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Securities firms can borrow against collateralized loan obligations at the Federal Reserve’s Primary Dealer Credit Facility, the analysts said. The Fed set up the facility last month, its first extension of credit to non-banks since the Great Depression.

The creation last month of CLOs comprised of loans for private-equity buyouts or other leveraged loans to larger companies totaling $11.4 billion ended “the deep freeze” in the market, and many arose from unusual motives, today’s report said. “At least one” recent CLO was probably done to take advantage of the Fed’s new facility, it said.

“It’s not cheap to finance loans today in the market,” Vishwanath Tirupattur, a Morgan Stanley analyst in New York, said in a telephone interview.

At first, the decision threw Flagler Productions Inc. into a panic. Now it’s Wal-Mart that’s squirming.

In recent months, Flagler has opened its trove of some 15,000 Wal-Mart tapes to the outside world, with an eye toward selling clips. The material is proving irresistible to everyone from business historians and documentary filmmakers to plaintiffs lawyers and union organizers.

Among the revealing moments: A former executive vice president and board member challenges store managers in 2004 to continue his work opposing unionization. Male managers in drag lead thousands of co-workers in the company’s corporate cheer. In another meeting, managers mock foolish or dangerous use of a product sold in its stores. In 1991, founder Sam Walton describes Hillary Clinton, then a Wal-Mart director, as “one of us.”

The best part, maintains plaintiffs lawyer Gene P. Graham Jr., is that “Wal-Mart has no control over this stuff.”

The world’s third-largest company by market value fell as much as 12 percent, the most since 1987, in New York trading after GE also cut the forecast that Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Immelt once told investors was “in the bag” for 2008.

“We hate disappointing investors,” Immelt said in an interview on the company-owned CNBC television network. “It’s not part of the company. It’s not part of the culture. We take accountability for that.”

Ira Winkler, a penetration-testing consultant, says he and a team of other experts took a day to set up attack tools they needed then launched their attack, which paired social engineering with corrupting browsers on a power company’s desktops. By the end of a full day of the attack, they had taken over several machines, giving the team the ability to hack into the control network overseeing power production and distribution.

Winkler says he and his team were hired by the power company, which he would not name, to test the security of its network and the power grid it oversees. He would not say when the test was done, but referred to the timeframe as “now.” The company called off the test after the team took over the machines.

Not one hand went up.

This is after four years of the word appearing on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers, on network and cable news, and online. This is after years of highly publicized lawsuits, Congressional inquiries, and international controversy and condemnation. This is after the release of a Hollywood film of that title, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, and Reese Witherspoon.

I was dumbstruck. Finally one hand went up, and the student sheepishly asked if rendition had anything to do with a version of a movie or a play.

I nodded charitably, then attempted to define the word in its more public context. I described specific accounts of U.S. abductions of foreign citizens, of the likely treatment accorded such prisoners when placed in the hands of countries like Syria and Egypt, of the months and years of detention. I spoke of the lack of formal charges, of some prisoners’ eventual release and how their subsequent lawsuits against the U.S. government were stymied in the name of national security and secrecy.

The students were visibly disturbed. They expressed astonishment, then revulsion. They asked how such practices could go on.

I told them to look around the room at one another’s faces; they were seated next to the answer. I suggested that they were, in part, the reason that rendition, waterboarding, Guantánamo detention, warrantless searches and intercepts, and a host of other such practices have not been more roundly discredited. I admit it was harsh.

That instance was no aberration. In recent years I have administered a dumbed-down quiz on current events and history early in each semester to get a sense of what my students know and don’t know. Initially I worried that its simplicity would insult them, but my fears were unfounded. The results have been, well, horrifying.

Power for 2009 in Germany, Europe’s biggest electricity market, climbed to a record 65.50 euros ($105) a megawatt hour, gaining 1.2 percent, according to broker GFI Group Inc. The contract traded at 65.25 euros at 3:35 p.m. Berlin time. French, Dutch and U.K. contracts also rose to records.

European electricity prices are in the third year of a rally as the price of oil is surging and after the introduction of the European Union’s emissions-trading program. The increased costs for the continent’s 306 million people and industry may dent an economy that’s being threatened by a possible U.S. recession and add to inflation pressures.

“Commercial and industrial users will definitely have to pay these prices, and the broader public too,” said Per Lekander, a utilities analyst at UBS AG in London today. “It’s short-term pain and long-term gain for the utilities.”

“The Street got staffed up to support what was a slight bubble in M&A,” Moelis, 49, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television today. “You’re going to see a significant retrenchment.”

Moelis resigned from UBS, Switzerland’s largest bank by market value, a year ago and now runs Moelis & Co., an investment banking boutique. Some of the largest financial “conglomerates” may break up as Wall Street shifts focus from lending to its clients to furnishing them with strategic advice, he said. Wall Street banks hit by mortgage losses and writedowns have cut more than 34,000 jobs in the past nine months, the most since the dot-com boom fizzled in 2001.

The US is already sliding into what the IMF predicts will be a “mild recession” but there is mounting pessimism about the ability of the rest of the world to escape unscathed, the IMF said in its twice-yearly World Economic Outlook. Britain is particularly vulnerable, it warned, as it slashed its growth targets for both the US and the UK.

The report made it clear that there will be no early resolution to the global financial crisis.

“The financial shock that erupted in August 2007, as the US sub-prime mortgage market was derailed by the reversal of the housing boom, has spread quickly and unpredictably to inflict extensive damage on markets and institutions at the heart of the financial system,” it said.

They are joined by media barons like Rupert Murdoch, whose global network of newspapers, Web products, movie studios and TV stations reach hundreds of millions of people every day, or tech entrepreneurs like Facebook wunderkind, 23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, whose company is redefining what global community means. Alongside them you’ll also find those who have different forms of power: religious leaders from the pope to Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei, perhaps the most powerful man in the Middle East today; clerics who have taken to a media pulpit and reach millions around the world daily like Latin America’s Luis Palau or the Egyptian “tele-Muslim,” former accountant turned religious TV star Amr Khaled. Cultural icons who use their celebrity platforms for activism like Bono and Angelina Jolie would certainly make the list, as would terrorist leaders and others who form a kind of shadow elite, like Osama bin Laden or the recently arrested arms dealer, Russia’s Viktor Bout. A growing number of tycoons from emerging markets make the cut: Indian industrialist Ratan Tata, Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, Saudi oil investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and Chinese real-estate billionaire Yang Huiyan, among others.

The Defense Department says the portable device isn’t perfect, but is accurate enough to save American lives by screening local police officers, interpreters and allied forces for access to U.S. military bases, and by helping narrow the list of suspects after a roadside bombing. The device has already been tried in Iraq and is expected to be deployed there as well. “We’re not promising perfection — we’ve been very careful in that,” said Donald Krapohl, special assistant to the director at the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment, the midwife for the new device. “What we are promising is that, if it’s properly used, it will improve over what they are currently doing.”