Phillip inman | New York | June 21

The Observer - Staff at Goldman Sachs staff can look forward to the biggest bonus payouts in the firm's 140-year history after a spectacular first half of the year, sparking concern that the big investment banks which survived the credit crunch will derail financial regulation reforms.

A lack of competition and a surge in revenues from trading foreign currency, bonds and fixed-income products has sent profits at Goldman Sachs soaring, according to insiders at the firm.

Shabtai Gold | Geneva | June 15

DPA - Child rights activists have hailed the move by several big-name companies to boycott Uzbek cotton over allegations of child labour - but warned it was just the first step against such abusive practices.

'Every year Uzbekistan is turned into a giant labour camp,' said one activist from the Central Asian republic, recalling conditions in the cotton fields.

Children work in freezing cold temperatures and in searing heat, witnesses said. Their jobs tend to clash with school, so they end up losing out on education while the state benefits by an estimated billion dollars annually, for a product dubbed 'white gold.'

Key companies, including Asda Wal-Mart, the British Tesco, Marks and Spencer and Gap, the clothing retailer, have all agreed in recent months to pull out of Uzbekistan as the evidence of forced child labour in return for meagre salaries mounted.

Censorship working at full gear. Some rumors here: AsiaNews.it

More about these financial nukes: Market Ticker.

Because the two Japanese have not been arrested, the bonds are real. The problem of the USA is that the bonds shouldn't exist. Bloomberg of course claims that they are counterfeit.

Joyce Smith | June 13

The Kansas City Star -

Calorie counters, beware.

Restaurants across the land, feeding a trend begun several years ago with the introduction of Hardee’s Thickburger, are offering ever-larger burgers, sandwiches and rich dishes.

In this economy, restaurateurs say, they want to give more value for the money. And stressed consumers seem to have a taste for such comfort food. For some diners, words like low fat, diet, organic or healthy are just not on the menu.

“I hate to say it, but if you are down on your luck, you tend to eat more, you lean toward food,” said Kevin Lyman, president of the Kansas City Originals, an organization of area independent restaurants.

The latest burst of big food is not going down well with nutrition experts. To counter the trend, they’re backing federal legislation introduced this week that would require restaurants to list calories on the menu or on menu boards.

Papa Bob’s Bar-B-Que of Bonner Springs calls its entry into the giant sandwich explosion of 2009 the Ultimate Destroyer.(pictured, engorged here)

Take a half-pound of pulled pork and a half-pound of hickory-smoked sliced pork on a 12-inch hoagie bun. Top that with sauce, two slices of bread and then a half-pound of hickory-smoked turkey breast.

Follow that with a half-pound of ham, sauce and two more slices of bread, then three half-pound hickory smoked hamburgers with more sauce and more bread, brisket, sausage, sauce and bun.

In case you’ve lost track, that’s 4½ pounds of meat.

CNBC, By Tom Brennan, June 9

“This is one of the most exciting markets I’ve ever seen,” Cramer said during Tuesday’s Stop Trading!, pointing to the action in oil, finance and tech. He attributed the Dow’s last 2,200 points to this “troika” of stocks.

Ten banks now have permission to repay $68 billion in borrowed TARP funds, while oil will climb to $75 before stopping, Cramer predicted. (“That’s where the Saudis want it,” he said.) And the Nasdaq is enjoying a rally all its own, as the chipmakers continue to push higher.

Cramer said he was “blown away” by the good news recently from Marvell Technology, Texas Instruments and even RF Micro Devices. Skyworks Solutions also has been doing well.

Mr. Anti-Net Neutrality, the Monopolist himself, Ed Whitacre is going to be the new CEO of GM.

What an amazingly stupid, counter-productive idea.

GM needs a real innovator like Steve Jobs, not a establishment creation like Whitacre.

Update: One prediction here. Whitacre is a one trick-pony. If he knows how to do anything it is this: accreting earnings via mergers and acquisitions, which is not earnings growth per se. Mark my words: within 12 months GM will attempt a merger with another car company. My money is on Chrysler. Time will tell and I will be happy to admit the error of my ways if not. But I doubt I will have to.

June 9

Reuters -

U.S. advisers began considering on Tuesday whether the makers of three blockbuster antipsychotic drugs should be allowed to promote them for children and teens with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
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Eli Lilly and Co's Zyprexa, AstraZeneca's Seroquel and Pfizer's Geodon are approved for adults and already used to treat children. But the companies need Food and Drug Administration approval before they can advertise them specifically for youths as young as 10.
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Winning FDA clearance for wider use may boost sales, which already top a combined $10 billion annually.

