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MB Financial Bank, which has more than 80 branches in the Chicago area, agreed to pay a premium of 0.2 percent for the deposits, according to a statement released today by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Corus was seized by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the FDIC was named receiver.

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Regulators are shutting U.S. banks at the fastest pace in 17 years, with 92 failing so far this year. A total of 416 are on the FDIC’s “problem bank” list after failing tests for asset quality, liquidity and earnings in the second quarter, the most since June 1994.

Corus Assets

MB Financial will assume about $3 billion of Corus’s $7 billion in assets, the FDIC said. The deal may cost the FDIC’s deposit insurance fund about $1.7 billion, the agency said.

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Brickwell Community Bank of Woodbury, Minnesota, was also seized today. CorTrust Bank of Mitchell, South Dakota, will pay a premium for the $63 million in deposits, the FDIC said. Brickwell’s sole branch will open tomorrow as an office of CorTrust. The FDIC and CorTrust entered into a loss-sharing agreement on $65 million of assets, the regulator said.

Prosecutors say the records, once kept at Stanford’s security office in Fort Lauderdale, were hauled away in a 95-gallon bin in February after a federal judge ordered that no company paperwork be destroyed.

The 61-year-old former DEA chief said he was prepared to turn himself over to federal agents Friday on charges of conspiracy and obstruction.

“No one is sorrier than me that it came to this — after spending 32 1/2 years working for the government,” he told The Miami Herald. “But I’m prepared to fight this. I still believe in the system.”

The indictment of the highly decorated former agent is the latest in a series of charges against Stanford and top lieutenants accused of stealing more than $7 billion from investors in a spectacular Ponzi scheme.

Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release September 10, 2009

NOTICE
– – – – – – –
CONTINUATION OF THE NATIONAL EMERGENCY WITH RESPECT

TO CERTAIN TERRORIST ATTACKS

Consistent with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. 1622(d), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, in Proclamation 7463, with respect to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States.

Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency, must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2009. Therefore, I am continuing in effect for an additional year the national emergency the former President declared on September 14, 2001, with respect to the terrorist threat.

This notice shall be published in the Federal Register and transmitted to the Congress.

BARACK OBAMA

Among the Glock-related material the IRS allegedly is examining: boxes of invoices and memos provided by the company’s former senior executive in the U.S., Paul F. Jannuzzo. Once one of the most prominent gun industry executives in America, Jannuzzo said in a federal complaint he filed last year that Gaston Glock used his companies’ complicated structure to conceal profits from American tax authorities. “[Glock] has organized an elaborate scheme to both skim money from gross sales and to launder those funds through various foreign entities,” Jannuzzo alleged in the sealed May 12, 2008, IRS filing, which BusinessWeek has reviewed. “The skim is approximately $20.00 per firearm sold,” according to the complaint. Glock’s U.S. unit, which generates the bulk of the company’s sales, has sold about 5 million pistols since the late 1980s, Jannuzzo estimates in an interview.

A burly man with a staccato delivery, Jannuzzo has several potential motives for airing these allegations. As a whistleblower, he is seeking a percentage of any federal tax recovery. He is also fighting embezzlement charges by his former employer. Since 2007, the company has been providing information about Jannuzzo to authorities in Cobb County, Ga., where Glock’s American subsidiary is based. The Cobb County District Attorney’s Office is prosecuting Jannuzzo—who once represented the company at a White House Rose Garden ceremony and on CBS’ (CBS) 60 Minutes—for siphoning corporate money into a Cayman Islands account. Jannuzzo, who left the company in 2003, claims he’s the victim of a vendetta.

Speaking on behalf of the company and Gaston Glock, Carlos Guevara, the general counsel of Glock Inc. in the U.S., said in a written statement: “Glock has acted lawfully and properly throughout its history. Unfortunately, Glock was victimized by several former employees and fiduciaries,” including Ewert and Jannuzzo. “The Glock companies are exceptionally well-run and managed. Glock’s tax filings and reporting are accurate.”

Still, eyebrow-raising goings-on appear to have been standard at Glock. After the attempt on Gaston Glock’s life, an internal investigation conducted at his instruction turned up documents apparently showing that a Glock affiliate in Panama helped in 1995 to start a bank called Unibank Offshore in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Unibank’s co-founder was an alleged money launderer named Hakki Yaman Namli.

In the U.S., Jannuzzo and another former Glock executive, Peter S. Manown, have claimed that for years they distributed company funds to their wives and Glock employees with the understanding that the money would be donated to congressional candidates—an apparent violation of U.S. election law. The ex-executives, who say they acted with Gaston Glock’s approval, have estimated the total amount in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Buttressing this allegation are ledger entries and cancelled checks. Guevara, the company lawyer, said: “Glock has never authorized, and would never authorize, any act that would violate U.S. campaign finance laws.”

