By Evelyn M. Rusli & Michael J. De La Merced | New York | May 23

NYT - Just days before Facebook went public, some big investors grew nervous about the company’s prospects.

After publicly warning about challenges in mobile advertising, Facebook executives held conference calls to update their banks’ analysts on the business. Analysts at Morgan Stanley and other firms soon started advising clients to dial back their expectations. One prospective buyer was told that second-quarter revenue could be 5 percent lower than the bank’s earlier estimates.

May 22

BBC - Google's $12.5bn (£7.9bn) purchase of US phone maker Motorola Mobility has been completed days after it received approval from the Chinese government.

Chinese authorities said Google must keep its mobile software, Android, free for other device makers for up to five years.

The acquisition is Google's biggest to date.

Lesley Clark | Washington | May 18

McClatchy - President Barack Obama will announce an alliance Friday with nearly 50 companies to boost productivity among small farmers in Africa with the goal of lifting 50 million people out of poverty.

Business executives from agricultural giants such as DuPont and Monsanto will join Obama, along with the leaders of three African countries who have pledged policy changes that U.S. officials say will improve business climates and encourage investment.

“We believe we’re really unlocking business investment in African agriculture in a way that will transform that sector and support improved outcomes for small farmers,” said Raj Shah, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The plan comes as aid groups are calling on the U.S. and members of the G-8 nations gathering Friday at Camp David to renew a pledge they made at their 2009 summit to spend $22 billion on efforts to alleviate global hunger.

Advocates said they hoped the largely private effort would complement, not replace, a public commitment from the countries, which gather amid worries over the troubled European economy.

BBC News, By Kate McGeown, May 14

Manila - When night falls in Manila, a wave of young people scurry into the skyscrapers which criss-cross the city.

They're call centre agents, and because most of their clients are on the other side of the world, the night shift is their busiest time.

Last year, with more than 600,000 call centre workers, the Philippines officially overtook India as the world's call centre capital.

Michael J. De La Merced | April 9

NYT Dealbook - AOL agreed on Monday to sell a portfolio of over 800 patents, and license about 300 more, to Microsoft for $1.056 billion, amid an arms race within the technology industry over intellectual property.

Under the terms of the transaction, AOL will retain a license for the patents it is selling, while Microsoft will receive a nonexclusive license for the technologies AOL is retaining.

Madrid | March 22

RT - Madrid’s high-class escorts have found a way to regulate the Spanish banking sector. The ladies want to have their say in the economy by withholding sexual pleasures from bank employees.

The largest trade association for luxury escorts in the Spanish capital has gone on a general and indefinite strike on sexual services for bankers until they go back to providing credits to Spanish families, small- and medium-size enterprises and companies.

It all started with one of the ladies who forced one of her clients to grant a line credit and a loan simply by halting her sexual services until he “fulfills his responsibility to society.”

David Mielach | March 22 | Business Daily

Women make better bosses. That’s the finding of a new survey, which found that women in management positions lead in a more democratic way, allow employees to participate in decision-making and establish interpersonal channels of communication.

[...]

Those interpersonal channels of communication facilitated increased communication between management and employees in companies with women in management positions. This has a twofold benefit for these organizations. First, these companies are able to make more well-informed decisions, since employee feedback will be utilized in the decision-making process.

Mass media, media, mass communications, journalism, news, radio, television, newspapers, movies, film, labor, downsizing, corporations, profits, corporate profits,

by WALTER BRASCH

The Reduced Shakespeare Co. cleverly and humorously abridges all of Shakespeare’s 37 plays to 97 minutes. Short of having a set of Cliff’s Notes or a collection of Classic Comics, sources of innumerable student essays for more than a half-century, it may be the least painful way to “learn” Shakespeare. The critically-acclaimed show, in addition to being a delightful way to spend part of an evening, is a satiric slap upside the head of the mass media.

Bloomberg News, By Mourad Haroutunian, Jonathan Browning, December 19

Twitter received a $300 million investment from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal as it pushes through a redesign of its site to attract advertisers.

