Month: July 2020

The U.S. Agency for International Development is an independent federal agency that provides civilian aid to foreign countries.

The U.S. Congress enacted the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (OPA) to streamline and strengthen the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) power to prevent oil spills. It was passed as an amendment to the Clean Water Act of 1972 following the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 is one of the most wide-reaching and critical pieces of environmental legislation ever passed.

The Hamptons Effect refers to a dip in trading that occurs just before the Labor Day weekend that is followed by increased trading volume as traders and investors return from the long weekend. The term references the idea that many of the large-scale traders on Wall Street spend the last days of summer in the Hamptons, a traditional summer destination for the New York City elite.

Notching is the practice by credit rating agencies to give different credit ratings to the particular obligations or debts of a single issuing entity or closely related entities. Rating distinctions among obligations are made based on differences on their security or priority of claim. With varying degrees of losses in the event of default, obligations are subject to being notched higher or lower. Therefore while company A may have an overall credit rating of ‘AA’, its rating on its junior debt may be ‘A’. read more

Heteroskedastic refers to a condition in which the variance of the residual term, or error term, in a regression model varies widely. If this is true, it may vary in a systematic way, and there may be some factor that can explain this. If so, then the model may be poorly defined and should be modified so that this systematic variance is explained by one or more additional predictor variables.