Glock’s political and public relations activities in the U.S. sometimes have tended toward strangeness. Internal records show payments of thousands of dollars a month over several years to a gun industry lobbyist named Richard Feldman. In interviews, Feldman says that at Gaston Glock’s request he spent some of the money in 1999 and 2000 to arrange U.S. appearances by Jörg Haider, then the leader of Austria’s anti-immigrant, far-right Freedom Party. Glock has been described in Austria as a political supporter of Haider, although the arms maker has sued both an Austrian newspaper and a politician there for making that claim. The arrangements Feldman says he worked on included Haider’s attendance at a January 2000 banquet in New York honoring the birthday of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The King dinner, sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality, received media coverage because Hillary Clinton criticized her then-rival for a New York Senate seat, Rudolph Giuliani, for attending the celebration Haider present.

Before he died in a car accident last year, Haider stirred controversy, according to media reports, for praising the “character” of elite Nazi SS troops and the “employment policy” of Adolph Hitler. “Glock urged me to help Haider overcome some of the [image] problems,” says Feldman. The lobbyist says he thoroughly researched the situation to satisfy himself that neither Glock nor Haider ever supported the Nazi cause. “There were loose statements [by Haider] that were blown out of proportion,” he says.

Glock’s Guevara did not respond to questions about the company’s or Gaston Glock’s relationship with Haider.

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In recent years, the gun company’s U.S. operation has been rattled by scandal. Local authorities in Georgia have prosecuted Jannuzzo and fellow former executive Peter Manown at the behest of their former employer. On Oct. 18, 2007, Manown, an attorney who handled many of Gaston Glock’s personal matters in the U.S., testified that he and Jannuzzo had embezzled company funds and funneled the money to accounts in the Cayman Islands. He said the pair also skimmed money from Glock real estate transactions. And Manown said he and Jannuzzo had withdrawn more than $500,000 from Glock accounts for political campaign contributions from 1993 to at least 2003. The executives put some of that cash in their own pockets, he testified. “There was so much money flying around in this company,” Manown said. “It was like Monopoly money.” He recounted confessing his transgressions privately to Gaston Glock back in 2003 and repaying some of the stolen money. The former Glock executive pled guilty in 2008 to theft and received a suspended 10-year sentence.

In connection with the campaign contributions, Manown testified that Gaston Glock knew what his underlings were doing: “This was all done with Mr. Glock’s blessing.” Manown said he and Jannuzzo would withdraw cash for political contributions from a Glock account at the since-closed Summit Bank (SBGA) in Atlanta. Sometimes the Glock executives withdrew “$9,000 so it would stay under the reporting radar of the bank,” Manown said. He was referring to the federal anti-money laundering rule that requires banks to report to the Treasury Dept. any cash withdrawal of $10,000 or more. Purposely evading the requirement is a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison.

The stock market has mounted an historic rally since it hit a low in March. The S&P 500 is up 55%, as U.S. job losses have slowed and credit markets have stabilized.

But against that improving backdrop, one indicator has turned distinctly bearish: Corporate officers and directors have been selling shares at a pace last seen just before the onset of the subprime malaise two years ago.

While a wave of insider selling doesn’t necessarily foretell a stock market downturn, it suggests that those with the first read on business trends don’t believe current stock prices are justified by economic fundamentals.

“It’s not a very complicated story,” said Charles Biderman, who runs market research firm Trim Tabs. “Insiders know better than you and me. If prices are too high, they sell.”

Biderman, who says there were $31 worth of insider stock sales in August for every $1 of insider buys, isn’t the only one who has taken note. Ben Silverman, director of research at the InsiderScore.com web site that tracks trading action, said insiders are selling at their most aggressive clip since the summer of 2007.

Silverman said the “orgy of selling” is noteworthy because corporate insiders were aggressive buyers of the market’s spring dip. The S&P 500 dropped as low as 666 in early March before the recent rally took it back above 1,000.

Both schools, long admired for delivering top-notch returns for years, warned about the declines late last year when their presidents told students, faculty and alumni about upcoming heavy cutbacks.

Harvard, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said its endowment dropped 27.3 percent, or $11 billion, to $26 billion in the year that ended on June 30. Despite the loss, the endowment has still returned an average of 8.9 percent every year for the last decade while the average comparable fund has risen 3.2 percent, according to research and consulting firm Wilshire Associates.

Harvard’s investment decline, the biggest in four decades, forced the 373-year-old school to lay off staff and interrupt a prominent campus expansion across the Charles River.

Yale, located in New Haven, Connecticut, said its endowment shrank a larger-than-expected 30 percent to $16 billion in the fiscal year that ended on June 30.

The drop means that Yale will have an annual deficit of $150 million from 2010-2011 to 2013-2014, Yale President Richard Levin wrote. He also said the school will cut another 5 percent from non-salary expenses this year after having already reduced staff and non-salary expenses 7.5 percent this year.

In recent years both Harvard and Yale invested heavily in hedge funds, private equity funds and timber, relying on these alternative asset classes to add billions to their endowments.