Lilly and Pfizer were scheduled to speak to the panel later on Tuesday. In summaries released before the meeting, both companies said their drugs' risks were acceptable, given their benefits for treating serious mental illnesses.
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The FDA advisers were expected to vote Wednesday on whether the medicines were effective and acceptably safe for various age groups. The agency will make the final decision, but usually follows panel recommendations.

LOL! '..both companies said their drugs' risks were acceptable, given their benefits for treating serious mental illnesses'..what else would they say?

Tomoeh Murakami Tse & Robert Barnes | Washington, DC | June 9

WaPo - Justices May Consider Creditors' Appeal

The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday held up the sale of Chrysler's assets to Italian automaker Fiat, at least temporarily interrupting the Obama administration's massive and speedy restructuring of the U.S. auto industry.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's 53-word order did not hint at what she thought of an appeal led by a group of Indiana pension and construction funds, which stand to see their investments in Chrysler reduced with no say in the process. Instead, she instructed simply that the transaction is "stayed pending further notice."

Salim Rizvi | New York | June 9

BBC - As an Indian American entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, Venkatesh Shuklaw has been hiring software professionals from India for years.

This has not always been easy because in order to get work visas for Nusym's staff he has had to compete with large US companies such as Microsoft or Indian software companies such as Infosys and Wipro.

But now he expects it to be easier to get visas for professionals working for his company, because many big companies no longer sponsor foreign workers applying for work visas.

That is partly because they are hiring fewer people during the recession, but also because of a new set of government rules.

Michael Powell | Baltimore | June 6

NYT - As she describes it, Beth Jacobson and her fellow loan officers at Wells Fargo Bank “rode the stagecoach from hell” for a decade, systematically singling out blacks in Baltimore and suburban Maryland for high-interest subprime mortgages.

These loans, Baltimore officials have claimed in a federal lawsuit against Wells Fargo, tipped hundreds of homeowners into foreclosure and cost the city tens of millions of dollars in taxes and city services.

E. Scott Reckard & Jim Puzzanghera | Costa Mesa & Washington | June 5

LA Times - Mozilo, Countrywide's co-founder, and two former associates are accused of failing to tell shareholders how far lending standards declined at the company as the housing boom went bust.

Reporting from Costa Mesa and Washington -- Federal regulators filed a civil fraud lawsuit today against Countrywide Financial Corp. co-founder Angelo Mozilo and two former associates.

The Securities and Exchange Commission scheduled a news conference this afternoon in Washington to discuss the allegations against Mozilo, who founded Countrywide in 1969 and was its chief executive until Bank of America purchased it last year as its financial condition deteriorated.

The agency has been investigating whether Mozilo and others failed to inform shareholders just how lax lending standards became at the Calabasas mortgage goliath as the housing boom neared its end. The SEC also was scrutinizing Mozilo's sale of hundreds of millions of dollars in stock in 2006 and 2007 as defaults mounted on the high-risk loans that Countrywide increasingly had specialized in.

Michael Orey | Washington, DC | June 1

BusinessWeek - The U.S. Supreme Court announced on Monday, June 1, that it would take up a major issue in intellectual-property law: whether patents should be granted for what are known as business methods. Many financial, accounting, and e-commerce firms have rushed to obtain patent protection for such things as ways to structure financial products, manage organizations, or transact business on the Internet.

The court said it would consider a case involving a method for hedging risk in commodities trading. A claimed patent on this process, filed in 1997 by inventors Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw, was rejected by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office on the basis that it simply involved a mental process and did not need any technology to implement. That rejection has been upheld though various appeals.

Sarah Schafer | Sergiyev Posad, Russia | May 31

WaPo -

Inna Kashnikova found her calling during a fourth-grade trip to a factory in this picturesque town that produces matryoshki, the wooden nesting dolls that are synonymous with Russian folk art.

"I really liked it here, with the smell of the paint and all the colors," recalled Kashnikova, 40, as she sat at a workbench in the Aofis factory and used a cotton swab to dab white flowers across the apron of an unfinished matryoshka. "Ever since then, I wanted to paint the dolls."

But matryoshki -- those gourd-shaped figures that can be pulled apart to reveal ever-smaller dolls -- are in trouble, and so is Kashnikova's job.

