Financial News - Yahoo laying off 2,000 employees, Russia to join WTO, Jaimie Dimon's Letter

The Wall Street Journal reports, New York's top financial regulator, is expanding an investigation of insurers, that force homeowners policies on borrowers, after turning up evidence that consumers were charged too much. Benjamin Lawsky, of the New York Department of Financial Services, is issuing new subpoenas, and formal document requests to several insurers, demanding justification for how their rates and loss ratios were calculated.Insurers issue such "force-placed" policies to homeowners, who miss mortgage payments or allow their homeowners' policy to lapse. Critics say that rates are often exorbitant, partly because of close ties between insurers, agents, mortgage servicers and brokers. The Wall Street Journal also reports, Russia is on the cusp of joining the World Trade Organization after a two-decade journey, a landmark move to integrate the emerging economy, into the international trading system. There's one problem for U.S. companies: They may be left out of the parade. Election-year sparring, could keep the U.S. from lifting long-standing restrictions on trade with Russia, by the time the country joins the WTO this summer. As a result, U.S. companies would not receive the same legal protections against Russian tariffs and other hurdles to business, that companies from other countries would gain, putting the U.S. businesses at a competitive disadvantage. Reuters reports, Yahoo will lay off 2,000 people, or 14 percent of its workforce, in its deepest round of job cuts in years, as new Chief Executive Scott Thompson tries to jumpstart growth with a leaner, more agile company, while saving hundreds of millions of dollars. Wall Street's reaction was lukewarm, after two previous Yahoo CEOs failed to find an answer to rivals like Web-search leader Google and the Facebook social-networking site. Finally Bloomberg reports, Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan, used his annual letter to shareholders, to rail against "contrived" and confusing financial rules, that he said, may stall lending. U.S. and international officials "made the recovery worse than it otherwise would have been," Dimon wrote in the letter released yesterday. They almost botched the U.S. debt-ceiling vote, constrained bank leverage "at precisely the wrong time" and adopted bad and uncoordinated policy, he wrote. Dimon, defended a banking industry, that has been besieged, by new rules and public contempt, after lax mortgage lending, contributed to the worst economic slump since the Great Depression.