Chicago Downgraded -- February 27, 2015

Updates

February 2, 2018: temporarily things are better. Link here.

Original Post 

Reuters is reporting:

Chicago drew closer to a fiscal free fall on Friday with a rating downgrade from Moody's Investors Service that could trigger the immediate termination of four interest-rate swap agreements, costing the city about $58 million and raising the prospect of more broken swaps contracts.

The downgrade to Baa2, just two steps above junk, and a warning the rating could fall further still, means the third-biggest U.S. city could face even higher costs in the future if banks choose to terminate other interest-rate hedges against fluctuations in interest rates. All told, Chicago holds swaps contracts covering $2.67 billion in debt, according to a disclosure late last year.

"This is an unfortunate wake-up call for anyone still asleep over the fiscal cliff facing the city of Chicago," said Laurence Msall (sic), president of the Chicago-based government finance watchdog, The Civic Federation.

Chicago's finances are already sagging under an unfunded pension liability Moody's has pegged at $32 billion and that is equal to eight times the city's operating revenue.

The city has a $300 million structural deficit in its $3.53 billion operating budget and is required by an Illinois law to boost the 2016 contribution to its police and fire pension funds by $550 million.

I track Doomsday: US Cities here.

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Birdman, The Movie

Regular readers know that of the movies nominated for best movie this year, my favorite was Grand Budapest Hotel and of the eight movies nominated, GBH was one of the few (maybe the only one) I saw.

But with Birdman winning the Oscar for best movie I was curious. I watched it tonight. Incredible. Excellent movie. I went through the list of the eight nominated movies. For me it came down to, in alphabetical order: Birdman; Grand Budapest Hotel; and, Theory of Everything.

My wife would have gone with TOE. 

Theory of Everything; American Sniper; and, The Imitation Game, for me, as weird as it sounds, are of the same genre, and I would not have voted for any one of them among this year's nominations. So, it came down to GBH or Birdman.

I don't know if I can watch Birdman several times in one week; I have watch GBH several times in one week on more than one occasion. I can watch it over and over. I don't think that will be true with Birdman.

But, for best movie, I might lean toward Birdman.

Birdman follows in the footsteps of another classic, a black and white classic that I watch maybe two or three times a year. I was curious if anyone else thought the same thing. I googled Birdman  and the name of the other classic and lo and behold, The Economist came up with the very same match: Sunset Boulevard --

A gleeful deconstruction of Hollywood superheroes and has-beens—a kind of "Sunset Boulevard" for the age of spandex—the film is constructed entirely from long, continuous takes, shot by the cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who prowls the enclaves of the St James Theatre on West 44th Street with the same stealth with which he penetrated outer space in last year’s “Gravity”. Here the stars on view are just as dazzling, from the collapsing supernova that is Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), a wormy, preening method actor whose commitment to realism extends to getting drunk on stage, followed by actual intercourse; to the black holes of insecurity that are his co-stars, Lesley (Naomi Watts) and Laura (Andrea Riseborough), a young starlet who may be pregnant with Riggan’s baby.