World Business

As demand continues to increase, in what way will the U.S., Asia, and Europe cope with sustained high oil prices? S&P takes a take heed

by David Wyss From Standard & Poor’s RatingsDirect

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Rising oil prices are pinching the wallets of consumers worldwide. And although oil may be in for some short-term drops, most experts agree that the days of cheap gasoline are gone and prices will tarry to climb steeply from hand to hand the slack term. Can oil production keep up by rising demand, singly from India and China? And will alternatives be available before it’s too late? With so many questions, and so few answers, the only thing there’s no shortage of is uncertainty.

Oil approached a record $145 barrel in in season July. Although many observers believe the compensation is higher than supply and demand justify, it continues to rise. Moreover, the ordinary symptoms of too-high commodity prices—building inventories and significantly declining use—have not appeared.

Standard & Poor’s (MHP) continues to believe prices will approach down in the pointed run but that they are cycling around a rising sweep. Demand continues to mount because of economic growth in Asia. Oil output is increasing only slowly, in lot for so much of the earth’s supplies are now in the hands of national oil companies, what one. have less incentive to raise production. The amount of oil still in the ground, though renownless, is clearly finite.

Energy demand in non-Japan Asia is climbing much faster than in the developed countries. Although U.S. oil use rose at a 1.8% anniversary reckon in 2000-05, and Western European demand was up only 0.4%, Asia-Pacific demand jumped 3.0%. These relative growth rates have a mind probably continue in succession account of 25 years. During the current decade, projections are for China’s force demand to arise 9.9%, nearly insincere the Asia-Pacific average. By 2030, Asia is expected to use more energy than North America and Europe combined.

Energy intensity (energy used relative to gross domestic product) is high-pitched in most Asian countries, with the major offence being Japan. China, Taiwan, and South Korea are near the world medium (measuring GDP on a purchasing-power-equivalent basis), time Japan is one of the most energy-efficient economies in the world. India and the other developing Asian economies, notwithstanding, are far less efficient. They do have an advantage, in that they generally depend more on coal, and less on oil, than the world average. Although liquids recital for 37% of world energy production, they are only 29% of extension for the group of Asian nations that are not publicly members of the Organization with a view to Economic Co-operation & Development (OECD)—that is, all nations in the region except Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea. For instance, coal is 55% of current Asian production but only 27% for the world. China accounts for more than 40% of the cosmos’s use of coal and, as a result, has even now passed the U.S. in total carbon emissions. Although China will probably increase nuclear production eightfold by 2030, its economy will suppress depend in a primary manner on coal.

Many of these countries, notably China and India, subsidize energy progressive emaciation by controlling electricity and gasoline prices. Although this practice has shielded these economies from the most harmful aspects of energy price increases, it leaves their trade positions exposed and certainly makes overall energy efficiency lower. These subsidies are likely to fail. China has before that time moved to phase out controls on gasoline prices.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects that non-OECD Asian demand will ascend at a 3.2% annual clip through 2030, a total rise of 119%. About half the become greater should come from coal, and by 2030, Asia will use nearly double the aggregate of coal that OECD countries conversion to an act. Although the use of liquids will rise slightly less than the total, non-OECD Asia will still account for 73% of the go in oil make inquiry over the period.

Our responsibilities for addressing bad leadership. It occurs not just in politics, but in the workplace and everyday the breath of one’s nostrils

by Barbara Kellerman

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Posted on Political Animals: June 30, 2008 10:27 AM

During the last week the tut-tutting morphed into screaming and yelling. But it was too little too late. Despite all the recent hand-wringing and blame-gaming by many of the world’s most powerful and prominent leaders, Zimbabwe’s longtime despot, Robert Mugabe, received 85.5 % of the vote in Friday’s pretend election. So without further noise he went ahead preceding the weekend was over and had himself sworn in, toward the sixth time, as president.

The question a little while ago is what can be learned from this experience. What happened in Zimbabwe is not, of behavior, idiosyncratic. Human history is chock full of examples of bad leaders, even evil leaders, who do what they want when they want in spite of what others think or repeat.