Alwaleed, who leads the 2011 Arab Rich List, and his investment company agreed to buy a "strategic stake" in Twitter, Kingdom Holding said Monday. A strategic holding means more than 3 percent, Ahmed Halawani, a Kingdom Holding director, said. That would give the San Francisco microblogging company a valuation exceeding $10 billion.

CNN, By Suzanne Kelly, December 11

The company once known as the world's most notorious private security contractor, Blackwater, is changing its name and its look once again in a bid to prove that it has outgrown its toxic reputation.

Renaming the company "Academi" tops a number of changes that have been made by a private equity consortium that purchased the company from former owner Erik Prince last year.

"The message here is not that we're changing the name," said Ted Wright, who came on as the new company CEO in June. "The message is that we're changing the company, and the name just reflects those changes. We have new owners, a new board of directors, a new management team, new location, new attitude on governance, new openness, new strategy - it's a whole new company."

Peter Beaumont | Nov 11

The Guardian - Renewed disagreement over US budget deficit strategy in Washington has reawakened China's fears of default. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images
The head of China's biggest ratings agency, Dagong Global Credit Rating, is warning that it may downgrade the US's sovereign debt rating again because of Washington's failure to tackle the federal budget deficit.

The remarks by Dagong's chairman, Guan Jianzhong, to be broadcast in an interview with al-Jazeera on Saturday morning, come at the end of another week of deep turmoil for the world economy.

Dagong, which has maintained a pessimistic outlook on US fiscal policy, has been leading the charge to downgrade US debt over the last 12 months, lowering the US rating from AA to A+ a year ago.

In August it downgraded US debt again, to A. Days later, Standard & Poor's followed in its wake, becoming the first western agency to downgrade US debt after the threat of a default was narrowly avoided following weeks of political squabbling in Washington over whether President Obama should be allowed to raise the US debt ceiling.

Guan's intervention comes as another embarrassing political standoff over budget policy looms in Washington. The cross-party "supercommittee" given the job of finding ways to cut the budget deficit is reportedly deadlocked, with Republicans refusing to countenance the tax rises being suggested by Democrats. The committee is due to report by 23 November, but there are fears they could fail to reach agreement, prompting a new crisis.
...
In an interview with Talk to Al-Jazeera, Guan agrees that it is almost inevitable that his agency will cut America's debt rating once again, arguing that the only solution open to the US economy is further quantitative easing.

"We are being throttled by the Big Lie: we're told that if the predatory financial system implodes, we'll all be ruined. The opposite is true: the only way to save our economy is to let the corrupt, pathological and flawed financial system implode."

http://www.oftwominds.com/blognov11/collapse-of-corrupt11-11.html

========================================================================

There's beauty in simplicity and Charles Hugh Smith cuts right to the core of what the problem is with the current financial system. I think he's nailed it.

New York Times, By Joe Nocera, October 28

On Friday, the law firm of Steven J. Baum threw a Halloween party. The firm, which is located near Buffalo, is what is commonly referred to as a “foreclosure mill” firm, meaning it represents banks and mortgage servicers as they attempt to foreclose on homeowners and evict them from their homes. Steven J. Baum is, in fact, the largest such firm in New York; it represents virtually all the giant mortgage lenders, including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

The party is the firm’s big annual bash. Employees wear Halloween costumes to the office, where they party until around noon, and then return to work, still in costume. I can’t tell you how people dressed for this year’s party, but I can tell you about last year’s.

That’s because a former employee of Steven J. Baum recently sent me snapshots of last year’s party. In an e-mail, she said that she wanted me to see them because they showed an appalling lack of compassion toward the homeowners — invariably poor and down on their luck — that the Baum firm had brought foreclosure proceedings against.

Neela Banerjee | Washington | October 26

Miami Herald - BP won approval from the Interior Department to drill its first exploratory oil well in the Gulf of Mexico since the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion touched off the country's worst offshore environmental disaster.

The new well will be much farther out to sea and in deeper water than BP's Macondo well, which exploded in April 2010, killed 11 workers and spewed nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the ocean over several months.

