| An obstinate liberal
A newspaper photographer seeking pictures of federal Judge William R. Wilson Jr. is invited to come by the Wilson mule farm at 9 a.m. on Sunday morning. There, the judge says, Sonny Simpson, former Little Rock police chief, and Bill Tranum, retired oncologist and former Razorback football player, will be helping him castrate and dehorn miniature goats. He hopes the photographer isn't squeamish. (The photographer made it through the assignment without incident, but the memory of the spurting blood stayed with him awhile.) A couple of things can be learned here: (1) Bill Wilson is a colorful sort, as federal judges go, and (2) he knows everybody in Arkansas, just about. These impressions are buttressed on another occasion, when the judge cuts short an interview so he can go to the races at Hot Springs with a bunch of fellows who played football at Little Rock High School under the legendary coach Wilson Matthews.
Misplaced trust costs $100000
TAMPA - The two men stood on a front lawn they both thought was theirs. They avoided eye contact and did not speak. A sheriff's deputy took the house key from one man and told him he risked a trespassing charge if he returned. "I understand," the man said, before driving away. The other man walked into the home he had once made beautiful and found it in disrepair. "He was my best friend," he said of the man who had left. Now he felt like killing him. * * * Merrill Roberts, 65, lost his 2,277-square-foot Dana Shores home in 1997 to Nicholas Drossos, the man he called his best friend. He spent much of the past decade battling to get it back. On March 9, Circuit Judge Claudia Isom determined that Drossos had obtained Roberts' home through "willful and deliberate fraud." She ordered Drossos out.
Cheap loans best for car finance
Britons are set to spend billions on new cars over the next six months, and cheap loans could be the best way of financing this. New figures from Sainsbury's Bank show 7.65 million people intend to buy a car between March 2007 and August this year, and 26 per cent of them plan to fund part of this purchase with a cheap loan. "Our findings estimate that of the total amount of money that will be spent on buying vehicles, around 15.8 per cent will be financed through personal loans, which equates to around £8.41 billion," said Steven Baillie, Sainsbury's Bank loans manager. "Although this represents a 33 per cent drop in the total planned for car purchase loans, it's actually more important than ever for people to shop around due to heightened competition in the market." Overall the Sainsbury's Bank survey shows 430,000 fewer people are planning to buy a car in the next six months than in the last six months, spending £16.2 billion less.
Fed, OCC Publicly Chastised Few Lenders During Boom (Update1)
March 14 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency took little action in public to police the $2.8 trillion boom in the U.S. mortgage market -- whose bust now risks worsening the housing recession. The Fed, which is responsible for the stability of the banking system, didn't publicly rebuke any firm for failing to follow up warnings on home-lending practices between 2004 and 2006. The OCC, which supervises 1,793 national banks, took only three public mortgage-related consumer-protection enforcement actions over the same period. Consumer advocates and former government officials say the regulators, by acting behind the scenes rather than openly advertising the shortcomings of some firms, failed to discipline an industry that loaned too much money to borrowers who couldn't repay it.
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