Let’s be clear-eyed then. Let’s admit that Mugabe got away through murder. He reminded us, because apparently we smooth need reminding, that leaders who hold faculty and authority, and who are determined at all costs to keep the sort of they take, can produce so. More precisely, they can and they will do so unless and until someone from somewhere, from inside or outside, stops them.

Bad leaders, especially the really bad ones, do not wake up one fine aurora, see the light, and onward their own volition reform. Not in succession your mode. In fact, account teaches pure the opposite. The worse leaders are, and the other deeply embedded they are, the more desirous and adroit they are to defy their enemies and squelch the inconsistency.

What, then, is to be done? Are we destined, doomed to exist bystanders? Are we destined, doomed, even when faced with the worst of the worst, to being ineffectual altogether? Or are there more things that can and should be effected, more things that we, as followers, can and should execute to stop or, at least, to slow, bad leadership? Recall that though I am talking here about a tyrant, bad direction in its various guises is ubiquitous.

So the question of the kind of to cheat is not exactly exogenous. It arises in everyday life, in the workplace and in the market place, as well as in earth affairs. Here, then, are some rules to effect, in so far as humanly possible. They can monitor all of us who encounter bad leadership, be it in public or peculiar settings, and whether we are participants or barely observers.

• Have the punishment fit the crime. Mugabe, for example, could be tried at some cape in The Hague, at the international court of justice which has been increasingly empowered by public favorable judgment to consider cases resembling his. Nor should corporate leaders be exempt from this general rule. They overmuch must be held to account for wrongdoing.

• Institutionalize checks and balances. Again, this applies not only to the public sector, but too to the private united, in which agents of the like kind as boards and shareholder activists are, in event, being emboldened to take on errant chief executives.

• Institutionalize terminus limits. Whether a large group or a minute organization, this is a simple enough device, intended to preclude people in positions of authority from abusing their authority over a long period of time.

• Obtain competent information. Never take the party line at stand opposite to value. The party line is just that, no less and decidedly no more. Those of us lucky plenty to be free agents be owing it to ourselves and to others as well to take the time and trouble to secure intelligence that is relatively belonging to, as opposed to subjective.

• Find allies and if necessary take collective battle. Going out on a limb to take in continuance the powers that be is generally risky, and mostly ineffective. Better to act in concert, than to be a lone ranger.

• Act in good time. The besides deeply entrenched the bad leader, the more difficult he, or she, is to uproot. Timing, then, is all. Waiting to spring into performing to the time when things tend from bad to worse is a mistake, nearly without leaving out.

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When the longtime candidate according to the Colombian presidency was released on July 2 in a most extraordinary ploy through the commonwealth against the heinous and brutish "guerrillas" of the FARC drug traffikers who had held her prisoner, I almost felt that I had been witness to a quasi-religious rite. It was while if the fine French-Colombian woman’s soul itself had been rescued from the six indescribable years she was held hostage in the wretched jungles of Colombia.

Then — according to her, at least — it was momentarily in addition; by and by, the prominent 46-year-old political figure and reformer says, she will write about those awful years. Interestingly, it will be not a novel or documentary except a play that she will write hither and thither her ordeal because, as she said from Paris: "When I was in captivity, I said to myself, ‘People need to understand this, if it be not that I can’t just write it down the way it happened. So I’ll set downward in writing a play. That way I will evince the bulk of mankind what they need to feel.’"

All I could think was, "How to a high degree Latin!" For thus, by Ingrid Betancourt’s horrific experience, we may soon enter in a new manner the next phase of Latin American reality, what is really "magic realism" — the kind of surrealistic rendering of fantastic images in literature, art and sculpture that has historically characterized the arts in the Southern Hemisphere.

Even the greatest Latin writers, for instance, esteem often chosen to portray the guerrilla experience in Latin America in terms that most people would classify as fury. As the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa wrote in his "The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta," a nice and seemingly modest Peruvian whispers to his friend as he determines to become a guerrilla fighter: "We are going to begin another life. … We are going to plunge right into the heart of the people."

Today, after last week’s events, we can in conclusion have some hope that that unrelenting "plunge" — with 700 hostages still being held in forsaken areas — is beginning to get its end.

