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Articles by Ryan Chittum | Email the Author

 

1. The Audit

   The AP on Student Loan Hell

   April 27, 2012 02:06 PM

   The Associated Press takes a good look at how a 2005 law traps borrowers in private student loans—upending the whole point of the bankruptcy code. Back in 2005, President Bush signed the misleadingly named Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer... Continue reading

2. The Audit

   Audit Notes: Davies on Murdoch, Banks Eye the Poor for Fees, TARP ROI

   April 26, 2012 08:53 PM

   Nick Davies writes in The Guardian that, after a second day of questioning under oath, "Rupert Murdoch is in trouble... He is vulnerable." The man who has made millions out of paying people to ask difficult questions, finally faced... Continue reading

3. The Audit

   Bloomberg on Cherry-Picking Executive “Peers” to Inflate Pay

   April 26, 2012 02:08 PM

   Bloomberg News has a good piece on how companies inflate CEO pay by comparing them to "peers" that are out of their league. It focuses on CBS Corporation and its CEO Les Moonves, who got paid 70 million bucks... Continue reading

4. The Audit

   Audit Notes: The ER Boiler Room, Jeremy Hunt, UK Austerity Fails

   April 26, 2012 12:54 AM

   Jessica Silver-Greenberg has an alarming page-one story in The New York Times on how hospitals are letting in third-party debt collectors to pressure patients to pay before they've even had treatment. The Minnesota AG says a company called Accretive... Continue reading

5. The Audit

   The Journal Misses on Ebooks and Antitrust

   April 25, 2012 07:55 PM

   It's usually wise to read an "experts say" story a little more skeptically than you normally would. That's the case with a Wall Street Journal story earlier this week on the Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit against five major... Continue reading

6. The Audit

   Audit Notes: Murdoch Minister Edition

   April 24, 2012 08:03 PM

   The Murdoch scandal heated (hotted?) up yet again today with James Murdoch's testimony to the Leveson Inquiry, and it now threatens to bring down a key member of the prime minister's cabinet—or more. Emails detail an awfully close relationship and... Continue reading

7. The Audit

   60 Minutes Revisits Lehman, Valukas, and Repo 105

   April 24, 2012 07:19 PM

   Remember the Valukas Report? That court-appointed bankruptcy examiner'sinvestigation into the collapse of Lehman Brothers found a number of colorable claims (prosecutable) against Lehman executives, including CEO Dick Fuld. The Repo 105 scam was designed to mislead investors about... Continue reading

8. The Audit

   Audit Notes: Blame the Lenders, Government Scandals, Corrections

   April 24, 2012 01:38 AM

   Abigail Caplovitz Field at Firedoglake writes a good post explaining why the blame-the-borrowers meme is ultimately misguided—and dangerous: Houses are not like tulips, shares of stock, dolls, or any other mass-market consumer product. They just cost too much. The... Continue reading

9. The Audit

   The Times’s Extraordinary Wal-Mart Investigation

   April 23, 2012 06:38 PM

   David Barstow's epic Wal-Mart investigation in the Sunday New York Times has already lopped $10 billion off the company's market value ($8 billion if you assume Wal-Mart would have been down 1 percent like the rest of the market... Continue reading

10. The Audit

    Audit Notes: The Pentagon’s Privatized Propaganda, Chesapeake, Inequality

    April 20, 2012 10:43 PM

    This story is just amazing: A USA TODAY reporter and editor investigating Pentagon propaganda contractors have themselves been subjected to a propaganda campaign of sorts, waged on the Internet through a series of bogus websites. Fake Twitter and Facebook... Continue reading

11. The Audit

    The NYT Goes Backward on Digital Ads

    April 20, 2012 05:14 PM

    The New York Times Company's first quarter earnings, reported yesterday, left a lot to be desired. About.com, the company's web-only content farm, continues to crater, weighing down the newspapers. It lost nearly a a quarter of its revenue and... Continue reading

12. The Audit

    Audit Notes: Luskin and Krugman, Bailouts, Minimum Wage,

    April 20, 2012 02:18 AM

    Brad DeLong catches Donald Luskin in a doozy. Luskin calls out Paul Krugman for saying in 2000 that the Dow Jones was overvalued but that the Nasdaq was not. Only that's not really what Krugman said. Here's Luskin: In... Continue reading

13. The Audit

    Excellent Reuters Probe Uncovers a CEO’s Billion-Dollar Loans

    April 19, 2012 07:51 PM

    Reuters has a fantastic piece of enterprise reporting on natural gas giant Chesapeake Energy, reporting on serious conflicts of interest in investments by its founder and CEO Aubrey McClendon. Yesterday, the report helped send Chesapeake shares down 10 percent... Continue reading

14. The Audit

    Audit TV: Dean Starkman at the Narrative Arc Conference

    April 19, 2012 12:12 PM

    Take a look at Audit Chief Dean Starkman's speech last month to the Narrative Arc conference at Boston University. Dean's riffing off his "Confidence Game" piece on the future-of-news debate and why "the story is the thing." (Dean's part... Continue reading

15. The Audit

    Audit Notes: Bank Run, Silicon Valley Small-ball, Anti-Free

    April 19, 2012 12:00 AM

    Michael Lewis, who says he sympathizes with the Occupy Wall Street movement, interviews himself on what he would do if he were its leader: But if I were in charge I would probably reorganize the movement around a single,... Continue reading

16. The Audit

    The New York Times Company in 2015

    April 18, 2012 07:17 PM

    Will The New York Times Company survive as a stand-alone firm past 2015? That's unknowable, of course. A lot can happen between now and then. But extrapolating from current trends can give us an idea of where things are going.... Continue reading

17. The Audit

    Audit Notes: French Capital, French Economists, Hulu’s Paywall

    April 18, 2012 02:21 AM

    Bloomberg's Mark Whitehouse is good to report that as the Eurocrisis flares again, with Spain in the spotlight now, investors have been creeping out of France for months: As of February, the debts of the Bank of France to... Continue reading

18. The Audit

    Audit Notes: Carr on Amazon, Muni Broadband, Too Big to Fail

    April 16, 2012 07:49 PM

    David Carr's New York Times column today on Amazon, Apple, and the book publishers is excellent. He calls the Department of Justice's antitrust suit "the modern equivalent of taking on Standard Oil but breaking up Ed’s Gas ’N’... Continue reading

19. The Audit

    Audit Notes: Ebooks, Amazon, and Apple Edition

    April 13, 2012 08:05 PM

    Barry C. Lynn, author of Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction, writes a good Slate piece on the Justice Department's misguided suit against Apple and book publishers for fighting Amazon's ebooks monopoly. Lynn writes about... Continue reading

20. The Audit

    Bloomberg Scrutinizes JPMorgan Chase

    April 13, 2012 06:58 PM

    Bloomberg News has an important story today showing how press favorite Jamie Dimon's JPMorgan Chase has ramped up risk in its chief investment office, which has become a major profit center for the bank. The CIO is supposed to... Continue reading

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