(Reuters) – Federal Reserve Board Vice Chair Stanley Fischer on Tuesday warned that while the U.S. and other countries have taken steps to make their housing finance systems stronger, more needs to be done to prevent a future crisis.
Fischer did not address the outlook for U.S. monetary policy or the economy in remarks prepared for delivery to the DNB-Riksbank Macroprudential Conference Series in Amsterdam.
Instead he focused on preventing financial instability, arguing that since the 2007-2009 financial crisis in the United States, “the core of the financial system is much stronger, the worst lending practices have been curtailed, much progress has been made in processes to reduce unnecessary foreclosures,” and a 2008 law helped clarify the status of government support for housing agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
But to prevent a new crisis, he said, governments ought to do more, including stress tests for banks on their resilience should house prices decline dramatically, and making it easier to avoid foreclosures, which hurt both lenders and borrowers.
“(T)here is more to be done, and much improvement to be preserved and built on, for the world as we know it cannot afford another pair of crises of the magnitude of the Great Recession and the Global Financial Crisis,” he said.
(Reporting by Ann Saphir; editing by Diane Craft)
Doctors have now been able to confirm that type 2 diabetes has a direct connection to the loss of brain matter.
Doctors have known for many years that diabetes has a negative impact on the brain but the study of patients using MRIs shows that long term diabetes has a direct correlation to the greatest loss of brain tissue.
“It’d been thought that most, if not all, of the effect of diabetes on the brain was due to vascular disease that diabetics gets and, therefore, stroke,” Dr. R. Nick Bryan of the University of Pennsylvania told Fox News. “We found in addition to that, there’s sort of diffuse loss of brain tissue, atrophy, we think may have a direct effect on the diabetes on the brain.”
A study of MRIs on patients close to 62 years of age with type 2 diabetes for at least 10 years showed the greatest reductions of the brain’s gray matter, where the neurons of the brain are located.
Researchers say that for people with diabetes, proper care is a priority to help delay the impact the disease will have on the vascular system and the brain.
(Note: This is a follow up to a story we carried on April 18, 2013 on an explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas.)
The deaths of 15 people and the wounding of 226 others in an explosion at a West, Texas fertilizer plant was completely preventable according to the investigation into the incident.
The U.S. Chemical Safety Board said Tuesday that the incident “should never have occurred.”
“It resulted from the failure of a company to take the necessary steps to avert a preventable fire and explosion and from the inability of federal, state and local regulatory agencies to identify a serious hazard and correct it,” Chairman Rafael Moure-Eraso said. “The community clearly was not aware of the potential hazard at West Fertilizer.”
The board’s investigation found that the factory was storing ammonium nitrate inside a wooden building that left it very susceptible to fire. Ammonium nitrate is a common fertilizer but is also extremely explosive.
It has been used in terrorist attacks, such as the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing.
A new report says that American nuclear facilities are vulnerable to a “high-force” terrorist attack and some are still vulnerable to sabotage intended to create a nuclear meltdown.
The Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas released the report stating they want to shine a light on the security gaps left a decade after 9/11. Continue reading →