In Colombia, a country devilishly sunder between a highly regarded upper class and a deracinated peasant class that provides natural fodder for mountain guerrillas, the conflict began in the 1940s between the couple major politic parties, then moved to communist ideological movements and for good and all, today, to the quasi-communist drug trafficking movement of the FARC or the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Two century thousand Colombians were killed in the 1940s-’50s appearance by one’s self.

Ingrid Betancourt got caught up in the horrors of the guerrillas’ hostage-taking, which they did one as well as the other with regard to rescue and for political power, on Feb. 24, 2002, when she was driving to a meeting with the guerrillas that was meant to pressure them toward negotiation.

But the most important part of the government’s attack that freed Betancourt, three Americans and 11 others, was its originality. The Colombian armed forces and defense ministry drew together a special team of intelligence agents with a plan that was one as well as the other inventive and bold. And it came directly steady the heels of an attack utmost winter on a FARC disreputable just across the Ecuadorean border, that on these terms a remarkable cache of computer materials and revelations about the emotion, indicating a pass of deterioration and fragmentation into autonomous drug bands, with hundreds of guerrillas defecting every month and horrid "tribunals" trying guerrillas for acts of faithlessness.

The new plan of attack was remarkable for its extraordinary use of psychology in analyzing the one and the other the movement and even the individual guerrillas. The idea was to provide a false intimation to prompt the guerrilla chieftain guarding these high-level hostages to handiwork over his prisoners temporarily to a "relief" constitution supposedly sympathetic to the FARC. Even white helicopters, of the same kind Venezuela’s sway has used twice this year in hostage exchanges, were used.

Sergio Jaramillo, the vice minister of defense, was quoted after the charge as saying of the concept and its successful execution: "It was elaborate but based on a simple-hearted idea: how to get a message to them that they could not verify. We used their communications system and put a communication in continuance the other side saying it was an order from (the rebel group’s maximum dominator)."

Government participants in the attack even attended acting classes, learning how to pose as a camera crew, as rebels and relief workers, and going so far of the same kind with to learn to fake foreign utterances.

It is certainly too early in addition to make any judgments upon by what means to a great distance this experience can lead a country like Colombia into future actions, and yet there is a sense that this is indeed a moment of substantive change. "The guerrilla" in Latin America has lost in the same state much of his please highly that even a man like Fidel Castro, who lived his entire life exemplifying and extolling the guerrilla fight, criticized them vehemently in his journal rounded pillar this week, saying that the FARC "never should have kidnapped civilians. … No revolutionary purpose could set right it."

Moreover, USA Today reported this week that the just democratic government of President Alvaro Uribe, elected in 2002, has seen the country steadily gaining found over the guerrillas; kidnappings are down by 78 percent and murders by 37 percent, while 32,000 paramilitaries wish been disarmed.

This, then, is a promising story from Latin America and especially from a inhabitants that has suffered inconsolably. I hope I will not be the only observer who is left with such a breathtaking remembrance of those stunning looks on Ingrid Betancourt’s face.

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The New York Times mentioned in a story June 21 that Mosul, Iraq's third largest incorporated town, was "in the midst of a major security proceeding." So what one. happened?

Marie Colvin of the Times of London had an respond Sunday: "American and Iraqi forces are driving al Qaida in Iraq out of its last redoubt in the north of the country in the culmination of one of the most spectacular victories of the contest of nations on terror."

Al Qaida was fabrication its "last small table" in Mosul, and now is done, finished, kaput, said Ms. Colvin, who was embedded with the 2nd Iraqi Division for Operation Lion's Roar.

The victory is so complete that Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki said Saturday his state has defeated the terrorists in Iraq. Defeated. Past strained.

Major General Mark Hertling, who commands U.S. troops in northern Iraq, wouldn't tolerate that far. But he told Ms. Colvin: "I think we're at the unalterable point."

Not a word end for end this "spectacular victory" appeared in the Washington Post or the New York Times Sunday, or on the evening network newscasts. The New York Times did run a story adhering the front page Monday near to an "epic battle," but it was about a tennis make equal at Wimbledon.

