ATF rank and file losing faith in agency leadership

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Top leaders at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, already under fire from lawmakers in the wake of the “Fast and Furious” debacle, also get harsh marks from the men and women who serve under them, according to an internal survey.

An ATF memo obtained by FoxNews.com reveals that rank-and-file workers at the beleaguered federal agency, where whistleblowers who first alerted lawmakers to the “gun-walking” scandal say they were threatened or even punished, don’t trust the agency’s leaders.

“A key area in which ATF fell short was leadership,” the e-mail from ATF Headquarters, describing the results of the internal survey, reads.

“Most troubling were responses to the question – ‘My senior leaders maintain high standards of honesty and integrity.’”

Just 44 percent of ATF employees said that their leaders maintained such standards last year, according to the Partnership for Public Service, the non-profit that administers the annual survey to government employees.

On “leadership effectiveness” in general, ATF scored a 40.5, placing the agency nearly last among government agencies, at 215th out of 228 agencies surveyed. That rating was the first since the “Fast and Furious” scandal broke, and it is down 10 percentage points from the year before.

WASHINGTON (CNNMoney) — Stronger job growth has brought “good news” recently, but overall, it remains “out of sync” with the modest growth of the U.S. economy, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Monday.

“The improvement in the labor market over the past year — especially the decline in the unemployment rate — has been faster than might have been expected, given that the economy during that time appears to have grown at a relatively modest pace,” Bernanke told the National Association for Business Economics on Monday.

Government numbers show the U.S. economy has added more than 200,000 jobs each month since January, and the unemployment rate has fallen to 8.3% from 9% in just five months. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy has been growing relatively slowly, most recently at a mere 3% annual pace.

Bernanke called those figures a ‘puzzle.’ For the unemployment rate to fall that significantly, the economy should have been growing much more quickly.

Seoul, South Korea (CNN) — Just hours after the United States warned that North Korea would achieve nothing with threats or provocations, Pyongyang moved a long-range rocket it plans to test fire to a launch pad Monday, a South Korean Defense Ministry official said.

A U.S. official said the United States also has seen signs the North Koreans are preparing to launch a long-range rocket.

The news broke at the start of a two-day nuclear summit in Seoul that is bringing together leaders from the United States, Russia, China and dozens of other nations to discuss how to deal with nuclear terrorism and how to secure the world’s nuclear material.

Overshadowing the summit’s message of international cooperation was an announcement by North Korea that it plans to carry out a rocket-powered satellite launch in mid-April.

South Korea has said it considers the satellite launch an attempt to develop a nuclear-armed missile, while U.S. President Barack Obama said Monday such a launch would bring repercussions.

“Here in Korea, I want to speak directly to the leadership in Pyongyang. The United States has no hostile intent toward your country,” Obama said during a speech to students at Seoul’s Hankuk University of Foreign Studies.

“But by now it should be clear, your provocations and pursuit of nuclear weapons have not achieved the security you seek. They have undermined it.”

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Is the new requirement that people buy health insurance unconstitutional?

That’s the principal question before the Supreme Court this week as it takes up the 2010 health care reform law.

The Affordable Care Act is meant to help more people get affordable health insurance coverage — including the 49 million uninsured today — and bring health costs under control. But those goals could be harder to achieve if the court strikes down the “individual mandate.”

Just how much harder is not certain.

The individual mandate is intended to work in conjunction with two other new rules in the law: Insurers must offer everyone coverage regardless of health status, and insurers may not charge people with pre-existing conditions more than other policyholders in their geographic area who have the same plan.

The argument goes like this: The mandate, which wouldn’t start until 2014, would mean the vast majority of Americans will be insured, and that would reduce the costs imposed by the uninsured on everyone else.

WASHINGTON—By Saturday, a short queue had already formed on the sidewalk outside the Supreme Court building, filled by people with hopes of snagging prime seats for what will likely be historic oral arguments debating the fate of President Barack Obama’s health care law.

Those few souls, who braved a weekend of rain for the hottest ticket in town, will be joined by thousands more over the next three days, as activists from far and wide descend on Washington, D.C.

