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Utah is among the number of states that now use a partial or fully electronic election system, and Premier Election Solutions, a subsidiary of Diebold, is the company that sold the machines to the state. To convince Utah decision-makers that Diebold was a big company with a substantial presence, Kathy Dopp, founder of UtahCountVotes.org, reported that a company representative told the decision-makers in 2006 that Diebold “has about 20 offices in Utah.” When pressed further, the representative refused to give the locations of any of the offices. In fact, the White Pages lists 18 Diebold offices.

However, when calls were made to all of these offices, only one picked up the phone. And when the addresses of offices listed under Diebold in the White Pages were visited, the addresses turned out to belong to either a Wal-Mart, a Sam’s Club, or no building at all. In the end, 16 of the 18 Diebold offices in Utah listed in the White Pages were false listings. One is in Salt Lake, and the other is in Bountiful.

The leaders of Europe’s wealthiest countries pledged on Sunday to help the IMF to raise at least a further $200 billion for crisis loans, but there was little sign on Monday that EU members will be able to find such sums while facing their own pressures.

Treasury sources said that Gordon Brown, as chairman of the G20 group of leading economies, would hold a series of bilateral meetings in the run-up to the London summit on April 2. These meetings will tackle the issue of reforming regulation and global financial institutions, as well as the more delicate task of raising funds for the IMF, the international lender of last resort, which is based in Washington.

The world has a much more complex financial system than in the 1930s, Mr. Taleb told Bloomberg Television, and that makes the current problems worse. Bonuses paid on Wall Street encouraged risk-taking with no regard for losses, he added.

Rare and unforeseen events are known as “black swans,” after Mr. Taleb’s 2007 book, “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.” Mr. Taleb said the current financial crisis isn’t one.

“The black swan for me would be for us to emerge out of this unscathed and return to normalcy,” Mr. Taleb told Bloomberg. Compared to the Great Depression, he said, this crisis is “very different, and it requires much more drastic action.”

Taleb’s book was published in May 2007, about three months before the credit crisis exploded.

Open Interest data for Friday is confirming that positions are already being rolled into May. This is unusual to have positions being rolled so early before the next expiry but the USO has created a different crude oil market. The front timespread on WTI (Apr/May) is logically starting to weaken as length is taken out of April WTI and as traders start to position themselves for the USO free lunch. This in turn is making for a wider Brent premium to WTI and an improvement of the product crack. If Petrologistics is right on the level of compliance then given that WTI will remain for a while distorted on the USO rolls, this could make for an even wider prompt premium of Brent versus WTI and a strong rebound of US Gulf cash physical values during the roll of indices.

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From ice-cream parlors to tanning salons, franchisees’ defaults on loans guaranteed by the U.S. Small Business Administration are piling up in amounts unseen in years. A list of loans at 500 franchises shows the number of defaults by franchisees increased 52% in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2008, from fiscal 2007. Loan losses totaled $93.3 million, a 167% jump from $35 million just 12 months earlier.

The figures, a stark barometer of the downturn’s severity and scope, could give pause to banks that have loan money about where to lend next. Banks that make SBA-guaranteed loans say they use the annual list as guidance in assessing future commitments.

SBA-guaranteed loans are aimed at providing capital to small businesses that often can’t qualify for conventional credit. Those loans, made through commercial banks and other lenders, can total as much as $2 million for as long as 10 years. The SBA essentially insures a significant portion of the loan to encourage lending and small-business entrepreneurship. The recently passed stimulus package raises that guarantee amount to 90% from 75%.

The annual list, which shows the number of loan failures for the year and failure rates over eight years, is compiled by the SBA and published by the Coleman Report, a lending-industry trade publication based in La Canada, Calif.

The S&P/Case Shiller composite index of 20 metropolitan areas fell 2.5 percent in December from November, compared with a 2.3 percent decline in the previous period, S&P said in a statement.

“There are very few, if any, pockets of turnaround that one can see in the data,” David Blitzer, chairman of S&P’s index committee, said in the statement. “Most of the nation appears to remain on a downward path.”

Juggling glasses of white wine and baggies filled with baubles, dozens of women descended on a well-appointed Orange County home this week to trade in their old golden treasures for hefty checks.

There were earrings from ex-boyfriends, ring settings with missing stones and chain bracelets from sorority sisters. One woman brought in her husband’s wedding ring — from a previous marriage.

Julia Geivet, 39, had hopes of selling an “embarrassing” Italian horn bauble she had owned since eighth grade and a few other small trinkets, which she thought might get her $30.

“I figured I’d come get a little money and socialize and chat,” said Geivet, who was recently laid off as a manager at Verizon Communications Inc. “It might not come out to a lot, but right now, every little bit helps.”

She left with a check for $302.92.

Gold is hot. The precious metal soared $25.70 an ounce Friday to $1,001.80, topping the $1,000 mark for the first time in nearly a year. South African Krugerrands, American Eagles and other gold coins are in demand as people seek safe investment havens in uncertain times.

That has people digging through their drawers and jewelry boxes looking for watchbands, cuff links, chains and bracelets that can be sold to jewelers, pawnshops and other brokers to be melted down to feed the growing demand for gold coins.

