Daily Archives: May 15, 2009

Straw drops secret inquest plans

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Hooray! According to BBC NEWS,

The government is dropping plans to hold secret inquests without juries, Justice Secretary Jack Straw has said.

In a Commons written statement, Mr Straw said the move did not command the necessary cross-party support, despite earlier government concessions.

It was included in the Coroners and Justice Bill earlier this year to cover cases involving sensitive information.

Civil liberties groups who feared cases like that of Jean Charles de Menezes would be affected, welcomed the move.

The government had argued that in some cases inquests should be held in private for national security, crime prevention or diplomatic reasons.

Financial epiphanies

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From Nick Paumgarten’s piece on the decline of high finance in the current New Yorker…

A private-equity executive I talked to said that he sensed the jig was up when his cleaning woman — “from Nicaragua or El Salvador of wherever the fuck she’s from” — took out a subprime loan to buy a house in Virginia. She drove down with her husband every weekend from New York, six hours each way, to fix it up for resale. They cleared sixty-five thousand dollars on the deal, in a matter of months. To many, this would have been proof that America is a land of opportunity, but to him it signalled a fatal imbalance between obligation and means.

One could find many similar stories from the UK ‘buy-to-let’ bubble. At the height of the bubble, British buy-to-let speculators didn’t really care whether they had tenants for their properties because the capital value was escalating so quickly that renting didn’t seem worth the hassle — or the agency fees.