Tea parties, unions, liberal advocacy organizations, religious groups and nonaligned curiosity seekers are arriving outside the court, with rallies planned in front of the steps and in the nearby parks surrounding the building. Groups are busing thousands into the city from around the country for the three-day marathon. Demonstrations, counter-rallies and prayer vigils will be held each day under the watchful eye of security personnel and the discerning observations of hundreds of reporters from news agencies that have dispatched entire teams to cover the hearings.

Seoul, South Korea (CNN) — President Barack Obama travels to South Korea Saturday on a three-day trip centered on an international nuclear security summit in Seoul.

He is due to arrive in Seoul early Sunday, where he will later hold a bilateral meeting with his South Korean counterpart Lee Myung-bak.

Top officials from 54 countries, including China and Russia, will attend the summit meeting on Monday and Tuesday.

But its message of international cooperation has been overshadowed by North Korea’s announcement last week that it is planning to carry out a rocket-powered satellite launch in April.

South Korea has said it considers the satellite launch an attempt to develop a nuclear-armed missile, while the United States has warned the move would jeopardize a food-aid agreement reached with Pyongyang in early March.

President Lee has already said he will use the summit to drum up international support against the actions of his northern neighbor.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Greece is well on track in its efforts to improve how it monitors its finances, the head of the European Commission’s special task force said, while adding that its banking system remained in difficulty.

“I am optimistic as never before,” Horst Reichenbach told Austria’s Passauer Neue Presse newspaper in an article published on Saturday.

“The segment in the finance ministry which is responsible for pensions has greatly improved,” he noted.

Reichenbach, who heads the special task force to help rebuild the Greek economy, said carrying out sufficient tax audits at Greek companies and the country’s wealthy population remained challenging.

Turning to banks, however, Reichenbach was less optimistic.

“The financial problems of Greece’s banks pose great difficulties. The banks now need to be re-capitalized so that the economy can prosper.”

The EU task force of about 50 officials, most of whom visit Athens intermittently, advises ministries on measures needed to improve the country’s economic competitiveness and tax collection as well as on reform of the public sector.

It estimates that Greece could potentially collect about 8 billion euros ($10.6 billion) in tax arrears out of 60 billion euros owed to the state – equivalent to about a quarter of the country’s gross domestic product.

Reichenbach said that Greece’s bureaucracy was a big hurdle to economic growth.

“The granting of licenses is a nightmare. It could take years,” he said, adding solving these problems had “absolute priority”.

GUIRIA, Venezuela (Reuters) – Venezuela will pay Williams Cos Inc (NYS:WMB – News) and Exterran (NYS:EXH – News) $420 million for the 2009 nationalization of assets including a major gas injection project, the South American country’s oil minister said on Friday.

Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez told reporters the deal meant the two companies would drop an arbitration case that is pending against Venezuela before a World Bank tribunal.

“We reached an agreement of $420 million. They will drop the arbitration. They had been asking for $1.2 billion,” he said.

The nationalizations in 2009 were part of a broader wave of state takeovers that targeted the assets of more than 70 smaller oilfield service companies, the majority of them Venezuelan.

U.S. service company Exterran Holdings announced a $97 million non-cash charge in April 2009 relating to Venezuela’s takeover of a gas injection plant controlled by U.S. firm Williams Companies and a water injection plant, which both included Exterran as a minority partner.

During President Hugo Chavez’s 13 years in power, his socialist government has put almost all the OPEC member’s oil industry under state control, including multi-billion dollar projects run by U.S. majors.

Venezuela has about 20 cases pending against it at the World Bank’s arbitration tribunal, known as the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes, or ICSID.

The most high profile of those were brought by Exxon Mobil (NYS:XOM – News) and ConocoPhilips (NYS:COP – News), which are seeking combined compensation of some $40 billion for takeovers in 2007.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Portfolio managers will be doing some last-minute shopping for winners from the big stock market rally as they take part next week in the quarter-end ritual of window dressing.

The activity could help stocks resume their upward course in the week ahead and keep a long-expected pullback at bay.

The benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 index (MXP:SPX) is up 11.1 percent so far for the first quarter and the year. That would follow a gain of 11.2 percent for the fourth quarter.

If the trend holds, the S&P 500 will book its best back-to-back quarters since the second and third quarters of 2009.

