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Articles by Ryan Chittum | Email the Author

 

1. The Audit

   Audit Notes: Occupy Maybelline, Abramoff on the Revolving Door, News Corp. (UPDATED)

   November 18, 2011 07:56 PM

   The Occupy Wall Street movement is already having its dissent commodified. As BagNews shows, this Maybelline commercial shows its models prancing around in co-opted Occupy imagery (UPDATE: Or not. BagNews updates its post to note that the Maybelline commercial... Continue reading

2. The Audit

   Skeptical and Not-So-Skeptical Coverage of Angie’s List

   November 18, 2011 03:10 PM

   Social media site Angie's List IPO'd yesterday, and the market now values it at nearly $900 million. While those are hardly Groupon Bubble numbers, the valuation is still high and more possible evidence of a bubble in social-media companies. So... Continue reading

3. The Audit

   Audit Notes: Net Exposure, Crain’s Chicago Probe, Angelo’s Tumblr

   November 17, 2011 07:50 PM

   Gillian Tett of the Financial Times shows why banks hedging their European exposure with credit-default swaps aren't necessarily actually hedged. She notes that Deutsche Bank says it reduced its net exposure to Italian sovereign debt by 88 percent in... Continue reading

4. The Audit

   Nonprofit News and the Tax Man

   November 17, 2011 02:28 PM

   The future of nonprofit news organizations has hit an unexpected roadblock in the agency that determines their tax-exempt status: The Internal Revenue Service. Nonprofit news organizations applying for tax-exempt status are running into long delays as the IRS bundles them... Continue reading

5. The Audit

   Audit Notes: Fraud Prosecutions Plunge, Robber Barons, Zoning Fight

   November 16, 2011 07:57 PM

   Here's the chart of the day, from Syracuse's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse via The New York Times's Catherine Rampell: Prosecutions of financial-institution fraud have plunged over the last two decades, and are running at roughly... Continue reading

6. The Audit

   Reuters On the “Payment Protection” Scam

   November 16, 2011 01:35 PM

   Reuters puts the spotlight on the scam that is the multi-billion-dollar credit-card insurance industry, which promises to cover payments if a cardholder gets sick or loses her job. So-called payment protection plans have super-high profit margins for the banks... Continue reading

7. The Audit

   Audit Notes: Farmland Booms, Regulation and Jobs, Euro Sell-off

   November 15, 2011 07:24 PM

   The Wall Street Journal reports that farming is making something of a comeback on the edges of metro areas amid collapsing residential land values. This anecote is great: Consider the England family, which recently repurchased 430 acres of cotton... Continue reading

8. The Audit

   Confused NYT Coverage of Obama Health Care Law’s Prospects

   November 15, 2011 04:59 PM

   The New York Times can't make up its mind on what a Supreme Court ruling against Obama health care plan's individual mandate would mean for the overall health-care law. On page one today, it reports this: Whatever Court Rules,... Continue reading

9. The Audit

   Bloomberg Gives Newt Another Frannie Headache

   November 15, 2011 03:57 PM

   Newt Gingrich has a Frannie problem. The former Speaker of the House used to work for Freddie Mac but is trying to win the nomination of a party that believes that government meddling in the form of the quasi-governmental Frannie,... Continue reading

10. The Audit

    Insider Trading in Congress

    November 14, 2011 07:35 PM

    If I could short Congress, I would right now. Last night's 60 Minutes report, based on the work of conservative scholar Peter Schweizer, shows how powerful members of Congress benefited by insider trading, which happens to be perfectly legal if... Continue reading

11. The Audit

    The Times Eyes New Fees From the Banks

    November 14, 2011 03:05 PM

    Everybody who skipped Bank Transfer Day ought to read this New York Times story today on how giant banks are hitting customers with new fees. Not so long ago, banks had a couple of multibillion-dollar rackets going that hit... Continue reading

12. The Audit

    Audit Notes: The Sovereign Risk Genie, Regulatory Complexity, Wal-Mart and Bank Fees

    November 11, 2011 07:22 PM

    The Economist's Greg Ip says the European crisis, at its core, is not about Silvio Berlusconi or even Italian debt levels, which haven't risen that much. It's about the introduction of the sovereign-risk calculation in markets that investors had... Continue reading

13. The Audit

    The Morning Call Revisits Amazon’s Work Conditions

    November 11, 2011 03:48 PM

    Remember that Morning Call investigation a couple of months ago into an Amazon sweatshop outside Allentown, Pennsylvania? The paper showed that the company endangered temp employees in a warehouse where temperatures sometimes hit 110 degrees all while issuing... Continue reading

14. The Audit

    Audit Notes: Guardian Editor on Hackgate, Judge Rakoff, Confidence Game

    November 10, 2011 07:44 PM

    Read Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger's Orwell lecture for an excellent overview and analysis of Murdoch's hacking scandal, and his paper's lonely role in uncovering it. On a day MP Tom Watson called James Murdoch a "mafia boss," Rusbridger... Continue reading

15. The Audit

    The Big Lie of the Crisis, Called Out By the Press

    November 10, 2011 05:33 PM

    At CNBC's GOP debate last night, Mitt Romney showed that he, like Michael Bloomberg, buys into the Big Lie of the financial crisis, one that's unfortunately become conventional wisdom on the right: That the private sector only made hundreds... Continue reading

16. The Audit

    Audit Notes: The Euro Crisis’s 1930s Parallels, Taibbi on Bloomberg

    November 10, 2011 01:24 AM

    The eurozone crisis is now at its worst point with Italy's interest rates at unsustainable rates and quite possibly past the point of no return. Berkeley economist Brad DeLong says radical measures are required to stave off a... Continue reading

17. The Audit

    NYT on How Unions Are Learning From Occupy Wall Street

    November 9, 2011 01:41 PM

    The New York Times reports on how the American labor movement, whose membership and power have crumbled over the last few decades, is getting something of a second wind from the Occupy Wall Street protests. The picture I get... Continue reading

18. The Audit

    Audit Notes: What Would Hammurabi Do?, WSJ + OWS, Fisking Davidson

    November 8, 2011 08:01 PM

    Nassim Nicholas Taleb doesn't pussyfoot around in his New York Times op-ed arguing that we should "End Bonuses for Bankers": Instead, it’s time for a fundamental reform: Any person who works for a company that, regardless of its current... Continue reading

19. The Audit

    The SEC’s Soft Touch For Repeat Offenders

    November 8, 2011 03:14 PM

    Bloomberg's Jonathan Weil wrote a swell column last week on the SEC's latest Citigroup wrist-slap. Weil noted that one of the terms of the settlement was that Citi not violate the law again and reported that it was... Continue reading

20. The Audit

    Dirty Business (As Usual) at News Corporation

    November 7, 2011 01:16 PM

    You know a company has serious problems when it's unsurprising that it gives an executive a golden parachute after her newsroom culture of industrial-scale criminality destroyed a century-and-a-half-old newspaper. The Guardian reported this weekend that Rebekah Brooks got... Continue reading

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