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At just over 3 percent of gross domestic product, total U.S. military spending is almost $600 billion a year, constitutes around 5 percent of total national industrial output, and accounts for a major share of the economy in certain regions across the U.S., including as much as 13 percent in Virginia and about 6 percen...
Since 2010, however, the defense budget has been steadily declining. As the U.S. military ramps down its presence overseas, and military industries are squeezed by long-term trends on multiple fronts, how will the American economy fare?
This question framed a recent event hosted by the Foreign Policy and Economic Studies programs at Brookings, and moderated by Director of Research for Foreign Policy Michael O’Hanlon. Former Federal Reserve Chair and Distinguished Economics Fellow in Residence Ben Bernanke joined the discussion, along with the Metropol...
Mark Muro echoed Bernanke’s sentiment regarding the importance of technological advances resulting from defense funding, arguing that in many respects, the defense budget has functioned as the nation’s de facto economic development policy.
Though Muro praised the military’s frequent and important investments in technology, he warned that recent and forecasted declines in defense funding make it critical to ensure that the nation retains a broad, national strategic plan for economic growth.
“As we think about the size of the military, [we must] consider the rest of our economic strategy and ensure that we protect and build these industries,” said Muro.
When it comes to the workforce participation, Michael O’Hanlon pointed out that there are currently 1.4 million active duty members of the military, plus an additional civilian workforce that is nearly 800,00 strong working for the Department of Defense and around 900,000 men and women in the reserves, which altogether...
Bernanke noted that the need to employ 1.4 million active duty soldiers is itself a cost borne by the rest of the economy. This cost could be mitigated by the training and skills that the soldiers subsequently take to the civilian economy. Unfortunately, Bernanke said, the research suggests that a soldier re-entering t...
Nonetheless, while in uniform, U.S. military personnel today are reasonably well compensated, O’Hanlon argued, with the latest DOD study on the issue suggesting that overall compensation (not including pensions) for enlisted military personnel of given age, experience and skill levels exceeded that for about 85 percent...
Switzerland claimed pole position for the Sprint and Feature races at the A1GP World Cup of Motorsport in Malaysia courtesy of a sensational performance from Neel Jani in qualifying at the Sepang International Circuit.
Nani will start the Sprint race from the front for the third consecutive season at Sepang before leading the drivers off the grid for the 50th time in the afternoon’s feature race.
The Swiss driver continued his magnificent form around the circuit by setting the quickest lap during the first Sprint race qualifying segment before snatching pole ahead of France and Loic Duval with a faster second-session time.
Great Britain’s Oliver Jarvis and German rookie Michael Ammermuller will line-up on the second row, with Canada’s Robert Wickens and championship leader Jonny Reid of New Zealand making up the third row.
After topping the timesheets in the Sprint race qualifying, Jani stamped his authority on the weekend by taking pole for the Feature race in the closing minute of the session.
He produced an outstanding lap of one minute 47.658 seconds, which was almost a second quicker than Jarvis who will line-up alongside him on the front row.
Germany’s Ammermuller and Frenchman Duval make up the second row, ahead of Netherlands’ Jeroen Bleekemolen and Brazilian rookie Sergio Jimenez.
Great Britain’s Jarvis set the pace in Friday practice and despite problems on Saturday, will start the Sprint race from third and the Feature race from second.
“We put on a new set of tyres for qualifying one and the difference was amazing. Unfortunately it just caught me out as the car had a lot of oversteer,” he said.
AKRON, Ohio --It will feel like winter in the morning and spring in the afternoon Friday in Akron. There's also a slight chance of rain and snow, and gusty winds will make colder temperatures seem frigid.
In the morning, commuters will need to dress warmly for temperatures in the upper 30s and low 40s. A slight breeze will make it feel closer to the 20s.
There's a slight chance of a wintry mix early. If showers do end up developing, they will be light and should not cause problems on roads.
Winds will speed up in the afternoon to nearly 20 mph, but with temperatures warming to 50 degrees, wind chills won't feel as intense. The slight chance of showers will continue, but if they pop up in the afternoon you can expect rain instead of a wintry mix.
A very slim chance of flurries is ahead for the evening as things cool back down into the 30s.
Kelly Reardon is cleveland.com's meteorologist. Please follow me on Facebook and Twitter @KellyRWeather.
