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The Audit

The AP Falls For a Bogus Press Release
April 13, 2011 01:59 PM
Henry Blodget wants to know if we're going to blast the Associated Press for falling for a hoax press release falsely purporting to be from General Electric. Not quite. It's a journalist's worst nightmare to fall for an impostor... Continue reading
The Audit

Audit Notes: Perk Up, Core Inflation, What Passes for News
April 12, 2011 07:49 PM
USA Today takes a long look at CEO perks, but it doesn't do a good job of prioritizing the really egregious (ie newsworthy) ones. Its first anecdote is about Larry Ellison, the Oracle CEO who's a billionaire forty times... Continue reading
The Audit

Taibbi on a Fed Bailout the Business Press Buried
April 12, 2011 02:11 PM
Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone zeroes in on an interesting detail from the Federal Reserve's bailouts: The Fed lent big bucks to an investment vehicle led by Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack's wife and the widow of a Morgan... Continue reading
The Audit

LAT on the U.S. As Low-Wage Offshoring Destination
April 11, 2011 07:54 PM
Where does Ikea build a plant when it wants to offshore work to pay poverty wages, bust unions, force mandatory overtime, and generally slave-drive their workers? The quote of the day goes to Bill Street, a union organizer in Danville,... Continue reading
The Audit

NYT Eyes a Conflict of Interest at JPMorgan
April 11, 2011 01:58 PM
The New York Times looks at a lawsuit over conflicts of interest at JPMorgan and how the bank covered its own flank—and made a couple billion dollars—while letting its clients lose hundreds of millions of dollars. It's interesting stuff.... Continue reading
The Audit

Audit Notes: Race to the Bottom, More Corporate Welfare, Money Is Fungible
April 8, 2011 06:47 PM
The New York Times is good to take a look at how neighboring states race to the bottom bidding to give companies tax breaks to relocate to or stay in their states. A.G. Sulzberger (the publisher's son) tells the... Continue reading
The Audit

HuffPost: An SEC Wrist Slap for Fleecing an Indian Tribe (UPDATED)
April 8, 2011 05:15 PM
Good for The Huffington Post's Shahien Nasiripour for giving us a closer look at Wachovia's settlement for defrauding an Indian tribe—the Zunis—with toxic CDOs. Surely this is a story that deserves more coverage. This is what we've suspected happened... Continue reading
The Audit

Audit Notes: What SF’s Missing, Post on Waters, Palin Prediction
April 8, 2011 01:29 AM
SF Weekly's Matt Smith reports on a new project that's well worth watching—one that will investigate the impact of the decline of newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area. David Weir, a Bay Area journalist who co-founded the Center... Continue reading
The Audit

Becky Quick Thinks the Fed Is Too Focused on Jobs
April 8, 2011 12:30 AM
CNBC's Becky Quick uses her Fortune column to argue that the Federal Reserve should break the law. The law says the Federal Reserve has to focus on two mandates: Keeping prices stable and keeping unemployment below 4 percent. That's... Continue reading
The Audit

Bercovici Is Wrong on “Journalism 2.0” Causing Afghan Murders
April 7, 2011 03:36 PM
Forbes's Jeff Bercovici would like you to know that those UN workers murdered in Afghanistan after a Florida Koran-burning were killed by Journalism 2.0. Seriously. He tweeted this: When Journalism 2.0 kills: A college kid's reporting caused 24... Continue reading
The Audit

ProPublica and Fortune’s Unhelpful Post on GE’s Taxes
April 7, 2011 11:46 AM
Fortune's Allan Sloan and ProPublica's Jeff Gerth asserted a couple of days ago that The New York Times got it wrong when it said GE paid no American tax last year. Fortune even gives it a... Continue reading
The Audit

Audit Notes: BizWeek Soars, Barofsky in Fortune, A Picture of Deflation
April 6, 2011 08:17 PM
It's been more than a year now since Bloomberg took over BusinessWeek, rebranded it, expanded it, and put Josh Tyrangiel at the helm. How's the new Bloomberg BusinessWeek doing? By the ad numbers, it's stomping Fortune and Forbes. The... Continue reading
The Audit

A Little Healthy Outrage on Executive Pay
April 6, 2011 02:16 PM
Roger Lowenstein had an excellent Bloomberg column a couple of weeks ago on outlandish executive compensation. Unfortunately, it got one of those bad Bloomberg headlines, so you might not have read it: Think About Sin When Bonuses Are... Continue reading
The Audit

60 Minutes With a Good Look at the Foreclosure Scandal
April 5, 2011 07:45 PM
Hats off to 60 Minutes and Scott Pelley for taking a nice look at the foreclosure scandal on Sunday. Pelley shows the scale of the foreclosure problem... Continue reading
The Audit

A Triangle Shirtwaist-Like Disaster, Buried By the U.S. Press
April 5, 2011 02:11 PM
The Consumerist has a fascinating post asking whether we've really eliminated our Triangle Shirtwaist Factory disasters or if we've just outsourced them. It turns out that a sweatshop in Bangladesh that made clothes for The Gap, Abercrombie &... Continue reading
The Audit

Audit Notes: Hiltzik on Drug R&D, A 1 Percent “Score”, Paywalls
April 4, 2011 08:26 PM
The Los Angeles Times's Michael Hiltzik finds a study that questions the drug lobby's line on how much it costs to develop medicines: The statistic that may be most hazardous to your health is one pegging the research and... Continue reading
The Audit

Audit Notes: Forced Fed, Bank Wages, Schroeder on Buffett
April 1, 2011 07:48 PM
The press continues to rifle through the Fed's discount window data dump, finding that Some 70 percent of all loans made through the program went to foreign banks. Bloomberg reports on details revealed about the toxic collateral the... Continue reading
The Audit

A Times Snapshot of the Gilded Age Economy
April 1, 2011 02:16 PM
The New York Times's business coverage today is good and depressing—a portrait of our Second Gilded Age. On page one, we learn that the CEOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, once quasi-public but now nationalized companies, made $9... Continue reading
The Audit

Audit Notes: Bloomberg on the Fed, OCC Meddles for Banks, Who Runs the World
March 31, 2011 07:57 PM
Bloomberg News is flooding the zone on the Fed's discount-window document dump, which the central bank had to disclose after Bloomberg sued it and won. Here are a few of its stories so far: Goldman Sachs Borrowed From Fed... Continue reading
The Audit

An Atlantic Ghost Story
March 31, 2011 03:05 PM
The Atlantic runs a slideshow post by 24/7 Wall St.'s Douglas A. McIntyre with the click-me headline "The New American Ghost Towns"—a red flag that this piece may be oversold. Here's the lede: There are several counties in America,... Continue reading

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