The party Geivet attended at the Aliso Viejo home of Mary-Margaret Fincher is a twist on the old suburban Tupperware party. Here, however, it’s the guests who do the selling.

Erin Stevenson, who organized the party through her group My Gold Party CA, appraised the jewelry with assistant Richard Bartoletti as guests debated whether to wear heels or flats during pregnancy.

To test the gold, Stevenson shaved off small flecks with a whirring Dremel tool, blanketing the dark wood of the dining table with a luminous sheen. Later, while Bartoletti peered through a magnifier attached to his eyeglasses, looking for karat stamps on the jewelry, Stevenson weeded out gold impostors with magnets and a special acidic gel.

Fincher, 34, said the parties were popular in her hometown of Atlanta. As the host she gets 10% of what is paid out — which this night was $4,000. One woman walked away with a $1,836.88 check.

Stevenson pays about 65% of the market value, which works out to $5.56 for a gram of 8-karat gold, rising to $15.47 a gram for 22k. She then sells the gold to a refiner for a price just under the market trading price.

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Precious metals, including silver and platinum, are benefiting from the panicky belief that “everything else has been destroyed,” said Leonard Kaplan of Prospector Asset Management in Evanston, Ill.

Kaplan says the gold market is on its way to becoming another bubble, like technology stocks in the late 1990s and housing for much of this decade.

“Is it going to end badly? Yes,” he said. “The question is where — is it $1,200, or $1,500, or $1,800?”

For now, however, demand appears to be growing. The U.S. Mint shipped 92,000 1-ounce American Eagle coins to its dealer network in January, up sharply from 22,500 in January 2008.

On Cloverfield Boulevard in Santa Monica, Goldline International Inc. caters to investors looking to buy thousands of dollars in gold bars or coins such as the American Eagle.

On Friday, total sales exceeded $5 million, he said.

The Home Office has suggested that the remote-controlled drones could be used to help police gather evidence and track criminals without putting officers at risk.

The miniature aircraft could be fitted with cameras and heat-seeking equipment, allowing police to carry out aerial reconnaissance from a control room.

They also have the benefit of being quieter than conventional helicopters or spotter planes and are much cheaper to run due to their fuel economy.

While in Beijing on her first overseas trip as US secretary of state, Clinton urged China on Sunday to keep buying US debt, saying it would help jumpstart the flagging US economy and stimulate demand for Chinese exports.

In fact, China has to keep investing in the United States if it wants to protect the value of its trillions in dollar holdings, said Lu Feng, an economist at Peking University’s China Center for Economic Research.

“China is sitting on huge piles of foreign exchange and it will increase its holdings of US Treasuries,” Lu said. “Objectively speaking, helping the US economy is good for both China and the US.”

China overtook Japan last year as the United States’ biggest foreign creditor, and had 696.2 billion dollars of Treasury Bills in December, according to the latest official data from Washington.

Its world-largest foreign exchange reserves, which stood at 1.95 trillion dollars as of the end of December, also mean it is the world’s biggest foreign holder of the US currency.

Clinton sought to highlight the importance of the ever-building inter-dependency between the world’s biggest and third biggest economies.

As with the Bernard Madoff case, the scandal surrounding billionaire R. Allen Stanford now seems clear and obvious in hindsight. Yet Stanford managed to run his alleged scheme even while the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators had him on their radar screens and investigated his businesses. Stanford wasn’t charged until last week.

From his tiny accounting firm’s office near a North London fish-and-chips shop to certificates of deposit promising outsized returns sold by a bank in Antigua, ample warning signs over the years suggested Stanford’s business wasn’t what it seemed.

Among them:

_A finding by regulators in June 2007 that Stanford’s company lacked enough capital to function properly as a securities brokerage firm. The company paid $20,000 to settle charges by the National Association of Securities Dealers without admitting or denying them.

_Stanford’s businesses were inspected and investigated several times, starting in 2006 by the SEC and in 2004 by the NASD, the brokerage industry’s self-policing group, now called the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA. NASD’s scrutiny resulted in several disciplinary actions: the regulator fined his brokerage company four times, with penalties totaling $70,000, for violations that included misleading investors in sales materials about the risks of the CDs.

_A 2006 lawsuit by a former employee alleging that Stanford’s company ran a Ponzi scheme. Two other ex-employees asserted in a suit in January 2008 that Stanford’s Antigua bank, Stanford International Bank Ltd., sold CDs based on inflated returns and had destroyed documents.

_A board of directors that included Stanford’s father, his college roommate and a family friend who remained on the board years after suffering a debilitating stroke.

_The Antigua-based accounting firm that audited the offshore bank was tiny and little known.

_A 1999 Treasury Department advisory that warned U.S. banks to scrutinize transactions involving Antigua. It said a new regulator in Antigua was essentially a captive of offshore banks it was meant to supervise. (The advisory was lifted in 2001.)

Last week, the SEC accused Stanford in a civil lawsuit of a “massive” fraud. It said he peddled sham promises and funneled investors’ money into real estate and other assets not easily turned into cash. FBI agents in Houston are running a parallel investigation.