After completion of FAFSA report the students afterwards knows what loans they had been awarded, but the biggest question which they get in mind is that how they will get the money. Federal Student Loans specially the Federal Stafford Loan are distributed to students in two ways, either Federal Direct (FDLP) or Federal Family Education (FFEL).

Federal Direct Loans

Federal Direct Loan’s requirements are non-flexible than the Federal Family Education Loans. That is because they are sent from the U.S. Treasury to the Department of Education. After that the check is received by the student’s school and it is presented to the student but before it has been applied to tuition, fees, room, and board and any other charges placed on the student by the school. If any amount left then that is given to the student either in form of check or cash. Read the full story

The Wall Street Journal reports that just two days after announcing plans to sell as much as $5 billion in shares of Citigroup, the U.S Treasury Department has canceled the sale.

This has been done due to the low prices that would have caused the agency to lose money.

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Citigroup Inc., who is the recipient of the biggest U.S. bank bailout, has struck a deal with regulators for repaying $20 billion to taxpayers and in order to escape government-imposed pay restrictions.

Citibank will raise funds with a Sale of $20.5 billion of equity and debt

Citigroup, is the only major U.S. lender that is still dependent on the government “exceptional financial assistance. The bank said in a statement today that with a sale of $20.5 billion of equity and debt the company will raise the funds.

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Citigroup Inc., who is the recipient of the biggest U.S. bank bailout, has struck a deal with regulators for repaying $20 billion to taxpayers and in order to escape government-imposed pay restrictions.

Citibank will raise funds with a Sale of $20.5 billion of equity and debt

Citigroup, is the only major U.S. lender that is still dependent on the government “exceptional financial assistance. The bank said in a statement today that with a sale of $20.5 billion of equity and debt the company will raise the funds.

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In response to the U.S. Treasury’s call to speed the process and help prevent foreclosures, Citigroup Inc has significantly boosted its mortgage modification offers this month.

In a report released on Tuesday, CitiMortgage said that it has already helped 108,000 homeowners in the last quarter to avoid potential foreclosure, a rise of nearly 30 percent over the previous period.

It has participated fully in the President Barack Obama’s Home Affordable Modification Program, known as HAMP, to ease loan terms for up to 4 million borrowers.

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Due to higher treasury rates, last week the mortgage rates went up a bit. 10-year U.S. Treasury rates were up at 3.65 percent compared to 3.30 percent of the week earlier. Still the rates are quite low if we see them in long-term historic perspective.

These low interest rates are bringing back the home buyers. It the trend continues, the housing crisis might be near it’s end. Mortgage re-finance activity is also picking up pace as result of low interest rates.

According to to Mortgage Banker’s Association the Refinance index rose more than 17 percent from the weak earlier.

National Association of Realtors also reported that Pending Nome Sales index is also creeping up slowly for last 4 weeks.

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Mortgage rates went down sharply last week. It is the sharpest decline we have seen over a peed of past few weeks. Home mortgage rates have come down intensively from the peak in June 2009. The most obvious reason for this is that world economy in general and US economy in particular is showing signs of late recovery. Some economic pundits are even saying that we have not seen the bottom yet!

Week Economic Outlook

Amidst of all this week economic data, and poor financial outlook, U.S. Treasury rates have declined significantly. Federal Reserve Bank is in no mood to touch the interest rate in near future. This situation is likely to keep Fed fund’s target rates between zero percent and one quarter of a percentage. U.S. economy is very less likely to rebound swiftly. Even European Union has also moved it forecast for economic recovery to late 2010 or early 2011.

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All of us who live in the United States, have spent all our lives looking at the same style of paper currency: those things that say “Federal Reserve Note” and have a dead President in the center of the bill in an oval frame. Every now and then the Bureau of Engraving and Printing starts distributing a new design of U.S. currency, we’ve started seeing some variations in the theme; certainly we get to see the details of the portrait engravers’ work much more clearly. Still, though, we rarely stop to appreciate the skill and artistry of the engravers… after all, it’s just money. We just take it out and spend it.

But what if the Bureau of Engraving and Printing decided, as they did in the 1890s, to use our paper money as a showcase for art?

Silver certificates are an older form of U.S. currency; their value was backed by silver held in the U.S. Treasury, and they could be redeemed at the Treasury for silver dollars. An 1886 Act of Congress authorized the creation of a new series of silver certificates, and so it came to pass that the Secretary of the Treasury gave the Bureau of Engraving and Printing the task of designing and printing the new currency.