The S&P 500 lost some ground in the past week, ending down 0.5 percent after five straight weeks of gains, but that’s only its second negative week for the year.

Much of the quarter’s gains have been driven by signs of improvement in the economy, particularly a pickup in jobs, which has been lagging other areas in the recovery.

Window dressing typically involves investors grabbing some of the quarter’s best performers to dress up their portfolio listings.

Some of the last-minute buying is likely to come from the hedge fund community, said Phil Orlando, chief equity strategist and senior portfolio manager for Federal Global Investment Management Corp in New York.

Hedge funds “by and large have not been believers about the improvement in the domestic economy … so they’ve been very much out of the market. Yet here we are with the first quarter looking like the best first quarter since 1998,” he said. “They’ve got a huge gain to catch up.”

But retail investors, he said, have probably also noticed that they’ve missed a lot by having kept their money in Treasuries and other fixed-income assets over the quarter.

“They have woken up to the realization that the surge in yields has resulted in a significant loss of capital for them,” Orlando said.

If the S&P 500 manages to end the first quarter with an 11.1 percent gain, that would be its best quarterly performance since the second quarter of 2009.

(AP) – Americans have pumped less gas every week for the past year.

During those 52 weeks, gasoline consumption dropped by 4.2 billion gallons, or 3 percent, according to MasterCard SpendingPulse. The decline is longer than a 51-week slide during the recession.

The main reason: higher gas prices. The national average for a gallon of gas is $3.89, the highest ever for this time of year, and experts say it could be $4.25 by late April. As a result, Americans are taking fewer trips to restaurants and shopping malls. When they take a vacation, they’re staying closer to home.

But the decline in gas consumption is also a sign that efforts to push carmakers to produce vehicles with better gas mileage are paying off. The average new car now gets nearly 24 miles to the gallon, compared with about 20 mpg just four years ago, according to the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute.

“I’d expect to see lower gasoline consumption for several years to come,” Rice University energy expert Ken Medlock says.

Americans have cut back on fill-ups for extended periods before. In 2008, gas spiked from $3.04 to $4.11 per gallon in seven months. It wasn’t until January 2009, when the national average for gas had dropped to $1.86 that consumption increased. Drivers bought more gasoline for 23 weeks in a row.

“The spike in 2008 was a real shock to the system,” Medlock says. “There’s still a residual impact on people’s driving behavior.”

There were other stretches of reduced gas use, notably two into the 1970’s and one in the early 1980’s. But in those cases, Americans eventually went back to driving big cars and trucks that guzzled gas.

This time may be different. Medlock thinks economic growth will be too modest and gas prices will stay too high for Americans to start driving more anytime soon. Economists expect the U.S. economy to grow 2.5 percent in 2012. The government estimates that gas will average a record $3.79 per gallon for the year.

Cited by the Congressional Panel. Developing…

HONG KONG (Reuters) – More than a decade after regulators moved to clean up the stock research industry at investment banks, analysts across the globe are as hesitant as ever to issue negative research on companies they believe are destined to struggle.

While so-called “Chinese walls” were set up after regulators and legal cases shed light on the role analysts and bankers played in inflating the 1990s technology bubble, research teams still appear conflicted between their conviction and their bank’s client list.

A mere 9 percent of analyst recommendations by investment banks and brokerage firms globally are a “sell” right now, based on 120,029 recommendations issued on nearly 17,000 companies, according to a Reuters study of StarMine data.

Ten years ago, sell orders jumped to nearly 20 percent after a series of rules were put into place to wipe out banker-analyst conflicts. It’s now back in the single digits, and in some cases headed to levels last seen in the 1990s.

“Research is associated, rightly or wrongly, with an organization and if somebody puts out a sell recommendation people don’t like that,” said David Baran, co-founder of Tokyo-based hedge fund, Symphony Financial Partners.

An analyst with a negative view on a stock will often prefer to keep that belief tight, fearing pressure from top bankers seeking business from the company or being shut out by its senior executives.

“In general it’s difficult for a lot of the analysts who could be negative or negatively biased on a company and expect to see them welcome at the next investor meeting or get access to the management,” said Baran.

