Six on "our" Economy: Turf War Blocked CFPB From Helping Fix Student Loan Forgiveness Program; Charted: These Giant Companies Make Millions Every Day; Oil firms to pour extra 7m barrels per day into markets; Signalman of the Utah Copper Company at it
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"Starting early last year, the nation's most powerful consumer protection agency sent examiners into companies that run student loan call centers to try to fix a troubled loan forgiveness program. But the Department of Education blocked the bureau from getting the information it needed, NPR has learned.
NATIONAL
Senators Press CFPB To Dig Into Public Service Loan Forgiveness Problems
The Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program is designed to help firefighters, military service members, nonprofit workers and others. But thousands of people say they were treated unfairly and rejected.
One of them was Wendy Feliciano, a police sergeant in the Bronx borough of New York City. In 2007, she heard about the program, which promises public service workers that if they make qualifying student loan payments for 10 years, their remaining student loan debt will be forgiven.
Wendy Feliciano is in the Army Reserve and is a sergeant in the New York Police Department. After 10 years of loan payments, she was told she was in the wrong repayment plan to qualify for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. "This is a complete scam," she says.
That sounded great to Feliciano. She owed about $40,000. So she called the number on her loan statement and says she was told "you qualify for the program."
Feliciano says she was told she didn't need to do anything, just to keep making her payments and she'd be all set. So she did that. But a decade later, she was told she didn't qualify because she'd been in the wrong type of repayment plan and so none of those payments counted.
"I was really angry and really frustrated," Feliciano says. "I told everybody this is a complete scam."
Exclusive: Turf War Blocked CFPB From Helping Fix Student Loan Forgivene...
The Trump administration blocked the nation's top consumer protection agency from digging into problems with a p...
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Charted: These Giant Companies Make Millions Every Day
- 70 companies around the world earn over $1 million in profits in one hour or less.
- Globally, the corporate profit pool is expected to shrink to 8% in 2025 from 10% today.
- In the United States, corporate profits remain below their 2014 peak.
- Saudi Aramco, the world’s most profitable company, is planning an IPO in 2020 in the face of attacks on its facilities.
One way to make the enormity of annual profits more comprehensible is to instead measure daily profits, and we’ll take this strategy for our analysis. The data comes from the latest rankings of the Fortune Global 500. Our viz uses a radial stacked bar chart to compare the daily profits of the top twenty most profitable companies. A darker shade indicates a higher profit.
Top 10 Most Profitable Companies on Earth
1. Saudi Aramco: $304.04 M daily - Earns $1 M in 4.7 minutes
2. Apple: $163.1 M daily - Earns $1 M in 8.8 minutes
3. Industrial & Commercial Bank of China: $123.29 M daily - Earns $1M in 11.7 minutes
4. Samsung Electronics: $109.3 M daily - Earns $1 M in 13.2 minutes
5. China Construction Bank: $105.48 M daily - Earns $1 M in 13.7 minutes
6. JPMorgan Chase & Co.: $88.97 M daily - Earns $1 M in 16.2 minutes
7. Alphabet: $84.21 M daily - Earns $1 M in 17.1 minutes
8. Agricultural Bank of China: $83.99 M daily - Earns $1 M in 17.1 minutes
9. Bank of America Corp.: $77.12 M daily - Earns $1 M in 18.7 minutes
10. Bank of China: $74.59 M daily - Earns $1 M in 19.3 minutes
To standardize the analysis of the world’s biggest corporate earnings, we’ve also calculated how long it takes each of the ten most profitable companies worldwide to earn $1 million in profits. It’s well under half an hour for each -- by the time you’ve finished reading this article, you can count on tens of thousands more. Most of the top ten operate in either the banking or technology industries, with headquarters in the United States or Asia (namely, China).
The one exception: Saudi Aramco. The Saudi national energy company is the most profitable on earth, nearly doubling that of the second-place Apple. Saudi Aramco is going public in 2020, floating up to 10% of the company. This is planned in the face of recent attacks on its oil facilities and mounting tensions among Saudi Arabia, Iran and the United States, among other countries.
The Asian firms on the list, with the exception of Samsung, are state-owned Chinese banks. Amid the trade war with the United States, Chinese banks have been reluctant to lend. The Chinese central bank in response has left interest rates unchanged in the face of declining rates worldwide. These policies will have mixed effects on the profitability of these so-called “Big Four” Chinese banks."
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"Increasingly, U.S. shale firms appear unable to pay back investors for the money borrowed to fuel the last decade of the fracking boom. In a similar vein, those companies also seem poised to stiff the public on cleanup costs for abandoned oil and gas wells once the producers have moved on.
“It’s starting to become out of control, and we want to rein this in,” Bruce Hicks, Assistant Director of the North Dakota Oil and Gas Division, said in August about companies abandoning oil and gas wells. If North Dakota’s regulators, some of the most industry-friendly in the country, are sounding the alarm, then that doesn’t bode well for the rest of the nation.
In fact, officials in North Dakota are using Pennsylvania as an example of what they want to avoid when it comes to abandoned wells, and with good reason.
The first oil well drilled in America was in Pennsylvania in 1859, and the oil and gas industry has been drilling — and abandoning — wells there ever since. Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) says that while it only has documentation of 8,000 orphaned and abandoned wells, it estimates the state actually has over a half million.
“We anticipate as many as 560,000 are in existence that we just don’t know of yet,” DEP spokesperson Laura Fraley told StateImpact Pennsylvania. “There’s no responsible party and so it’s on state government to pay to have those potential environmental and public health hazards remediated.”
According to StateImpact, “The state considers any well that doesn’t produce oil and gas for a calendar year to be an abandoned well.”
That first oil well drilled in Pennsylvania was 70 feet deep. Modern fracked wells, however, can be well over 10,000 feet in total length (most new fracked wells are drilled vertically to a depth where they turn horizontal to fracture the shale that contains the oil and gas). Because the longer the total length of the well, the more it costs to clean up, the funding required to properly clean up and cap wells has grown as drillers have continued to use new technologies to greatly extend well lengths. Evidence from the federal government points to the potential for these costs being shifted to the tax-paying public.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report this September about the risks from insufficient bonds to reclaim wells on public lands. It said, “the bonds operators provide as insurance are often not enough to cover the costs of this cleanup.” The report cited a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) official’s estimate of $10 a foot for well cleanup costs.
StateImpact Pennsylvania noted that costs to reclaim a well could add up to $20,000, and DEP spokesperson Fraley said they could be “much, much higher.” The GAO report noted that “low-cost wells typically cost about $20,000 to reclaim, and high-cost wells typically cost about $145,000 to reclaim.”
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