Claude M. Johnson, then Chief of the BEP, had definite ideas about the role of art in paper money. By 1893 Johnson and the BEP had decided on four artists – the muralists Edwin H. Blashfield, Will H. Low, C. S. Reinhart and Walter Shirlaw – to design the new currency, and planned to award a commission of $800 for each design the BEP accepted.

1896 $1 USD Note

The noted artists, together with the BEP’s talented engravers, created a new currency of unparalleled beauty – extraordinary designs, the likes of which had never been seen before in the U.S. and have never been equalled since.

Will H. Low’s design for the $1 note

Will H. Low’s design for the $1 note, entitled History Instructing Youth, shows a female History with a young student standing beside her, gesturing to an open book of history before her. An olive branch rests against the book, holding it open to show the Constitution of the United States upon the page. Both the Washington Memorial and the Capitol Dome can be seen in the background landscape. The outside border of the note shows 23 wreaths, each bearing the name of a noteworthy American – not surprisingly starting with Washington, Jefferson and Franklin, but also including such names as poet Henry Longfellow, inventor Robert Fulton, and author Nathaniel Hawthorne, among many others. The seal of the Treasury appears in the lower right.

Low’s original painting, which now hangs in the BEP’s Washington, D.C. offices, was slowly and artfully reproduced as an intaglio printing plate by the BEP’s talented engraving staff.

Shortly after the $1 bill was released to the public, Bureau engraver G.F.C. Smillie was informed by a friend that the word tranquillity was misspelled in the tiny Constitution that adorned the book. “Rats,” Smillie reportedly replied. “The word was spelled that way in the original Constitution…”

Smillie was, of course, correct… even though, at the time, tranquillity (with two “l”s) was the accepted spelling.

“Now at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing we must ‘follow copy,’” a Bureau spokesman later stated, “and cannot demonstrate superior knowledge in the face of absolute authority. Hence, ‘tranquility’ is on the new note. There is plenty of authority for spelling that word economically in respect to ‘l’s.”

1896 $1 USD Currency Note

The $1 note was released to the public on July 14, 1896, the first of the series to be put into circulation. Because of the public’s unfamiliarity with the new money, though, some people began illegally “raising” the values of the bills by changing the numbers in the corners and then passing the notes off as “the new $5s” or “the new $10s”.

The memory of this may be why the present-day U.S. Treasury chose to release the highest denominations of our new currency first, and then slowly proceeded downwards as people grew accustomed to the new designs. (It would make little sense for a counterfeiter to take a new $100 bill and try to persuade people it was a new style of $1.)

The back of the 1896 $1, featuring intricate geometric lathe work and a winged, shield-bearing Liberty in each of the upper corners, carries traditionally-styled portraits of both George and Martha Washington. The portraits were engraved by Alfred Sealey and Charles Burt, respectively, and the overall design of the back was the work of Thomas F. Morris.

Recently made the Chief of the BEP’s engraving division, Morris had his own concerns about the 1896 note designs. They were the only notes since 1861 which had no geometric lathe designs on the face of the notes, and the intricate lathe-work served as a strong deterrent to counterfeiters. Perhaps this accounts for the unusually intricate and thorough lathe-work which Morris applied to the backs of the 1896 designs.

People being what they are, there were several public statements that the central “One” on the note was irresponsible. The reasoning was thus: “no one should come between George and Martha Washington”.

Don’t blame me. I don’t make the news. I only report it.

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Guardian in a recent report revealed the perpetrators of the global financial crisis. It  revealed their names and photos too. The British Guardian newspaper on Monday published a list of people whose work has proved fatal for the world economy. Lies have been told by  both policy makers and business sharks.

The publication also listed visionaries who, warned us long before the actual crisis hit our shores.  Unfortunately for the all us, these people were not involved in the process of decision-making.

In its famous “black list” Guardian has 25 spots. Almost half of them are filled with the people that have something to do with economic crisis of today. here are some of political and financial heavy weights.

Bark up the wrong tree “guru”

Alan Greenspan, head of the U.S. Federal Reserve( 1987 to 2006), is on the list at number one. The most influential financier has received from fans the world title of “guru”, “oracle” and “maestro”. In the delight of observers led his calmness with which Greenspan has held America through crises of 1987 and 1991, as well as the collapse of IT-industry in 2000 and panic in the markets that followed the September 11, 2001.  It was Greenspan in early 2000 pursued a policy of low rates of the Fed, which led to easy money and irresponsible distribution of loans by banks. Moreover, the head of the Fed encouraged mortgage borrowers to take loans with floating rates. When rates inevitably increased after the tightening of fiscal policy in the middle of this decade, the people proved to have nothing to pay sharply increased the cost of credit.

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