The underwriters of Wednesday’s luncheon and fashion show missed the event—because they were attending their grandson’s bris.
Grandma and Grandpa weren’t going to miss it, no matter what.
ended brief remarks with optimism. “The cure is on the horizon.
much, though she had a moment of brain freeze regarding the lipstick.
then launched into a call to arms for the foundation’s goals.
Herrera boutique that was set up after the luncheon.
Shih Tzu as a door prize and the Yorkshire Terrier for $1,500.
buyer pick up the little angel later from the seller?
suits were in somber shades–navy, black, aubergine, and gray.
Will that look fly in DC? We’ll see come fall.
At least 9 dead as fire incinerates N….
PARADISE, Calif. (AP) — A fierce wildfire in Northern California incinerated most of a town of about 30,000 people with flames that moved so fast there was nothing firefighters could do, authorities said Friday. Nine people died in what quickly grew into the state’s most destructive fire in at least a century.
A federal judge this week sternly rebuked the city manager of Monte Sereno for destroying several computer hard drives in defiance of a court order, marking one of the biggest twists yet in a couple’s colorful, yearslong battle with the tiny, tony enclave.
Joe and Darla Padgett’s crusade began eight years ago amid a squabble over a wooden fence and has since ballooned into a full-fledged feud, involving threats, an expletive-laden letter and a handful of back-and-forth lawsuits. It was one of those suits that had the destroyed hard drives at its heart. Wading in, U.S. Di...
Ware’s ruling documents several instances in which Loventhal, without the court’s consent or knowledge, had ordered employees to throw out or tamper with hard drives, including the one in his own laptop.
So, what might that evidence have involved?
This particular suit was sparked in part by a threatening letter the Padgetts received in 2004, demanding that they “get out of this town.” Months later, the Padgetts did. They moved to Seattle.
After Loventhal was linked to an article that was sent with the letter, Lisa Rice, his former administrative assistant, confessed to writing it on her own volition and without anyone knowing about it. Rice is also named as defendant in the suit but she has not responded to the complaint.
Loventhal could not be reached Friday, but City Attorney Kirsten Powell said the Padgetts needn’t start celebrating yet.
“We disagree with the ruling,” said Powell, who contends all the information on the hard drives that a court order protected was made available to the Padgetts. “There was no malice or ill will. Nothing was intentionally destroyed.
The trouble began in 1999, when the Padgetts were building their $2.5 million dream home in Monte Sereno, one of a strip of posh, pastoral communities nestled in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The city sued the couple over a fence that was too tall by city standards, an expired building permit and a tree th...
They accused Loventhal, who also was the city’s Planning Director, of being impartial with enforcing codes and demanded that he be stripped of that role.
The Padgetts settled the suit but there were several others along the way. All were dropped or settled except the one involving the recent ruling, a civil rights suit.
Darla Padgett on Friday said her family has spent millions fighting the city to send a message.
“I want to raise my son to know that his civil rights are sacred, so sacred that his parents are willing to go to the wall to stand up for them,” she said.
Ware’s ruling is effectively considered a win for the Padgetts in their case against Loventhal. A hearing on damages is expected in January after a trial involving the remaining defendant and city councilman Curtis Wright, who referred calls to Powell.
Powell said the city, since 2002, has spent $415,000 tangling with the Padgetts in court. That could go up depending on whether – and how much – damages are awarded to the Padgetts.
This installment of the Star Log.EM-series clocks in at 9 pages, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 3 pages of SRD, leaving us with 4 pages of content, so let’s take a look!
Hej. Wait. Yep, you’d be right – the Kitsune is obviously not a race featured in the Starfinder Core Rules. Its Starfinder iteration was released in the Starfarer’s Companion by Rogue Genius Games. Since both RGG’s Starfinder supplements and those of Everyman Gaming share the implicit setting of the Xa-Osoro system, th...
That being said, this pdf absolutely requires Starfarer’s Companion to properly work.
select this trick.“ In an obvious cut-copy-paste-glitch. Realistic Likeness builds on the change shape racial trait and allows you to assume forms other than the specific forms and alternate kitsune forms. This has a synergy effect with the previous feat, just fyi.