Last year, however, many of those bets did not pay off and both Ivy League schools lost far more than the median college endowment which concentrated mainly on stocks and bonds and dropped 18 percent, according to Wilshire Associates.

Jane Mendillo, head of Harvard Management Co, which oversees the school’s endowment, blamed Harvard’s heavy commitments to illiquid asset classes for the losses.

Harvard did not have enough cash on hand in the last year, Mendillo said in a report where she outlined changes to the way the university will invest from now on.

“We expect to see a prolonged period of instability and slower growth in some markets,” she wrote in the report.

To raise cash, Mendillo sold stock, pulled money back from certain hedge funds and exited some private equity funds. She also laid off a quarter of the workforce, or 50 people, at Harvard Management to cut costs.

GOLD

* December gold GCZ9 up $13.80, or 1.4 percent, at $1,010.60 an ounce at 10:26 a.m. EDT (1426 GMT) on the COMEX division of the New York Mercantile Exchange.

* Ranged from $996.30 to $1,013.70, which marked the highest level since Feb. 20.

* The U.S. dollar fell to a one-year low against major currencies as optimism about the outlook for the global economy encouraged investors to favor higher yielding currencies and stocks instead of the safety of the greenback.

They can look, but they dare not touch: Ms. Passos’s car is bulletproof.

This metropolis of 10 million is the auto-armoring capital of the world, by some estimates. Last year alone, more than 3,000 automobiles were taken apart, and then put back together complete with steel door plates, windows five layers thick, and tires that keep rolling even after taking a bullet.

Over the last three years, the number of armored cars in Brazil has doubled as an explosion of wealth has sent the newly rich in search of ways to live safely in a class-driven society where the murder rate is nearly five times that of the U.S.

“I wouldn’t drive it unless it was armored,” says Ms. Passos. Her bedroom has a pink computer and pink snowboard in it. “Everything that is mine I personalize in pink. I think it’s a very pretty and expressive color.”

Unlike Ms. Passos and her attention-grabbing car, most Brazilians seek safety by trying not to call attention to themselves, or to their wealth. Publicly traded companies here don’t report executives’ salaries, fearing disclosure could turn them into targets. And the high-heeled feet of São Paulo’s wealthiest women rarely touch the city’s pavement. Many descend from their armored vehicles only in guarded garages.

Brazil’s armoring industry, including some 120 companies that convert vehicles, got its first big break in 1999, when bandits tried to kidnap the children of Jorge Paulo Lemann, the most famous banker in Brazil. A magazine story headlined “The Hero Car” told the gripping tale of how the bandits’ bullets bounced off the car’s windows.

Although the market is still small — less than one percent of all cars sold in Brazil get armored — sales are jumping again, but this time on a quickening of Brazil’s economy that’s expanded the ranks of status seekers. “They want to wear a suit, have a nice watch and buy a nice car, so then it needs to be armored,” says David Silva Ferreira, a salesman employed at a Mercedes showroom.

The country’s armored-car fleet now numbers some 86,300 vehicles according to the Brazilian Association of Armoring, a São Paulo-based trade group. Another 6,000 are added annually.

Even the car-rental company Maxiauto has about 30 armored cars on offer. “You don’t want to be the only one without,” says rental manager Maria Tereza Soubihe, whose customers are often looking to impress clients or friends. On weekends, the company offers a “Bulletproof Bride” special. For $875, a driver in a steel-plated Chevy Omega whisks wedding clients to the hairdresser and then to church.

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The grim economic statistics unveiled Thursday in the Census Bureau’s annual report on income, poverty and health insurance are destined to grow bleaker. Since the data were collected in the spring, millions of people have lost their jobs.

“When the numbers come out next year at this time, I expect them to look even worse,” said Robert Greenstein, executive director of the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The statistics reflect the toll the recession has taken on the nation since the downturn officially began in December 2007.

The nation’s poverty rate rose to 13.2 percent in 2008, up from 12.5 percent in 2007, the Census Bureau data showed. That was the first significant increase since 2004 and the highest level in 11 years.

In all, 39.8 million Americans were living in poverty in 2008, defined as an income of $22,025 for a family of four. The last time there were that many poor people was 1960, although the nation’s population was smaller then.

Almost one in five children younger than 18 are living in poverty, with the total number rising from 13.3 million in 2007 to 14.1 million in 2008.

In a measure of the breadth of the decline, median household income — the amount earned by a family at the exact center of the income scale — sank 3.6 percent in 2008: from $52,163 to $50,303. In 1998, at the height of the tech stock boom, the comparable income was $51,295. All the figures were adjusted for inflation.

The drop in median household income was the first in four years. It had stagnated for four years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“We’ve basically seen a lost decade,” said Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard University. “We had a plutocratic boom. Then we have egalitarian recessions. Taken together, only the top ends up growing, on average. For the typical American family, the 2000s have been a disaster.”

The income loss is the largest one-year decline on record, said Lawrence Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, tracing it to the number of people shifting from full-time jobs to part-time work.