News Links: BofA Clash With Fannie Mae Escalates Over Loan Buyback Stance

Bank of America Corp. (BAC) told Fannie Mae it refuses to cooperate with the U.S. mortgage firm’s new stance on loan buybacks, setting the lender up for a potential surge in claims and penalties.

Michel Barnier, the European Union’s markets commissioner, said on Sunday he was in favor of euro zone countries pooling their debt together but warned that tougher oversight of national budgets was needed first.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett said Europe’s debt crisis had shown up a "major flaw" in the 17-member euro zone system and it would take more than words to fix it.

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron pledged a "massive" program of credit easing to help spur the economy as his government drives through its plan to narrow the budget deficit. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne will use his statement to Parliament on Nov. 29 to set out full details of the program to aid companies finding it hard to obtain bank finance, Cameron said in a speech in London today.

IMF chief Christine Lagarde confirmed the move today saying: "The IMF has received a request from the Hungarian authorities for possible financial assistance. The authorities have sent a similar request to the European Commission and indicated that they plan to treat as precautionary any IMF and EC support that could be made available."

Chancellor Angela Merkel hates the idea of euro bonds. But with the European Commission set to present a feasibility study on Wednesday, pressure is mounting for her to change her tune. If she doesn’t, say some, the debt contagion will simply continue to spread.

As Richard enthusiastically realized in June, one of the most helpful features of iTunes Match is how it ‘normalizes’ any tracks that exist in the iTunes store catalog up to 256 kbps AAC files, the same quality as iTunes Plus music that you buy from the store. While he was interested in lowering the storage requirements of his audiophile-friendly (and massive) ALAC files, this fix works in the other direction: getting low-bitrate or variable-bitrate files up to the standards of current-day digital music.

Ted Forstmann, the Wall Street dealmaker who sounded the alarm in the 1980s when junk bonds reshaped the leveraged-buyout industry he had helped create, has died. He was 71.

La izquierda abertzale, a través de la coalición Amaiur, regresará con fuerza al Congreso de los Diputados tras 15 años de años de ausencia, según los datos que arrojan los primeros escrutinios. Con algo más del 42% de votos escrutados en el País Vasco y el 18% en Navarra, la coalición independentista obtendría seis escaños, con lo que podría formar grupo propio en el Congreso.

Los 110 puntos rebajan la marca de 118 obtenida en 1977, en las primeras elecciones tras el franquismo

At least three people have been killed and hundreds wounded as Egyptian security forces clashed with rock-throwing protesters in a second day of violence. Rubber bullets and tear gas were fired while demonstrators hurled broken chunks of cement from pavements and set a police van on fire. The major confrontations took place around Cairo’s Tahrir Square – birthplace of the 18-day uprising that toppled authoritarian leader Hosni Mubarak in February.

Working with the same files in multiple places used to be a hassle. You’d have to make sure to bring the file with you, email it to yourself, or save it in a place you could get to it later. Now, there are a number of online file storage and syncing services that will make your data available on as many computers as you like. Here’s a look at five of the best of those services.

Apart from the updates that a variety of readers sent yesterday about the affectless sadism of a UC Davis policemen, let me mention a few more links and resources

The bottom line is that the Eurozone has been a tremendous gift to German exporters and the German state. The idea that Germans are hard-working nobles, and the periphery is comprised of lazy borrowers fits nicely with cultural biases, but it doesn’t really reflect the dynamic of what’s happened over the last decade. Germany continues to benefit massively from the Eurozone, as without it, it would be faced with swift loss of customers (all the countries around it), competitiveness problem (the Deutsche mark would likely surge in value) and removal of safe-haven banking flows.