Now, the kyubi paragon archetype provides alternate class features at 2nd and 9th level. At 2nd level, we get chakra, which lets you select two spells from the Two Tail Spell-array in Starfarer’s Companion. 1/day as a move action, you may add one of these spells to list of spells that you can cast with the Magical Tail...
Whenever a feat or class feature would net a character the option to select a spell via the Magical tail feat, he may instead elect to learn a kyubi trick. Tricks are grouped in 2 categories: Two Tail tricks require 1 feat; Five Tail Tricks require 4 feats. Yes, alas, this means that the most potent of kitsune tricks a...
Among the Five Tail Tricks, we can find a pounce-like feat: When using Shot on the Run, charging or using Spring Attack, you may make an Acrobatics check (not a big fan of DC being partially based on CR of the foe, but oh well – the cost does prevent abuse here). On a success, you get to make two attacks with the trigg...
The pdf closes with a flavorful, brief description of kyubi in the Xa-Osoro system.
Editing and formatting are very good, I noticed no serious hiccups. Layout adheres to Everyman Gaming’s nice two-column full-color standard for the series and the pdf comes with a nice artwork in full color. The pdf has no bookmarks, but needs none at this length.
Alexander Augunas’ kyubi paragon is a concept that is near and dear to my heart. The execution of the kyubi in Starfinder is interesting, flavorful, and makes good use of the material from the Starfarer’s Companion, building on it in a tight and interesting manner. Now, granted, I wished that this was a longer file – I...
Missed the Starfarer’s Companion? That tome can be found here!
It was already March, and negotiations around the distressed power company Energy Future Holdings appeared to be going nowhere.
Attorneys working for owners KKR & Co. and TPG had maybe two months before EFH went into default. A handful of creditors were ready to cut a deal to break up the more than century-old company. But a powerful group of senior lenders, who controlled more than half the company’s $40 billion in debt, was balking at the tax...
And then the word came in. They were willing to talk.
The decision by EFH to split up the company and file for bankruptcy last week was the culmination of an almost two-year negotiation pitting some of Wall Street’s powerful figures against each other in a test of financial strategy and gamesmanship.
Court documents and interviews with people close to the talks depict a process in which EFH’s owners slowly came to the realization in summer 2012 that the company could not sustain itself under its $40 billion debt structure. But the negotiation was a series of starts and stops, hindered by the fact everyone at the ta...
And when 2014 began, KKR’s Henry Kravis and TPG’s David Bonderman faced a chorus of investment firms that had bought their debt on the cheap and were ready with battle plans to fight them for every penny of value in EFH.
Among them was rival private equity firm Apollo Global Management, led by billionaire Leon Black. Apollo, along with investment firms Oaktree Capital Management and Centerbridge Partners, bought their debt in EFH’s power generation and retail arm with what many believe was the expectation of one day taking over the bus...
But according to an affidavit filed by EFH CFO Paul Keglevic this week, the firms rejected the plan to break up the company earlier this year. At issue was a deal structure that would give them control but leave them with a big bill for capital gains tax from the IRS.
To some watching the proceedings, the move was right out of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. By virtue of the amount of debt they controlled, any deal would have to involve the first-lien creditors. Ultimately, they would have to accept the deal to avoid a long, drawn out bankruptcy. But waiting it out set them up to get agre...
TXU Corp. traced its history to the late 1800s with the arrival of the first electric lights in Dallas.
More than a century later the company’s millions of customers and fleet of power plants had fallen onto the radar of KKR and TPG. Kravis had revolutionized the field of buying out publicly traded companies with his famed takeover of the food and tobacco giant RJR Nabisco in 1988.
Bonderman, who had cut his teeth working for the Bass family in Fort Worth, had helped turn TPG into arguably the most successful private equity firm in the country. Known as “Bondo,” he reportedly hired the Rolling Stones and John Mellencamp to play his 60th birthday party at a Las Vegas casino.
By late 2007, their respective firms, along with the private equity arm of Goldman Sachs, had a deal to buy out the shareholders of the former TXU Corp. for $45 billion. In the largest leveraged buyout in U.S. history, the firms were betting that power prices in Texas were poised to rise. And with the state’s steady ec...
