Archive for April, 2008
Wachovia Resorts to Emergency Fundraising
April 15th, 2008Via: Guardian: America’s fourth-largest bank, Wachovia, is raising $7bn (£3.52bn) through emergency fundraising as the subprime mortgage crisis in the US continues to reverberate through the banking sector. Wachovia is raising the funds through public offerings of common and convertible preference stock after incurring a surprise $350m loss in the first quarter of 2008 compared […]
Messy Symmetrical Triangle on U.S. Dollar Index Daily Interval
April 15th, 2008WARNING: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument. April U.S. Dollar Index, daily interval The next leg down could be setting up. 71.34 is the all time low and the strategic support. Any rally below 73 is, most likely, fake. At 73 it’s still constrained by the 50 fib […]
Retailing Chains Caught in a Wave of Bankruptcies
April 15th, 2008Via: New York Times: The consumer spending slump and tightening credit markets are unleashing a widening wave of bankruptcies in American retailing, prompting thousands of store closings that are expected to remake suburban malls and downtown shopping districts across the country. Since last fall, eight mostly midsize chains — as diverse as the furniture store […]
IRS Audits of Big Companies Fall to All-Time Low
April 14th, 2008Via: TaxProfBlog: The FY 2007 audit rate for the nation’s largest corporations has plunged to its lowest level in the last 20 years, less than half what it was in FY 1988 … The historic collapse in audits for the corporations with $250 million or more in assets was especially notable during the last two […]
Food Riots ‘An Apocalyptic Warning’
April 14th, 2008Their headline, not mine. Via: ABC: Basic access to food is slipping out of reach for many people in developing countries. The cost of the rice has risen by more than three-quarters in two months and the price of wheat has more than doubled in the same time. The desperation in dozens of countries has […]
U.S. Housing Collapse Spreads Overseas
April 14th, 2008Via: IHT: The collapse of the housing bubble in the United States is mutating into a global phenomenon, with real estate prices down from the Irish countryside and the Spanish coast to Baltic seaports and even in parts of India. This synchronized global slowdown, which has become increasingly stark in recent months, is hobbling economic […]
Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear
April 14th, 2008Must read… If you like the Horror genre. Via: Vanity Fair: Today, 37 years after PCB production ceased in Anniston, and after tons of contaminated soil have been removed to try to reclaim the site, the area around the old Monsanto plant remains one of the most polluted spots in the U.S. People in Anniston […]
U.S. Lenders Freeze Home Equity Credit Lines
April 14th, 2008Via: IHT: It was the lending institutions and mortgage originators that got the United States into this credit mess, but it is the American consumers, taxpayers and those companies’ shareholders who will end up shouldering most of the costs. The latest example of this is in the mass freezing of home equity lines of credit […]
U.S. Defense Contractor Found that a Single Compromised Windows Box had Been Secretly Siphoning Information to a Server in Mainland China for 18 Months
April 13th, 2008Via: Wired: The attackers relied on e-mails tempting the victim to open the attachments, in some cases by presenting them as résumés from job seekers. But when the target opened the attachment, the application would usually crash, while the embedded code covertly installed a keylogger and data-stealing software that scooped up documents anywhere on the […]
U.S. Government to Use Most Advanced Spy Technology Against Americans
April 13th, 2008And you thought the Google van in your driveway was bad!? Look up and wave at the birdy. Via: Washington Post: The Bush administration said yesterday that it plans to start using the nation’s most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon, rebuffing challenges by House Democrats over the idea’s legal authority. Homeland Security Secretary […]
