At the end of 2008, the government -- and U.S. taxpayers -- stood behind about three-fifths of all financial firm liabilities, according to economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
(The bill also removes the $75m cap on oil firms' liability for damage from offshore spills, in response to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico).Mr Obama has said he will fight on for a weightier bill.
Moves are afoot to lift the cap on oil firms' liability for the economic damage done by oil spills from $75m to $10 billion (they are already on the hook for unlimited clean-up costs).In this section Deep trouble Coming to a city near you?
Dodd-Frank, the 2010 law overhauling financial regulations, calls for regulators to impose a ten percent cap on individual financial firms' liabilities relative to the entire system.
The firm's liability lasts as long as the landfill continues to generate leachate or gas.
And the tax structure encourages leverage because interest payments can be set against profits, sharply reducing a firm's liability for corporation tax.
Within whatever the total is, it is not clear which privatised firms will be subject to the tax, nor how each firm's liability will be set.If the budget is more than minimalist, its fiscal stance will be intensely scrutinised.
David Tabolt, Andersen's spokesman, declined to comment on the potential business impact of the Enron litigation and cautioned investors not to jump to conclusions about the firm's liability.
In Google's latest run-in with the law, the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals refused to exempt the firm from liability under the federal Wiretap Act for intercepting people's e-mail messages along with their network identification, signal strength, username, password and other data.
Rather than try to win a judgment in excess of a small firm's liability insurance policy (and potentially force it to liquidate assets, which complicates payment), plaintiffs in many states can sue all along the company's supply chain to sweeten the spoils.