Here in Sergiyev Posad, a historic town 50 miles north of Moscow that is considered the birthplace of the matryoshka, factories that have produced the dolls for decades are struggling to stay in business. Souvenir shops have slashed orders, tourists have stopped coming, and artisans such as Kashnikova are worried that their way of life -- and a distinctly Russian tradition -- may soon be lost.

Banks securitize their mortgages, sell these structured products to themselves and exchange them to cash on ECB counter.

Rory Carroll | Caracas | May 26

The Guardian - Slump in production and imports leaves demand outstripping supply

It sounds like a dodgy sales pitch from Arthur Daley: buy a car, drive it out of the showroom and watch its value instantly jump 10%.

The fictional wheeler-dealer was known for bending the truth, but in Venezuela he would be spot-on. Here, used cars increase in value and sell for more than new ones.

A unique market logic has reversed the orthodoxy of car value declining with age, leaving some sellers very happy and everyone else – buyers, dealers, importers, manufacturers – very upset.

Victor Rocia, who commutes daily across the capital, Caracas, is theoretically a winner. He bought his Toyota 4Runner two years ago for £26,900 and today it is worth £66,600. "It sounds great," he said. "But it's not. Trying to replace it is a nightmare."

Daniel Howden | May 26

The Independent -

The oil giant stands accused of complicity in the 1995 execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa, a Nigerian environmental activist.

The world's boardrooms are watching the case, which is seen as a test of whether transnational companies owned or operating in the US can be held responsible for human rights abuses committed abroad.

The plaintiffs include Ken Saro-Wiwa's son, Ken Wiwa Jnr, and his brother, Owens Wiwa.

For Shell, which denies any involvement in the environmentalist's killing, ordered by the government of Sani Abacha, the case represents an unwelcome public hearing of grievances that the company has spent time and money trying to make people forget.

Mr Saro-Wiwa was hanged in November 1995 after being convicted by a military tribunal in which he was denied proper legal representation or appeal. Shell subsequently faced a storm of protest and Nigeria was suspended from the Commonwealth. The then British prime minister John Major called the execution "judicial murder".

Tomorrow's proceedings will see the Dutch-based energy giant charged with collaborating with Nigerian authorities in the execution of Mr Saro-Wiwa and eight other members of his ethnic Ogoni group on "trumped-up charges". Shell has vigorously denied any involvement and says it appealed to the Abacha government for clemency on Mr Saro-Wiwa's part.

Michael B. Farrell | San Francisco

CSM - Robb Linn will walk your dog or cut your grass. He doesn’t have any professional experience in either canine care or landscaping, but he does have a master’s degree in city and regional planning.

“I had this bright idea that I would just start throwing out ads on Craigslist for landscaping, gardening, and dog walking” after being laid off from a Sonoma County, Calif., environmental planning firm earlier this year, says Mr. Linn.

As many educated and formerly well-paid workers become restless living on unemployment benefits and frustrated over fruitless job searches, some are opting for lower skilled jobs that pay less but will help cover monthly bills or simply keep them busy.

DeNeen L. Brown | May 18

WaPo - Having Little Money Often Means No Car, No Washing Machine, No Checking Account And No Break From Fees and High Prices

You have to be rich to be poor.

That's what some people who have never lived below the poverty line don't understand.

Put it another way: The poorer you are, the more things cost. More in money, time, hassle, exhaustion, menace. This is a fact of life that reality television and magazines don't often explain.

So we'll explain it here. Consider this a primer on the economics of poverty.

"The poor pay more for a gallon of milk; they pay more on a capital basis for inferior housing," says Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.). "The poor and 100 million who are struggling for the middle class actually end up paying more for transportation, for housing, for health care, for mortgages. They get steered to subprime lending. . . . The poor pay more for things middle-class America takes for granted."

Kevin G. Hall & Greg Gordon | Washington | May 13

McClatchy Newspapers - Largely unnoticed in last week's government report on the condition of the nation's biggest banks was the disclosure that five of them, topped by Bank of America, could lose $99 billion from the kinds of exotic bets that sank the global economy.

Even that figure, however, could prove to be exuberantly optimistic if the economy hits new depths, a McClatchy analysis has found.

Moreover, the regulators' recent "stress tests" on bank holding companies didn't fully measure the cash squeeze those institutions could face if souring conditions forced them to post tens of billions of dollars in additional collateral on some of their insurance-like bets, known as derivatives.