Nathan Olivarez-Giles | Washington | October 28

LAT - The Federal Communications Commission has approved a plan to expand high-speed Internet access in parts of the U.S. that currently have slower connections, such as rural areas.

The FCC, in a statement announcing its plans, said it has enacted "the most significant policy step ever taken to connect all Americans to high-speed Internet, wherever they live."

Necco returns to its original candy wafer recipe after customer backlash and a drop in sales

The Boston Globe, By Taryn Luna, October 25

New England Confectionery Co. thought it could make its old-fashioned wafer appeal to a modern, health-conscious consumer by coloring and flavoring it with all natural ingredients such as cabbage and beets.

Instead, sales of Necco Wafers fell 35 percent.

“There were stacks and stacks of letters and e-mails that said, ‘Why did you do this? You ruined it,’ ’’ recalled Steve Ornell, Necco’s vice president of sales.

OCTOBER 16: While in Portland, Maine to give a talk on race and
social justice at First Parish Portland Unitarian Universalist
Church, I visited on Sunday with Occupy Wall Street participants
(above) who have camped out at a downtown park. It was an unseasonably
warm day, their spirits were high, and my sense was that they are highly
organized (e.g., they have a media coordinator) and that they feel
very connected with Occupy Wall Street groups elsewhere.

(NYC PHOTOS AFTER THE JUMP)

Brendan Coffey | Oct 18

Fortune - Goldman Sachs lost money by doing all of the things the Volcker Rule says it shouldn't be doing.

Goldman Sachs reported just its second quarterly loss since it went public and the first since the dark days of late 2008. It also gave Paul Volcker a great big reason to push harder for his proposal to clamp down on investment banks trading for their own accounts.

Basically, the Volcker rule aims to get investment banks back to what they historically do: broker trades, act as a trusted vehicle to get corporate America funding, and manage the commercial sector's money. Over time banks decided they wanted to make their own money and trade heavily for their own benefit rather than relying on fees from making other people money. Essentially, they became like hedge funds -- big speculative, risk-taking machines. Volcker has been proselytizing to rein them in since these in-house funds helped crash the world economy in 2008, arguing they should focus on their traditional roles of providing liquidity and expertise to the financial markets.

How did Goldman do this quarter? Pretty good, if you look just at what an investment bank is supposed to do. The bank made money from its Investment Banking arm, which includes financial advisory services and equity underwriting. It made money on Institutional Client Services, such as executing trades. It made money on Investment Management, which includes keeping safe the record levels of cash corporations hold.

So how did it post a net loss of $428 million this quarter? By doing all those things Volcker says banks shouldn't be doing.

Goldman's Investment & Banking division, which is its umbrella division for trading its own capital to make profits, took a bath. Goldman's house account lost over $1 billion on its equities portfolio, got burned for $907 million in losses in the debt market and saw its outsized investment in the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China drop $1.045 billion in value -- a total loss of $2.5 billion and the reason Goldman shares have opened weaker this morning.

Michael McCarthy | October 12

The Independent - BP is making contingency plans to fight the largest oil spill in history, as it prepares to drill more than 4,000 feet down in the Atlantic in wildlife-rich British waters off the Shetland Islands.

Internal company documents seen by The Independent show that the worst-case scenario for a spill from its North Uist exploratory well, to be sunk next year, would involve a leak of 75,000 barrels a day for 140 days – a total of 10.5 million barrels of oil, comfortably the world's biggest pollution disaster.

. . . on the Market Place Morning Report I heard them repeat and utterly mind-blowing statistic: student loan debt was now higher than credit cards, weighing in at $830 billion. (The story isn't on the site, but it can be heard towards the end of the eight minute show.)

The student loan debt was brought up and specifically linked to the Occupy Wall Street Protests, as it damn well should be. If there was one thing I would fight for if I was a twenty-something it would be this: a complete credit strike. I'd create a campaign and set a date where all students across the country recently graduated and paying student loans stopped paying. The sum of student debt is an outrageous, feudal, rentier-society fact that is one of the key aspects holding our economy back. It's parasitical.

