the different securities correlate - was underscored by the $3bn range Citi attached to its potential hit. The second is that the scale of the mess could be even greater since there are many synthetic CDOs out there referencing the cash CDOs. Lastly, Citi added yesterday for good measure that all it had detailed was its direct exposure. Along with others, it may have offloaded credit risk to bond insurers.
Alex Salmond transcript
You promised an extra thousand new recruits, now you're saying it may be five hundred. ALEX SALMOND: Well what we're saying is that we're going to have a thousand more officers on Scotland's streets and we're going to do that by a combination of increased recruitment, that's you know, five hundred more officers than there would have been if the last lot had stayed in power but also by retention because we've got many officers in their 40s, experienced officers, who are approaching retirement and we want to keep them in the service and of course paying the police what they're entitled to, what the review body said they should get instead of docking their wages as they're doing south of the border, will help in that retention, but we also recognize that there are important efficiencies that have to be made so that people are less caught up in bureaucracy and have more time to be in the front line; that's entirely sensible and defensible policy which will result in more police on Scottish streets.
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