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The Obama administration’s energy policy chief on Tuesday gave himself an A for controlling gas prices that have reached a record high at pumps across the country, drawing criticism and even chortles from Washington Republicans.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu made the comment during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing in which he was asked whether he was still doing A-minus work.

“Well, the tools we have at our disposal are limited, but I would say I would give myself a little higher,” he told committee Chairman Darrell Issa. “Since I became secretary of energy, I’ve been doing everything I can to get long-term solutions.”

Issa, a California Republican, said later that the administration’s “DOE is DOA.”

The average price of regular gas is now $3.87 a gallon, a record high for March and more than double the $1.85 a gallon price when Obama took office in January 2009, according to the federal Energy Information Administration.

The price for a gallon of regular gas has reached $4.35 a gallon in California.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Treasury Department said on Monday it made a $25 billion profit on sales of mortgage-backed securities acquired during the financial crisis, part of its ongoing efforts to wind down taxpayer-financed bailout programs.

The sales were the latest indication the multiple programs the government and Federal Reserve initiated to bail out the financial sector may turn out to be less costly than originally feared.

The Treasury bought $225 billion of MBS in 2008 and 2009 in an effort to keep the mortgage market from freezing up as private investors fled. The $250 billion it reaped from the investment reflected both principal and interest.

“The successful sale of these securities marks another important milestone in the wind-down of the government’s emergency financial crisis response efforts,” Treasury Assistant Secretary Mary Miller said.

The government purchased the mortgage debt as part of a bid to stabilize the housing industry, using funds authorized by the Housing and Recovery Act of 2008. It was one of several programs running in parallel with the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, which was set up during the administration of President George W. Bush to buy toxic assets from banks, but that ended up largely as a mechanism to inject capital into financial institutions.

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Since October, it has been nothing but up for the U.S. stock market, an uptrend that’s been especially unrelenting over the past 3 months. But while this rally has put a lot of money into people’s pockets, it has also served as a painful, relative reminder of how poorly gold has done at the same time.

But if you are thinking gold’s $250 giveback in the past 7 months is enough of a haircut to revisit the yellow metal, Rich Ilcyzsyzn, Founder of iiTrader.com would disagree.

“If we close below $1600 you can probably bank on $1525,” Ilcyzsyzn says, adding that, down there, he would “probably start to get a little bit long.”

As he sees it, the trouble really picked up with Bernanke. “The verbage that he said (a couple weeks ago) that I keyed off of is that he’s gonna keep rates low through 2013-ish,” says Ilczyszyn, adding, “we had all been playing 2014.” It was then, when gold had a chance to break $1800, that it faltered.

Ilczyszyn is also expecting volatility to stick around, arguing that $100 swings will be the norm and not the exception. “This is how the market is going to move from now on. We have such a high price, $100 is going to be the normal.”

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc has sold 3 million units of the new iPad since sales began on Friday, setting a first-weekend record for the iPad, which for the first time came with 4G capability.

The company said in a statement on Monday, hours after it announced it would begin to pay a quarterly dividend and commence share buybacks, that the latest version of the iPad would be sold in 24 more countries by March 23, including Italy and Spain, in addition to the initial 11.

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After a tsunami caused an accident at a nuclear plant in Fukishima, Japan last year, there was a lot of discussion regarding the future of nuclear power in the world.

Germany, for example, planned a shutdown of all its reactors by 2022. (Whether this was a ploy by the Merkel government to garner populist support, we will never know, but in a time of austerity, mothballing 17% of your energy source is a pretty expensive). Germany accounts for only around 5% of total global nuclear generation, meaning that even if it goes through with its plans, it will not have much effect on the nuclear power industry.

Nevertheless, the anti-nuclear talk brought a lot of discussion regarding the future of nuclear power in the world, and a sharp drop in share prices for uranium mining companies.

One year after Fukushima, not much has changed in the global nuclear industry. We can see the minor effect the accident actually had on the existing, planned and proposed nuclear reactors around the world…

The number of total reactors in operations and in the development chain has not changed; 987 before the incident and 987 presently. This means that the long term demand for uranium has not diminished since last year, although short-term demand may have been affected by the minor decrease in reactors currently operating. Despite supply questions, the price of spot uranium has decreased by approximately 20 per cent since the Fukushima accident…

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For the last few years, it has been housing’s lot to bring the stock market back to Earth.