The banks' financial reports to regulators for the quarter ending March 31 also tell a potentially ominous story about their holdings of derivatives, instruments whose value is tied to an underlying asset, such as a pool of subprime mortgages. Seventeen of the 19 largest banks reported that, in the event of an economic catastrophe, they face combined derivatives losses exceeding $568 billion.

Peter Grier | Washington | May 6

CSM - A hasty exodus could weaken the wobbly banking system, US officials say. They're poised to raise the bar for those wanting out of the Treasury-run program.

It’s a club they were strong-armed to join, in a way. And now it is turning out to be harder to resign than they had envisioned.

That’s the situation with some US banks and TARP, the Treasury’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Financial firms that want to return their TARP cash will have to show they can do without help from another government bailout effort, debt guarantees provided by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), US officials said Wednesday.

The point of this linkage is to show banks “they can’t just pick and choose what federal programs they’ll participate in,” says Martin Neil Baily, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution.

'Some Aspects of Our Industry Seem Greedy'

The investment bank Goldman Sachs is back in the black. SPIEGEL spoke with the chief executive of its German operation about finance industry greed, the morals of banking and who should be blamed for the global financial meltdown.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Dibelius, bankers worldwide have behaved shamelessly and irresponsibly in recent months. Do you feel complicit?

Dibelius: Yes, and I also want to face up to the debate. In retrospect, some aspects of our industry seem greedy, self-centered and unrealistic, as if the industry had no concern whatsoever for the society around it. And I admit that we did not manage, on the whole, to cope with the expectations society has of us -- as individuals, as institutions and as an industry. Some decisions were made in the euphoria of booming markets. Hindsight is always 20-20. For that reason, it also makes sense that some of these decisions are now being sharply criticized.

much more if you can stomach it

John Byrne | May 6

Raw Story - Earlier this week, Senate Democrats quashed an attempt to amend a bankruptcy bill that would have given judges the power to reduce the principal on mortgages of distressed homeowners, swallowing an explanation from the banking industry that reducing the value of mortgages would make it harder for other Americans to get a loan.

Apparently, though, if you’re a car company formerly owned by a private equity firm — and soon to be taken over by a powerful union and an Italian automaker, there are different rules.

As part of the company’s bankruptcy filing, Chrysler LLC will not repay US taxpayers more than $7 billion it received as part of the company’s bailout earlier this year. Instead, the US will get an 8% ownership in a firm whose value continues to deteriorate by the day.

The detail was buried in Chrysler’s bankruptcy filings last week, and overlooked until today. A senior Obama official confirmed the news to CNN.

Bali, Indonesia | May 4

Ministers from across Asia agreed to set up an emergency $120 billion liquidity fund that 13 Asian nations can tap to help counter the global financial crisis.

At the Asian Development Bank's annual meeting here, finance officials also said Asian governments must spend more on social safety nets and reduce their reliance on export-driven growth, as they grapple with the economic meltdown.

Japan, South Korea and China on Sunday agreed with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, on most aspects of the liquidity fund, called the Chiang Mai Initiative, including country contributions, borrowing accessibility and surveillance mechanisms.

May 3

Reuters - Warren Buffett told a record crowd at a somber annual meeting of his Berkshire Hathaway Inc that first-quarter operating profit fell and the company's book value declined 6 percent, as the recession hurt many of the company's businesses and investments. Operating profit fell about 12 percent from a year earlier to $1.7 billion, as most of Berkshire's businesses were "basically down," Buffett told an estimated 35,000 people at the meeting in downtown Omaha.

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Megan McCarthy liveblogging - the minute Buffett was asked about newspapers, everyone in the place was as attentive as a doberman on high-dose Adderall. Finally, Warren Buffett takes on the world's most important topic!
Sadly, what Warren had to say wasn't particularly novel: newspapers are in big, bad trouble.

Most newspapers in the United States, we would not buy at any price. They have the possibility of unending losses. 30 years ago, they were an essential business if you wanted to learn sports scores, news, etc. They were only essential to the advertiser as long as they were essential to the reader. That's changing, it's changing every day. And I do not see anything on the horizon that's changing.

Apr 30

BBC - Chrysler is to enter bankruptcy protection after failing to persuade a number of hedge funds to write off its debts, a White House official has said.

President Barack Obama is due to make a statement shortly on the future of the struggling US carmaker.

The news comes as Chrysler has been in last minute talks to restructure the business before a midnight deadline.

President Obama has already said that Chrysler would emerge stronger after any move into bankruptcy protection.