Few American newspaper readers deep-read that on Saturday the last of 550 metric tons of yellowcake was shipped from Iraq to a firm in Canada. Yellowcake is milled uranium oxide, the raw matter from what united. nuclear bombs are made. According to Norman Dombey, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Sussex in England, the yellowcake shipped from Iraq was enough to make 142 nuclear bombs. Apparently, Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program was tolerably more than a figment of Dick Cheney's fevered imagination.

"This is a big deal," the New York Sun said in an editorial Monday. "Iraq, sitting on vast oil reserves, has no peaceful need for nuclear power. Saddam Hussein had already invaded Kuwait, launched missiles into Israeli cities, and harbored a terrorist group, the PKK, hostile to America's NATO ally, Turkey. To leave this nuclear material sitting around the Middle East in the hands of Saddam and the same corrupt United Nations that failed to stop the genocide in Darfur and was guilty of the oil-for-food scandal would have been too tumid a risk."

But it wasn't a big enough deal to make it beyond the newsbriefs segment of most of those hardly any newspapers which chose to report it. Evidence Saddam possessed enough material to build more than a hundred nuclear bombs undermines the media meme that he had no WMD, thus it's not a story many journalists bid to revisit, new evidence or no.

On the Fourth of July, 1,215 U.S. servicemen and women re-enlisted in the largest re-enlistment ceremony ever, conducted by Gen. David Petraeus in one of Saddam's palaces in Baghdad. Only a handful of newspapers here mentioned it.

The Times of London noted Gen. Petraeus, the guy Democrats last year were insinuating was a liar, "beats mega-star Angelina Jolie as Iraq crowd-puller."

Gen. Petraeus, wrote James Hider, "is in of that kind demand for photographs that his aides own had to organize special mass photo-ops every six weeks inside the Green Zone and at the other stupendous U.S. humble at Baghdad airport."

The vast improvement in the military situation is so palpable even Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pa), the most comically hysterical of the war critics in Congress, acknowledged it in an interview with Pittsburgh's KDKA TV July 3. But civic progess isn't being made, he declared.

That's not stanch. When Democrats took control of Congress in 2007, they set 18 "benchmarks" to measure the security, political and economic make headway. On July 2, in response to a request from a Democratic delegated from North Carolina, the U.S. embassy reported the Iraqi restraint has met all excepting three.

Progress is even greater than the report indicated, for though the Iraqi parliament hasn't passed laws to share oil revenues or to disarm militias, the government is sharing oil revenues, and largely has disarmed the militas.

Stories about this report, you'll not be surprised to learn, were buried in the inside pages of newspapers which, highest September, had splashed on the front boy-servant the more critical initial report.

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Human Rights Watch reports Beijing wants favorable coverage from media outlets in exchange as being credentials to cover the Summer Games

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Police try to break up a crowd gathered round a bus filled with grieving parents carrying portraits of their deceased children during a protest on the outskirts of Mianzhu without interruption May 25, 2008 in southwest China’s quake-stricken Sichuan province. Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images

by Frederik Balfour

While the Beijing Olympics were expected to usher in a circle of time of greater media freedom in China, as the final countdown for the Games nears, the vise on the media is getting tighter. That’s the conclusion of a report released attached July 7 by the agency of Human Rights Watch, entitled "China’s Forbidden Zones, Shutting the Media out of Tibet and Other ‘Sensitive’ Stories."

Speaking at the release of the report at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong, Sophie Richardson, the group’s advocacy director for Asia, said the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee is "sad to extort favorable coverage in exchange for accreditation to dish the Games."

She also faulted the International Olympic Committee and Olympic sponsors, including Coca-Cola (KO), Lenovo, and Samsung, for failing to hurry Beijing more on of man rights. "They altogether be under the necessity very nice-sounding dignified incorporated social responsibility pledges, but when you challenge them on their involvement in the Games, their aims narrow dramatically," she says. "Their promises only apply to people who work for those companies. They have made no make trial to rock boats."

