Suit: Blacks steered into subprime loans
LOS ANGELES, March 14 (UPI) -- Wells Fargo Bank and HSBC Bank intentionally steered African-Americans who qualified for conventional mortgages into costlier subprime loans, a lawsuit claims.
The suit, filed Friday by the civil rights group the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, stems from governmental and advocacy group studies indicating that blacks are more likely to wind up with higher-cost subprime loans than whites, even though their income, assets and credit scores are similar, The Los Angeles Times reported.
NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous told the Times that many subprime lenders were subsidiaries or affiliates of mainstream banks, and that when the lenders opened in minority neighborhoods previously underserved by banks, 'the consumers trusted them, because for generations banks and financial institutions had been considered worthy of trust.'
Wells Fargo, based in San Francisco, and HSBC, based in London, denied the allegations, with Wells Fargo releasing a statement saying the suit was 'unfounded and reckless,' adding, 'We have never tolerated, and will never tolerate, discrimination in any way, shape or form.'
Sidley Austin lays off 89 lawyers
CHICAGO, March 14 (UPI) -- One of Chicago's top law firms has laid of 89 lawyers and 140 staffers, a leaked internal memo indicates.
The memo said Sidley Austin's London office also would be downsized, although few details were included, The Chicago Tribune reported.
Citing the global economic downturn, Sidley Austin officials said they were aligning the firm's staffing levels to match the volume of expected work in the next 12 to 18 months. The firm reportedly has more than 1,800 lawyers in 16 offices worldwide.
'A proper alignment of capacity to demand is not just about financial performance,' firm officials said in the memo. 'It is necessary for keeping all of our personnel fully productive and professionally satisfied -- and for the maintenance of our overall morale and competitive position.'
Washington Post cuts business section
WASHINGTON, March 14 (UPI) -- The Washington Post Saturday said it will fold its business coverage into the newspaper's 'A' section, further trimming the size of the daily newspaper.
The move to eliminate the Post's stand-alone business page six days per week will enable drastic reductions of its printed stock tables and trim the number of daily sections from five to four, Post officials said.
'From a reader-experience point of view, having business and economic news in the A section -- overlapping with national, international, political and policy news -- makes a great deal of sense,' Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli said in an interview with his newspaper Friday, indicating it likely means many business stories would receive less prominence in the future.
The Post said it had earlier eliminated the Sunday Source and Book World sections, as well as combining the Sunday Arts and Style sections.
Recession cuts trash flow to landfills
WASHINGTON, March 14 (UPI) -- A reduction in trash being sent to U.S. dumps and landfills is serving as another indicator of the economic downturn, landfill managers say.
A country that in better times was putting 254 million tons of refuse per year into landfills has seen that flow steadily decrease, in some cases by as much as 30 percent, The Washington Post reported Saturday.
'The trash man is the first one to know about a recession because we see it first,' Richard Weber, manager of the Loudoun County, Va., landfill, told the Post. 'Circuit City's closing, so people aren't going there and buying those big boxes of stuff and throwing away all that Styrofoam and shrink-wrap … and whatever they were replacing.'
Weber said that trash volume has declined to the point that instead of running out of space in 2012 as expected, the Loudon landfill will gain an extra 18 months of use.
Some landfill managers say they are laying off workers, Richard Doucette, a waste program manager with the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, told the newspaper.
'Normally garbage is a pretty steady business because everybody wants to get rid of it,' Doucette said.