What they didn’t realize was hydraulic fracturing techniques were about to open up vast deposits of natural gas in Texas and Pennsylvania. By 2009 natural gas prices were dropping fast, and with them the wholesale price of power in Texas.
The whole U.S. power sector would be affected. But at EFH, which took on more than $30 billion in new debt at the time of the buyout, the development sent alarm through the company’s headquarters in the Energy Plaza building in downtown Dallas.
The company was all right for the time being. At the time of the buyout, financial hedges had been placed on the vast majority of its power supply, limiting the upside but protecting EFH against a sustained fall in commodity prices.
Still, in October 2009 EFH decided to buy itself some more time. The 2008 economic collapse had brought interest rates down dramatically. By refinancing, EFH was able to reduce its debt by $2.5 billion and extend principal payments well into the next decade.
The only question was how long power prices would stay low. There was hope in many corners of the company that the fall in gas prices was just a blip. It had happened before, and they always came back up, often to great peaks.
But as the years dragged on and the hedges neared their expiration, optimism dimmed. By July 2012 executives were faced with almost two straight years of quarterly losses, totaling more than $6.2 billion. The decision was made by the owners: It was time to open up talks with creditors about restructuring the $40 billio...
The windup was slow, according to people close to the talks. For the company, there was always the hope that power prices would rise and it could recover. And creditors had little desire to cut off the close to $4billion a year in interest payments they were getting from EFH.
CEO John Young, who was hired away from power company Exelon to run EFH shortly after the buyout, advocated from the beginning it was in the best interest of security holders to keep the company together. The EFH board agreed. A breakup could trigger a more than $6 billion tax bill and potentially damage the company’s ...
But they faced a daunting task.
To appease state politicians wary of Wall Street taking over Texas’ largest power generator, the private equity firms agreed in 2007 to separate the transmission company Oncor from EFH. That kept it protected from the larger company’s enormous debt load, but it also forced the creation of a hugely complex corporate str...
Creditors on the power generation and retail side had watched the value of their loans and bonds plummet since 2007. But Oncor’s profits were controlled by the state utility board, and debt in Energy Future Intermediate Holding had held steady.
If EFH was to stay together, the two sides would need to agree on a restructuring.
Already wrenches were being thrown into the process by junior creditors, who were largely shut out of talks. Aurelius Capital Management, which bought a block of EFH debt in 2011, sued the company in March 2013 claiming it had fraudulently been moving money between its divisions at the expense of creditors.
The case was dismissed by a federal judge earlier this year. But it was just the beginning.
Billions of dollars of debt is going to be wiped out, some controlled by powerful players like U.S. hedge fund giant Appaloosa Management. And from the start, no one expected the firms to go away quietly.
Talks bore on through summer 2013, and into the fall. KKR and TPG tried to sell a restructuring plan in which they would file for Chapter 11 and hand over control of EFH to the creditors.
Apollo and other senior lenders were on board. But the EFIH creditors at the table were having none of it and argued for breaking up the company so they could take over the highly profitable transmission business.
It started leaking out to the media that Apollo and Oaktree were pressuring the company to file for bankruptcy immediately to avoid a $270 million interest payment due junior creditors Nov. 1. But EFH didn’t budge, holding out for a deal that would hopefully get the company in and out of bankruptcy court quickly.
The breakdown in talks was indicative of how much more complicated the situation had become. Once EFH started showing signs of financial trouble, firms specializing in an arena of investing known as distressed debt started strategically buying positions across its various debt classes.
A tactic being employed by some of the firms was to buy up EFIH debt around what those in the business call the “fulcrum security,” roughly the point at which the outstanding debts exceed the value of the company.
If investors can position themselves on both sides of that line, they have bought themselves a seat at the negotiating table, said Stephen Pezanosky, a bankruptcy attorney with Haynes & Boone.
“You don’t worry about the ones that are fully secured. And you don’t worry about the ones out of the money. It’s the guys around the line you watch,” he said.
After what happened in October, EFH gave up on the idea of keeping the company together, Keglevic wrote in his affidavit.
KKR, TPG and Goldman went about developing a new plan. There was no choice. They would need to break up the company.
By the early part of the new year, Third Avenue had come on board along with other EFIH creditors. Among them was Boston-based Fidelity Investments, which owned so much debt across so many different levels it seemed to be competing against itself.

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