Cash-strapped sell their kidneys to pay off debts…

from the UK Times Online

British victims of the credit crunch are offering to sell their kidneys for £25,000 or more to help pay debts, an investigation by The Sunday Times has revealed.

At least a dozen adverts have appeared on the internet offering kidneys for sale from British “donors”. Five of the sellers corresponded with undercover journalists, who posed as friends and relatives of sick patients to negotiate sales.

One person willing to sell a kidney is a 26-year-old mental health nurse who said he needed the money to pay debts after a business he set up went bankrupt. Another is a 43-year-old taxi driver from Lancashire, who wants to raise cash to pay off some of his mortgage and buy a new kitchen.

Both men said they wanted to help those in need of kidney transplants at the same time as relieving their financial difficulties. A leading doctor said the phenomenon highlighted the need for a public discussion of the issue of selling organs. [...] Source: Times Online

The credit crisis…

A simple, yet very well produced, look at how the banks and other financial institutions played with houses to make money… and lost.

Latvia’s is the second European government, after Iceland, to fall as a direct result of the global economic woes.

From the BBC:

Latvian Prime Minister Ivars Godmanis and his center-right government have resigned, amid turmoil triggered by economic crisis in the Baltic state.

President Valdis Zatlers has accepted the resignations and is beginning talks to try to form a new administration.

The country’s economy is in recession and is set to contract by up to 12% in 2009, with unemployment rising by 50%.[...]

[...] Latvia’s economy has shrunk at its fastest rate since the early 1990s, after it split from the Soviet Union and regained its independence.

Latvia’s gross domestic product (GDP) fell 10.5% in the last quarter of 2008, compared with the same period a year earlier. Economists believe GDP could fall as much as 10% this year.

The country had enjoyed several boom years – in 2006 the economy was still growing by 12% a year – but the global credit crunch has hit Latvia hard.

Correspondents say a major reason for the decline was that locally-owned banks, which make up 40% of the Latvian financial system, were taking deposits from abroad and investing them in the booming property market.[...]

[...] When the property market begin to decline and foreign credit dried up, confidence in Latvian banks evaporated.

The second largest bank, Parex, collapsed after depositors panicked and has been largely nationalized.

Many months ago I wrote a commentary about how the financial crisis would put at risk the credit rating of entire nations. Even the United States is at risk of losing its prized AAA rating with the ever growing debt and burden on the national deficit.

From the UK Telegraph…

Standard & Poor’s has stripped Spain of its coveted AAA status in the first such move against a top-rated country since the global crisis began, reflecting the deep damage suffered by Spanish public finances as the debt bubble bursts.[...]

[...]The credit-rating agency’s downgrade comes at a delicate moment for Euroland’s weaker bloc. Several states already face difficulties raising money on the bond markets. The yield spreads on Spanish debt rose yesterday to a post-EMU high of 122 basis points above German Bunds, though still below levels for Italy, Ireland and Greece.

(read more…)