Just walk away. That's what I'd do.

Bloomberg has a big splash out today on the Koch Brothers' empire. It's pretty hard hitting. (Side note: looks like Bloomberg Businessweek is taking the place of the old excellent business reporting the Wall Street Journal used to do.) The story details bribery, wrongful termination, trading with Iran and the general Koch-like skulduggery we've become accustomed. It's a long one but well worth a read.

. . . that Bank of America's greed will cost them more in people moving accounts than anything the Durban Amendment could have.

Blake Ellis | New York | Sept 29

CNN - Get ready for a new wave of bank fees. Bank of America will begin charging a $5 monthly fee at the beginning of next year for customers who make debit card purchases.

Whether you use your card for one purchase a month or 20, you will pay $5 per month starting in 2012. It doesn't matter if you select "debit" or "credit" at the point of sale.

If you don't use your card at all, you won't be assessed a fee, and you can still use ATMs as much as you want without getting hit with the new charge. Plus, customers with certain premium accounts will be exempt from the charge.
Other banks have been flirting with the idea of introducing a fee for debit card usage, but Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500) is one of the first major institutions to announce that it will make this a reality for active debit card customers.

The move coincides with the implementation of new rules limiting the revenue banks will be able to get from merchants. Beginning this weekend, a cap on the fees banks can charge retailers every time customers swipe their debit cards will take effect.
..
"After years of raking in excess profits off an unfair and anti-competitive interchange system, Bank of America is trying to find new ways to pad their profits by sticking it to its customers," Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said in a statement Thursday. "It's overt, unfair and I hope their customers have the final say.

Sept 14

BBC - A US federal report has blamed the worst oil spill in US history on "key mis-steps", poor leadership and a poor cement job by BP and its contractors.

BP was "ultimately responsible" for rig safety, with Transocean responsible for safe operations and worker safety.

BP tried to save time and money at the cost of safety, and Transocean operated normally despite the hazards, it said.

"Multiple causes, involving multiple parties, including Transocean and Halliburton" were to blame, BP said.

The April 2010 Deepwater Horizon blast killed 11 workers and spilled four million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

It took three months and highly complex undersea engineering effort to plug the well and stop the oil flow.

The report, issued by the the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement and the US Coast Guard Joint Investigation Team, echoes previous reports in concluding that multiple factors contributed to the disaster

The explosion was "the result of poor risk management, last-minute changes to plans, failure to observe and respond to critical indicators, inadequate well control response, insufficient emergency bridge response training by companies and individuals responsible," it said.

As well as labelling BP "ultimately responsible" for safety, the report blames Halliburton for conducting a poor cement job to seal the well that failed in the run-up to the blast

Ed Pilkington | New York | Sept 13

The Guardian - Major US banks accuse Murdoch and News Corporation of corporate misconduct extending far beyond UK

Full text of shareholders' complaint

A prominent group of US banks and investment funds with substantial investments in News Corporation has issued a fresh legal complaint accusing the company of widespread corporate misconduct extending far beyond the phone-hacking excesses of News of the World.

The legal action, lodged in the Delaware courts, is led by Amalgamated Bank, a New York-based chartered bank that manages some $12bn on behalf of institutional investors and holds about 1 million shares of News Corporation common stock. Its lawsuit is aimed against the members of News Corp's board, including Rupert Murdoch himself, his sons James and Lachlan, and the media empire's chief operating officer, Chase Carey.

In the complaint, the shareholders accuse the board of allowing Murdoch to use News Corp as his "own personal fiefdom". In addition to the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World, the complaint focuses on the controversial business tactics of two News Corp subsidiaries in America, its advertising arm News America Marketing and a manufacturer of satellite TV smart cards called NDS Group Plc.

In legal documents, the shareholders allege that the two companies were accused by multiple parties of "stealing computer technology, hacking into business plans and computers and violating the law through a wide range of anti-competitive behaviour".

Hypocrites