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The Audit

Deadspin Is Excellent on a Bogus Tax Break for Wealthy Team Owners
June 30, 2011 04:27 PM
Gawker's sports site Deadspin got hold of some New Jersey Nets financial statements from a few years ago and uses them to report on how tax law gives multimillionaire ballclub owners egregious benefits. Tommy Craggs does a good job... Continue reading
The Audit

Bank of America’s Disastrous Countrywide Deal
June 30, 2011 10:32 AM
In The Big Short, hedge fund investor Steve Eisman recalled the time he heard Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis speak in person: “I said to myself, ‘Oh, my God, he’s dumb!’ A lightbulb went off. The guy running one... Continue reading
The Audit

Audit Notes: The Swipe-Fee Battle, Homeless Kids, Angelides on Fire
June 29, 2011 06:03 PM
Bloomberg News has an excellent recount of how the debit-card swipe-fee battle was waged. Its headline is just about perfect: How Wal-Mart Trumped JPMorgan on Debit Cards Had it just been consumers fighting JPMorgan and the rest, they wouldn't... Continue reading
The Audit

Bank of America’s Big Countrywide Settlement
June 29, 2011 03:03 AM
Bank of America is going to fork over $8.5 billion to mortgage-bond investors lied to by Countrywide Financial, the Wall Street Journal scoops. But the feds can't find anybody at the company to charge with a crime? You don't... Continue reading
The Audit

Pioneer Press On a Renting Crisis and the Almost-Homeless
June 28, 2011 08:06 PM
The St. Paul Pioneer Press does a good job looking at how a serious lack of affordable housing and the poor economy is increasing the ranks of the almost-homeless among renters. And that's despite the housing crash. The number... Continue reading
The Audit

A Bloomberg Investigation Exposes Cisco’s Tax Hypocrisy
June 28, 2011 02:25 PM
Cisco's billionaire CEO John Chambers has led the recent campaign to let multinationals repatriate their overseas profits to the U.S. at an 85 percent discount. So it's particularly awesome that Bloomberg News has an investigation today showing how... Continue reading
The Audit

Audit Notes: Pogue Problems, Wall Street Arrest, Mortgage Assets Crashing Again
June 27, 2011 08:26 PM
Jim Romenesko scoops that a PR newsletter is selling $159 tickets to watch David Pogue say what pitches he likes best. It won't discuss how much or even whether Pogue was paid, but it's surely a nifty amount. So... Continue reading
The Audit

Bribery Without Bribers
June 27, 2011 03:21 PM
James B. Stewart got off to a strong start this weekend with his new New York Times column, which fills the Saturday spot Joe Nocera vacated in his move to the op-ed pages. I wrote the other day... Continue reading
The Audit

An NYT Default Story Has Finance Industry Tunnel Vision
June 24, 2011 02:09 PM
The New York Times posted a truly awful story online yesterday headlined "Argentina's Default Offers a Cautionary Tale for Greece." It does, if the cautionary tale is: What are the heck are you waiting for? Are you going to... Continue reading
The Audit

Reuters Brings a Deustche Derivatives Whistleblower to the Surface
June 24, 2011 12:40 PM
Reuters's Matthew Goldstein has an eye-raising scoop today, reporting that Deutsche Bank fired a top credit default swaps trader in 2009 after a whistleblower said he had found "substantial trading anomalies" in the trader's account. Deutsche quickly fired the... Continue reading
The Audit

Audit Notes: Magnetar Misled, Anonymous But On the Record, WSJ Jet Probe
June 23, 2011 07:49 PM
I wrote about JPMorgan's Magnetar settlement this morning, but it's important to note that it shows once and for all (if you somehow doubted it) that Magnetar has not been truthful when it's denied "choosing assets for any... Continue reading
The Audit

Fraud Without Fraudsters; Fraud Without “Fraud”
June 23, 2011 02:02 PM
How is it possible to file a civil fraud lawsuit against a bank without filing them against a banker? That's the reasonable question posed by both The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg's Jonathan Weil today. JPMorgan Chase defrauded... Continue reading
The Audit

Audit Notes: Wall Street’s Trib Bust, Pro-Union U.S., Authoritarian Wal-Mart
June 22, 2011 08:30 PM
David Carr looks at James O'Shea's new book on Sam Zell's Tribune Company fiasco and zooms in on O'Shea's reporting on how Wall Street helped create it: What Mr. O’Shea focused on was how the bankers — who he... Continue reading
The Audit

Gannett’s Multimillionaires Regret to Inform 700 Workers of Their Layoffs
June 22, 2011 01:42 AM
Gannett says "we need to take further steps to align our costs with the current revenue trends," so it's laying off 700 employees in its newspaper division—about 2 percent of the company's total workforce. Poynter's Jim Romenesko is <a... Continue reading
The Audit

Stock Market Chart of the Day: Socialism vs. Cowboy Capitalism
June 21, 2011 12:19 PM
In the appendix of that report on executive compensation and inequality that the Washington Post wrote about the other day, there's an interesting chart comparing stock market indexes for the U.S., France, and Japan from 1981 to... Continue reading
The Audit

Executive Compensation As the Driver of Inequality
June 20, 2011 05:51 PM
The Washington Post leads off its new series on inequality with a killer anecdote: It was the 1970s, and the chief executive of a leading U.S. dairy company, Kenneth J. Douglas, lived the good life. He earned the equivalent... Continue reading
The Audit

The Hamster Wheel and the AOL Way
June 20, 2011 11:23 AM
Audit Chief Dean Starkman's "Hamster Wheel" piece has now been enshrined in the lexicon of the bureaucracy with the release of the FCC's big report on "The Information Needs of Communities." But, you know, the big wheel keeps... Continue reading
The Audit

Audit Notes: Cash Giveaway, Bloomberg Views (in the WSJ), Lede of the Week
June 17, 2011 08:40 PM
Jeff Amy of the Mobile Press-Register has some good reporting on corporate welfare in Alabama. He writes that businesses aren't profitable enough to take advantage of all the corporate tax credits available for new capital investment in the state.... Continue reading
The Audit

SEC Scooplets From the WSJ
June 17, 2011 12:28 PM
The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that the SEC is finally considering charging the credit raters—critical components of the securitization fraud machine—with civil fraud. The question I have when reading these scooplets is always "What took so long?"... Continue reading
The Audit

The Press Notes the Euro Crisis Threatens the U.S. Too
June 16, 2011 05:47 PM
It's beginning to dawn on the U.S. press that the slow-motion crash of the European Union just might have some nasty effects here at home, an angle I'd been noticing has been missing a lot lately. How nasty will depend... Continue reading

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