It certainly has the potential to splash reality in investors’ faces in the week ahead when reports on existing- and new-home sales come along with the monthly reports on housing starts and building permits.

But if the numbers break right — with all the indicators showing clear signs that a bottom for housing has set in — one could reasonably see a continuation of the big rally that pushed the Dow Jones industrials ($INDU -0.15%) above 13,000 this past week.

The week ahead, in fact, is a busy one for investors. In addition to the housing reports, a batch of important earnings are due that include results from Adobe Systems (ADBE -1.02%), Oracle (ORCL -1.06%), Tiffany (TIF -0.92%), General Mills (GIS +0.36%), Nike (NKE +0.44%) and FedEx (FDX -0.29%).

And there will be many eyes on two more factors in the coming week: oil prices (and gasoline prices) and interest rates. Crude oil closed Friday at $107.06 a barrel, with retail gasoline at $3.831 a gallon. Crude is up 8.63%, while gasoline is up nearly 17%. Can gasoline prices hurt the economy? They did a year ago and helped set off the Great Recession.

Interest rates started to move up as well, with the 10-year Treasury hitting 2.298%, up from 1.871% at the end of 2011. The question is whether the increase will bother anyone — yet.

It was a very good week for stocks. The Dow and Standard & Poor’s 500 Index ($INX +0.11%) were up 2.4% for the week, with the Nasdaq Composite Index ($COMPX -0.04%) up 2.2%. The Dow and S&P 500 are enjoying their best start for a year since 1998; the Nasdaq’s start is its best since 1991.

Will housing stop being a drag on the economy?

Housing has been one of the biggest drags on the economy since the bubble started to burst in 2006. Housing markets have been struggling with foreclosures, bloated inventories of new and existing homes and condominiums for sale and weak household formation rates.

And there have been suggestions from a number of homebuilding companies that buyers are out looking for homes this year in greater numbers than in the past few years. Apartment construction has been stronger as many would-be buyers have opted not to own because they want the flexibility.

Inventories have been shrinking in places like Phoenix and Sarasota as investors large and small have swooped in to pick up foreclosed properties that they can rent or fix up and try to resell.

And that’s as it should be. Apartment construction gains usually precede gains in new-home building by nine months to two years before single-family construction starts to gain. And prices often continue to fall even as the bottom forms.

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It happens every spring. The players take their positions for the big game. The fans start screaming as the huge numbers on the board go up and up and up.

No, it’s not college basketball. It’s a madness of a different kind, as anchors and reporters manipulate coverage of one of the necessities of American life for maximum political gain.

It would be humorous if it weren’t so insane. But for the mainstream media it’s become almost a game. They scored points blaming Bush and now rack them up defending Obama. Nowhere is that more apparent than with gas prices.

So here we are again, with prices shooting skyward and a president and an energy secretary who have both previously said they supported high gas prices.

Stephen Chu, you’ll recall, said, “somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Now he’s backed off that position, at least “officially.” And then it was President Obama telling CNBC’s John Harwood “I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment” to gas prices.

So it’s not like the American public should feel confident that the folks running things “feel your pain,” as President Clinton used to say. And it’s not like the media deliver even vaguely consistent reporting.

Back in May, 2008, in the week before gas prices spiked to $3.80, the major networks did 57 separate stories and briefs on the issue. In 2012, under the same circumstances, the networks did just 26 stories – less than half.

But with a Republican president in the White House, ABC, CBS and NBC delivered stories on driving cars with vegetable oil instead of gas, so-called “hypermiling” (an ioditic way to maximize mileage by coasting while in traffic), and a gas giveaway to those who prayed at the pump.

Every story was hyped.

The gallons and gallons of coverage were laced with numerous customer complaints saying, with apologies to Jimmy McMillan, the gas price is too damn high.

