Federal Aid

A long-standing proposal to build a high-speed maglev train from Las Vegas to Anaheim will finally receive $45 million in federal funds that were approved several years ago to pay for the project's final planning and environmental analysis, the Nevada governor's office announced Wednesday. Gov. Jim Gibbons said the Federal Railroad Administration will administer the money that was earmarked by Congress for the first phase of the system, which would extend from Las Vegas to Primm on the Nevada-California state line.

A legislative committee Wednesday gave fast-track approval to a bill to funnel $839 million in federal stimulus money into California's insolvent unemployment insurance fund, but the benefits may not help California's 1.9 million jobless before late next year. The Employment Development Department, which sends out unemployment benefit checks, said it needed 18 months to modernize its 3-decade-old computer system.

Would a governor in a state with the third-highest unemployment rate in the nation really say no to President Obama's stimulus money? That is the question reverberating through South Carolina, where Republican Mark Sanford -- a popular second-term governor and noted fiscal conservative -- says he may reject some of the $2.8 billion in federal funds headed to his state. Some observers suspect that the governor, who is regularly mentioned as a presidential contender in 2012, is just grandstanding.

Some cities have decided the best way to use their federal stimulus funds is to barter with other municipalities, prompting a warning Tuesday that some of these transactions are prohibited. At least three Southland cities are proposing to swap their anticipated share of federal money earmarked for highway improvements for funds that they could use as they see fit.

President Obama announced Monday that highway projects spurred by the administration's $787-billion economic stimulus plan are coming in "ahead of schedule and under budget," but the program's early success may owe more to the depth of the economic crisis than to any newfound efficiency in Washington. State governments, facing black-hole deficits, went into overdrive to grab a share of the $28 billion for highways and bridges that was provided in the stimulus bill.

California Democratic Rep. Mike Thompson lives in St. Helena and calls city officials there by their first names. The Napa Valley town also is home to a vineyard owned by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and her husband. Yet the town spent about $150,000 during the first six months of this year on a Washington lobbyist, more than Philadelphia or St. Louis. St. Helena is just one of the cities, counties and states that have ramped up spending on lobbying as they look more to Washington for help in easing budget problems and getting a leg up on the competition in the scramble for federal funds.

Today is judgment day for the country's biggest banks as the government releases results of "stress tests" to gauge their stability, but Wall Street celebrated a day early after concluding that there would be no bombshells about the financial industry. As a group, the 19 banks are likely to be forced to add tens of billions of dollars to their front-line cushions of capital to guard against a deeper-than-expected recession.

The Treasury is unlikely to get back the full amount of money lent under the Troubled Asset Relief Program despite a recent spate of repayments from large banks, warned the program's watchdog. The program "played a significant role" in rescuing the financial system from a meltdown, Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for TARP, testified before the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday. But it was "extremely unlikely that the taxpayer will see a full return on its TARP investment," according to his prepared testimony.

The arrival of March is unlikely to bring much relief to a stock market battered by bad news throughout February. Trepidation is more like it after a month that saw the major indexes fall to their lowest levels in 12 years. The Dow Jones industrial average fell for the sixth straight month and is now worth less than half its record high of 14,164.53. All because no one has a clue about when the economy will begin to pull out of recession.

The major banks now collecting federal bailout money were not unwitting victims of the mortgage meltdown but instead were directly linked to the root cause of the problem: a subprime lending machine concentrated in Southern California, a new study asserts. The banks were "enablers that bankrolled the type of lending threatening the international financial system," according to the study being released today by the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington-based watchdog group.