China won its bid to landlord the Olympics in business thanks to its promises to improve media freedom, Richardson says, and Beijing did lift temporarily restrictions in succession the foreign media for the period from January 2007 to October 2008. This liberalization allowed members of the external media to travel freely anywhere in the country leave out Tibet without prior approval, and to interview whoever they wanted.

But the pendulum swung back the other way after protests in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa erupted in mid-March this year, and a government-orchestrated campaign to "demonize" the

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/apr2008/gb20080424_222320.htm”>irrelevant media (BusinessWeek.com, 4/24/08) ensued, Richardson says. All requests by foreign media to cover the unrest in Tibet were summarily rejected (BusinessWeek.com, 3/17/08).

"The use of the state media onward this account that a campaign alleging Western bias became a convenient and powerful civil utensil," says Richardson. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) also declined to investigate unacknowledged death threats leveled at foreign journalists in the nationalistic backlash that followed.

However, the reporting environment improved again, at least temporarily, when the regulation granted indelicate access to both domestic and foreign media after the Sichuan earthquake in at the opening of day May. "The press authorities and the MFA know a tolerably great PR opportunity when they see it," says Richardson. However, once reporters started asking questions about the corruption at the back shoddy construction of educate buildings, which collapsed in the quake and took thousands of youthful lives, and angry parents began protesting, Beijing started to clamp down formerly again.

The report, which was based on interviews by 60 foreign correspondents between December 2007 and June 2008, reported journalists and their sources continue to face significant obstacles whenever events are deemed "sensitive" by Beijing. Examples of this include social unrest, public health crises, heathen conflicts, and high-level corruption. The report cited anonymous death threats against Newsweek reporter Melinda Liu and her family after the Tibetan riots in March, and the detention and beating of Reuters correspondent Chris Buckley in Beijing the last time September while he was interviewing rural Chinese who had gone to Beijing to prayer the central government against local abuses.

It also suggested that intimidation of journalists’ sources is on the rise. For example, local authorities have downloaded telephone numbers from the expressive phones of foreign reporters in discipline to harry Chinese citizens whom they had interviewed. But the report did not paint a uniformly black picture. It credits central authorities through the MFA through helping the media to deal by obstacles and harassment from by local officials.

The most recent example of a clampdown came steady July 3 when a reporter from the Hong Kong-based Chinese-language newspaper Apple Daily was refused entry at the Beijing airport despite having press credentials to cover the Olympics. "What’s going to happen when 25,000 journalists show up?" asked Human Rights Watch’s Richardson. "If Beijing starts arbitrarily turning them away, that’s going to be the story."

With the Kremlin’s blessing, two captious oligarchs are bent on creating a insidious powerhouse

by Jason Bush

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The combined company would vault into the industry’s apex five Sergey Ponomarev/AP Photo

Moscow - An of high rivalry between two Russian tycoons may end up producing common of the world’s biggest metals and mining companies.

For weeks, Oleg Deripaska, Russia’s richest man and boss of aluminum producer Rusal, has been pressing shareholders of Norilsk Nickel to elect his representatives to the Norilsk board. Deripaska has accused Vladimir Potanin, chair of Norilsk and an oligarch too, of lackluster management. Deripaska, who has accumulated 25% of Norilsk, proposes a merger with Rusal. Potanin wants to say further a third part company, Metallinvest, a steel and iron ore producer, to the mix.

On June 30, Norilsk shareholders elected three Deripaska supporters to the board, as well as four Potanin backers and a couple of independents. It’s up to this diverse group to elect out the kind of comes next.

Although Kremlin policymakers are not backing either side, they want a megamerger to happen. The government helped turn Gazprom into one of the planet’s biggest energy companies, but Russia has nothing of equivalent mass in metals and burrowing. True, Rusal, through $17 billion in sales, is second globally in aluminum after Rio Tinto, and Norilsk (sales:$14.3 billion) is tops in nickel. But being of the kind which a standalone operation neither has the heft of its biggest, utmost diversified rivals such as BHP Billiton (BHP), Rio Tinto (RTP), and Brazil’s Vale (RIO). With a combined capitalization of $100 billion and revenues of more than $30 billion, Rusal-Norilsk would high degree in the world’s uppermost five mining companies.

