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Anonymous ID: efa0e7 Aug. 23, 2020, 6:38 a.m. No.10391394   🗄️.is đź”—kun

Abe ties Sato for longest uninterrupted term as Japan PM

 

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe brought up his 2,798th consecutive day in office on Sunday, tying him with his great uncle Eisaku Sato, who served between 1964 and 1972, for staying in the top government post for the longest uninterrupted term.

 

When combined with his short 2006-2007 stint, Abe, who returned to power in late 2012, has spent more than 3,000 days in office, eclipsing Taro Katsura, who led the country for 2,886 days in the early 1900s. Aside from Abe, there are only 10 people who have served as the country's prime minister for more than 1,000 consecutive days, including his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi, at 1,241 days.

 

Still, a rough road is expected ahead as Abe scrambles to leave what can be called a legacy amid the chinavirus pandemic. The prime minister hopes to achieve his long-held hope of constitutional reform before his term as the head of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party ends in September next year.

 

The course of his remaining tenure, however, is clouded, as speculation is rife that he is not in the best of health after he reportedly vomited blood in July and made a hospital visit earlier this month. In addition, the chinavirus has taken a serious toll on the country's economy and has given rise to criticism of his government's response.

 

Economic recovery under his key economic policies, dubbed Abenomics, has been wiped out by the pandemic forcing many businesses to close and people to stay at home. The country's annualized gross domestic product for the April-June quarter stood at 485 trillion yen ($4.6 trillion), lower than the 504 trillion yen in the January-March period of 2013 or the first quarterly GDP after Abe reassumed power.

 

The size of the latest GDP is equivalent to that of the three months ended June 2011 when the world's third largest economy was whacked by the devastating earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis in northeastern Japan. As Japan strives to fight against the new coronavirus, Abe has come under fire for the slow distribution and poor quality of government-sponsored cloth face masks.

 

He also met criticism for pushing a tourism promotion campaign this summer despite the resurgence of virus infections. His government had to make a last-minute change to exclude Tokyo residents from the subsidy program to address concerns over a spike in new cases in the capital.

https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20200823/p2g/00m/0na/012000c

Anonymous ID: efa0e7 Aug. 23, 2020, 7:26 a.m. No.10391736   🗄️.is đź”—kun   >>1788 >>1841 >>1910 >>1967

Bank of America customer opens mobile app and finds an extra US$2.45B

 

Days after Citigroup Inc. made headlines for accidentally sending US$900 million to a group of lenders, a Bank of America Corp. customer in Massachusetts opened his account to find an even bigger cash infusion: US$2.45 billion.

 

But the money was never really there.

 

“This was a display error and nothing more than that,” Bank of America spokesman Bill Halldin said. “It’s been corrected.”

 

The customer, psychiatrist Blaise Aguirre, said he initially figured Bank of America would discover the error itself. When that didn’t happen, he reached out to his relationship manager to inquire about the mysterious money. This week, after being contacted by Bloomberg, the bank fixed the issue with Aguirre’s Merrill Lynch account.

 

It hasn’t been as easy for Citigroup, in its role as administrative agent on a loan to Revlon Inc., to erase mistaken payments sent to the cosmetic giant’s lenders. While some willingly sent back the funds, the bank has been locked in a bitter legal battle with hedge funds including Brigade Capital Management and HPS Investment Partners, which refuse to return the payments.

 

Benjamin Finestone, a lawyer for Brigade and HPS, told a judge in proceedings this week that the firms don’t concede the transfer was a mistake. Citigroup, for its part, said the funds’ actions “threaten the integrity of the administrative agency function and trust in the global banking system.”

 

At Bank of America, the multibillion-dollar mishap wasn’t the first involving customer accounts. Earlier this month, the lender had a temporary display issue that caused some online and mobile-banking clients to see inaccurate balances. That mistake, however, wasn’t as potentially lucrative as Aguirre’s US$2.45 billion mirage: Their accounts were showing balances of US$0.

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/bank-of-america-customer-opens-mobile-app-and-finds-an-extra-us-2-45b-1.1483374