Conditions from Wildfire Remain a Problem for Drivers
Officials from the National Weather Service (NWS) have issued smoke and fog warnings for Brunswick and Columbus Counties in North Carolina, in addition to Horry and Georgetown County in South Carolina, due to the still-active wildfires in the North Myrtle Beach area.
County officials as far north as Onslow County, NC have reported smoke from the fires. The NWS cautions that both dense smoke and ash will likely continue to be blown inland by the sea breezes through the
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Cape Fear Bank has become the 22nd bank in the U.S. to fail this year, and the first to fail in North Carolina since 1993.
Cape Fear, which had eight branches and $492 million in total assets, was taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on Friday. It has been reopened today under the control of First Federal Savings and Loan of Charleston, S.C.
Cape Fear’s depositors are protected by FDIC insurance, and the agency estimates the bank’s collapse will cost its insurance fund $131 million.
Yet another example, which may lead to, more Banks opting into the TARP Funds that they are considering opting out of.
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North Carolina’s unemployment rate, already at its highest level in the three-decade history of jobless records, is forecast to keep climbing for the rest of this year, cutting off employer-subsidized health insurance coverage for tens of thousands of workers.
But thousands more who manage to hold onto their jobs may lose their insurance anyway as premiums push small businesses into a choice between offering health care or laying off employees. Other workers may see deductibles rise so high they’ll be able to count on their insurance for little more than catastrophic emergencies, said Dr. Kevin Schulman, a physician who directs the health sector management program at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business,
Rising unemployment will “increase the number of uninsured going forward and will increase the number of people who can’t afford to use their insurance,” Schulman said Monday. “It’s going to have an impact on people in North Carolina, an impact on people who lose their insurance, an impact on people who work for small employers, and on small employers to create new jobs going forward.”
Less than half of the state’s small companies are able to afford health insurance coverage for their workers, said Gregg Thompson, state director of the National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group that represents about 7,500 small-business owners. That’s down from about six in 10 North Carolina firms with fewer than 50 workers in 2006, according to the North Carolina Institute of Medicine.
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