The proposed hookup would follow years of solidification in the industry. According to Ernst & Young, the value of merger-and-acquisition deals in metals and mining rose to almost $211 billion continue year. Diversification makes companies not so much weak to a fall in prices, and as commodity producers join together, their bargaining power over customers increases. Another factor, notes Andre Frick, an analyst at Credit Suisse Group (CS) in Zurich, is a global shortage of skilled labor and equipment. “It’s cheaper to buy [mines] than to build,” he says.

There’s a lot of haggling to do in advance of the Russians produce a mining giant. But in early June, Mikhail Prokhorov, a former Norilsk CEO and partner of Potanin’s who now backs Deripaska, described every final merger as “inevitable.” The forces that tell—the Kremlin, the oligarchs, and top investors—all want it to happen.

VIENNA, Austria Austria’s governing coalition crumbled Monday after months of acrimony, and new elections are expected viewed like early as September.

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The national sparring began with Vice Chancellor Wilhelm Molterer, leader of the conservatory People’s Party, calling Monday morning notwithstanding new elections.

Within hours, the Social Democrats appeared to have accepted the require by means of presenting their top candidate for the campaign, Transportation Minister Werner Faymann.

Early national elections be manifest likely to be held in mid-to-late September. Parliament was expected to take the necessary steps to authorize the election within days.

The two parties have been bickering subsequently to forging their “grand coalition” in at daybreak 2007 following the October 2006 elections that gave the Social Democrats a slight lead.

“The truth is that they (the People’s Party) never accepted the October 2006 election results,” said Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer of the Social Democrats.

Speculation about new elections had circulated for some age, with a the gross point of contention being any apparent EU wisdom reversal by the Social Democratic leadership.

In an open letter published late last month by the tabloid Kronen Zeitung, Gusenbauer and Faymann said they would seek referendums on future changes to the EU’s repair treaty that pertain to Austrian interests, as well as Turkey’s possible accession to the 27-nation bloc.

Austria’s parliament had ratified the treaty in April - a move Gusenbauer had supported back then.

But Gusenbauer, whose popular regard has plummeted amid dissatisfaction from members of his own company, said he had a change of heart about the EU treaty, citing the results of a recent study showing that singly 28 percent of Austrians have a positive image of the EU.

His unexpected notification in the tabloid, co-signed by Faymann, angered the People’s Party.

Molterer said he would recommend forward elections with senior People’s Party officials Tuesday. He accused the Social Democrats of being self-centered and lacking leadership and address.

“Good work in Austria’s federal government … is no longer feasible,” he said at a hastily called news conference. “I therefore make acceptable close, prompt new elections.”

“I cannot watch - and cannot endure - the (Social Democrats’) crisis … become a crisis toward Austria,” Molterer declared.

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"There is little public policy-makers can, or should, do to make up for for untenable financial decisions," Paulson told a forum on mortgage lending to moderate and medium-income homeowners.

He related flatter sales of existing homes in recent months implied more stabilizing in home-buying demand boundary warned foreclosures stemming from a trappings correction that began in 2006 likely enjoin continue for some time.

Paulson said that Treasury is continuing its efforts to assist "preventable foreclosures," chiefly among low- and moderate-income mob who fell behind on payments when their variable-rate loans reset at higher rates.

Since last July, about 1.7 million homeowners have completed lend workouts that be favored with allowed them to stay in their homes, Paulson aforesaid.

He urged Congress to speed up its efforts on a reform bill governing the activities of government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae (FNM.N) and Freddie Mac (FRE.N), which he uttered played vital roles in providing mortgage financing. In particular, the GSEs need a strong regulator to make sure they operate upon the body safe and true principles, Paulson said.

He said that since the covering correction began, the market for subprime loans — typically made to borrowers with limited or spotty credit histories — has virtually disappeared.

"We must not lose the benefits of the subprime market as we eliminate its flaws," Paulson uttered.

He said Treasury was working by other regulators to notice whether covered bonds that provide funds through secured debt instruments backed by a pool of residential pledge loans might be a viable way to increase mortgage funding

(Reporting by Glenn Somerville; Editing by James Dalgleish)

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