Looks like we have lost one of our financial truth seekers. Mark Pittman, only 52, died yesterday. He had a history of heart problems.
Mark Pittman, the award-winning investigative reporter whose fight to open the Federal Reserve to more scrutiny led Bloomberg News to sue the central bank and win,
This is a true bummer for it appears Pittman was the cause of Bloomberg getting a spine by suing the Federal Reserve to find out what happened to $2 trillion dollars.
A former police-beat reporter who joined Bloomberg News in 1997, Pittman wrote stories in 2007 predicting the collapse of the banking system. That year, he won the Gerald Loeb Award from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, the highest accolade in financial journalism, for “Wall Street’s Faustian Bargain,” a series of articles on the breakdown of the U.S. mortgage industry.
It's Friday Night! Party Time! Time to relax, put your feet up on the couch, lay back, and watch some detailed videos on economic policy!
Frontline has done it again with another great documentary. The Card Game, perfect for Black Friday, brings us up to date on lobbyists efforts to stop a Consumer Financial Production Agency and also overviews the credit card companies' role in the financial crisis. Lowell Bergman produced this documentary. He also made The History of the Credit Card.
Bloomberg is reporting that Dubai World may end up in a sovereign default.
Dubai’s debt woes may worsen to become a “major sovereign default” that roils developing nations and cuts off capital flows to emerging markets, Bank of America Corp. said.
“One cannot rule out -- as a tail risk -- a case where this would escalate into a major sovereign default problem, which would then resonate across global emerging markets in the same way that Argentina did in the early 2000s or Russia in the late 1990s.
World Markets are reacting to the news of Dubai World and it's pretty bad
The selling resumed on Friday in Asia, with the Hang Seng Index down 4.8% and the Nikkei 225 Average down 3.2%, their worst percentage fall since March. Markets were struggling to figure out what kind of exposure banks had to Dubai debt.
Shares of heavyweights Standard Chartered Bank and HSBC /quotes/comstock/13*!hbc/quotes/nls/hbc (HBC 62.07, 0.00, 0.00%) fell over 7% in Asian trading. The banks rank as the top two lenders respectively in the United Arab Emirates.
Gold dropped to 1140 from an all time high of 1192 earlier. The reasons are the need to raise cash and the dollar being safe haven and stopping the dollar shorts. Margin calls by the need to raise cash as well as the rising dollar making gold more expensive are also cited as reasons.
Overcapacity is a blight on China’s industrial landscape, affecting dozens of industries and wreaking far-reaching damage on the global economy
The reports says China's stimulus package has made this overcapacity much worse.
One of the problems is China dumps it's excess goods onto the market, selling them for much less than the cost to produce.
This hurts other national economies in terms of wiping out their domestic industries through unfair competition.
I think the report is a little polite, ignoring China's intentional and strategic market dumping and other strategies to capture yet another manufacturing sector for itself long term.
(Bloomberg) -- Dubai shook investor confidence across the Persian Gulf after its proposal to delay debt payments risked triggering the biggest sovereign default since Argentina in 2001.
The scary thing is that if it can happen to Dubai it can happen to almost anyone.
Gulf region default swaps jumped, with contracts linked to Bahrain adding 29 basis points today to 223.5, the biggest increase since Feb. 18. Contracts linked to Abu Dhabi added the most since February yesterday, climbing 36 basis points to 136.5 and were another 23 basis points higher at 159.5 today, according to London-based CMA. Qatar default swaps rose 13 basis points to 117, adding to yesterday’s 11 basis-point increase.
Bankruptcy cases filed in federal courts for fiscal year 2009 totaled 1,402,816, up 34.5 percent over the 1,042,993 filings reported for the 12-month period ending September 30, 2008.
The weekly unemployment claims were very positive today.
(Bloomberg) -- The number of Americans filing claims for unemployment benefits fell last week to the lowest level since September 2008 as the economic recovery encourages companies to fire fewer workers.
Initial jobless claims declined to 466,000 in the week ended Nov. 21 from 501,000 a week earlier, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. The number of people collecting unemployment insurance dropped in the prior week, while those getting extended payments also declined.
Great news all around, right? Wrong.
The non-seasonally adjusted numbers tell a far different story.
It's Friday Night! Party Time! Time to relax, put your feet up on the couch, lay back, and watch some detailed videos on economic policy!
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