On May 15, 2008, CBS “Evening News” did an “Eye on the Road” report that gas prices were forcing the city of Louisville to make cuts and “half the city’s public pools will be padlocked this summer leaving these little girls high and dry.” ABC News financial correspondent Bianna Golodryga even included a clip in her story from a protest song that complained about high gas prices. “♪♫ ♪ Price gouging, so we’re shouting, who’s jacking up the cost of fuel ♪♫ ♪,” sang Jay Weinberg in the video, who claimed to be fighting the cost of gas with his songs and Web site.

But the tune they’re singing this time around is definitely not the same in 2012.

Not only are the stories fewer, but now journalists are defending the president.

CBS’s Charlie Rose told viewers on March 13, 2012, that, “the president has a point, doesn’t he? There’s little that he can do necessarily to – in the short term – to affect gas prices, and gas prices hurts his political chances.” His colleague Bob Schieffer agreed, saying “Well, that’s right on all counts, Charlie.”

ABC’s “World News with Dianne Sawyer” ran an upbeat economic story comparing the economy to the patient in the game of “Operation.” Dan Harris mentioned how gas prices had held back the recovery before, but, added, “tonight, there is true optimism that our patient is healing.”

It’s not just the networks either.

Naturally, high gas prices always draw the left out to admit that they like it this way. Howard Gleckman, a resident fellow at The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, wrote a piece for the Christian Science Monitor headlined: “Gas prices should be higher.” In it, he argued “we ought to be raising taxes on fossil fuels. A lot.”

He also cited others who felt the same way, including former Bush aide, now working as a Romney adviser, Gregory Mankiw, who recently wrote that “a tax exceeding $2 a gallon makes sense.” It’s now just 18.4 cents.

Politico’s Alex Burns went positively apoplectic about voters who might be upset with Obama’s anti-energy policies, calling them “Forrest Gump-like.” He added that, “to reassess a president’s performance in the context of a short-term increase in gas prices is more of a tantrum-like response to a new feeling of discomfort over which the president has relatively little control.”

That’s the true media spin of 2012 – high gas prices aren’t the president’s fault. Even though The Washington Post recently noted that candidate Obama was happy to blame then-President Bush for high gas prices. “And during the 2008 presidential race, Barack Obama said in a campaign speech that ‘here in Ohio, you’re paying nearly $3.70 a gallon for gas — 21/2 times what it cost when President Bush took office.’”

What all of this spin ignores is what Newt Gingrich tried to teach the media morons – that the president sets a tone and the markets follow.

If Obama pushed for more drilling, more exploration, opened the ANWR, approved the Keystone pipeline and more, he’d force speculators to react. Oil prices might not plummet, but the the market would look a lot different.

But the Obama administration is pro-high prices, pro-gas taxes, against new drilling, against the pipeline and more. And it’s about time for the media to Tell The Truth why you are paying nearly $4 a gallon. It’s time to end the madness.

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A top regulator’s unbending refusal to use troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to rescue underwater homeowners is whipping up a growing protest from liberal lawmakers and advocacy groups — some of whom are now calling on President Obama to fire him.

The little-known Washington official, Edward DeMarco, is under pressure by the left to reduce mortgage principals for struggling borrowers. Nearly 20 Democrats in Congress along with groups like MoveOn.org have launched somewhat of a campaign against the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

Their solution would presumably help thousands of families, but at taxpayer expense.

And DeMarco has suggested it just wouldn’t be fair to use government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to clear the way for a multi-billion-dollar homeowner bailout. In a recent letter, he said foreclosure prevention programs have already added to American taxpayer loss and destabilized neighborhoods.

But the lawmakers and advocacy groups allege he’s standing in the way of a robust housing recovery, and want him to either relent to their demands or step down. Absent that, some are calling on Obama to fire him.

Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., the top Democrat on the House Financial Service Committee, recently joined the ranks of those calling on DeMarco to step down.

The lawmakers specifically want DeMarco to agree to write down principal amounts for struggling homeowners. The Van Jones-backed Rebuild the Dream, which is circulating a petition supposedly signed by 90,000 people, calls DeMarco the “number one obstacle to solutions for struggling homeowners” and a “right-wing ideologue” who sides with Wall Street.

A House aide with the Progressive Caucus, whose members are pressuring DeMarco, told FoxNews.com that the strategy is to get him to “write down the loans or get out of the way.”