Audit Notes: Gutting Blame-the-Borrowers, Geithner Going? Wages and Profits

By Ryan Chittum   Jun 30, 2011 at 06:00 PM

Barry Ritholtz says "First, Blame the Lenders" in a good post today over at The Big Picture on the crisis... More

Deadspin Is Excellent on a Bogus Tax Break for Wealthy Team Owners

By Ryan Chittum   Jun 30, 2011 at 04:27 PM

Gawker's sports site Deadspin got hold of some New Jersey Nets financial statements from a few years ago and uses... More

Bank of America’s Disastrous Countrywide Deal

The “dumb” money squandered tens of billions of dollars on Angelo Mozilo’s predatory lender

By Ryan Chittum   Jun 30, 2011 at 10:32 AM

In The Big Short, hedge fund investor Steve Eisman recalled the time he heard Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis... More

Audit Notes: The Swipe-Fee Battle, Homeless Kids, Angelides on Fire

By Ryan Chittum   Jun 29, 2011 at 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:... More

Bank of America’s Big Countrywide Settlement

By Ryan Chittum   Jun 29, 2011 at 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... More

Pioneer Press On a Renting Crisis and the Almost-Homeless

By Ryan Chittum   Jun 28, 2011 at 08:06 PM

The St. Paul Pioneer Press does a good job looking at how a serious lack of affordable housing and the... More

A Bloomberg Investigation Exposes Cisco’s Tax Hypocrisy

CEO pushes for a repatration holiday while working hard to move profits overseas

By Ryan Chittum   Jun 28, 2011 at 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.... More

Audit Notes: Pogue Problems, Wall Street Arrest, Mortgage Assets Crashing Again

By Ryan Chittum   Jun 27, 2011 at 08:26 PM

Jim Romenesko scoops that a PR newsletter is selling $159 tickets to watch David Pogue say what pitches he likes... More

Bribery Without Bribers

James B. Stewart brings up an undercovered story; Tyson Foods executives walked

By Ryan Chittum   Jun 27, 2011 at 03:21 PM

James B. Stewart got off to a strong start this weekend with his new New York Times column, which fills... More

An NYT Default Story Has Finance Industry Tunnel Vision

The paper gets it all wrong on Argentina’s lessons for Greece

By Ryan Chittum   Jun 24, 2011 at 02:09 PM

The New York Times posted a truly awful story online yesterday headlined "Argentina's Default Offers a Cautionary Tale for Greece."... More

Reuters Brings a Deustche Derivatives Whistleblower to the Surface

By Ryan Chittum   Jun 24, 2011 at 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... More

Audit Notes: Magnetar Misled, Anonymous But On the Record, WSJ Jet Probe

By Ryan Chittum   Jun 23, 2011 at 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... More

Fraud Without Fraudsters; Fraud Without “Fraud”

The SEC’s settlement with JPMorgan Chase on a Magnetar deal

By Ryan Chittum   Jun 23, 2011 at 02:02 PM

How is it possible to file a civil fraud lawsuit against a bank without filing them against a banker? That's... More

Audit Notes: Wall Street’s Trib Bust, Pro-Union U.S., Authoritarian Wal-Mart

By Ryan Chittum   Jun 22, 2011 at 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... More

Gannett’s Multimillionaires Regret to Inform 700 Workers of Their Layoffs

Imagine if these six execs scrapped the “multi” and took low seven figures

By Ryan Chittum   Jun 22, 2011 at 01:42 AM

Gannett says "we need to take further steps to align our costs with the current revenue trends," so it's laying... More

Stock Market Chart of the Day: Socialism vs. Cowboy Capitalism

By Ryan Chittum   Jun 21, 2011 at 12:19 PM

In the appendix of that report on executive compensation and inequality that the Washington Post wrote about the other day,... More

Executive Compensation As the Driver of Inequality

A well reported Washington Post story makes a solid case

By Ryan Chittum   Jun 20, 2011 at 05:51 PM

The Washington Post leads off its new series on inequality with a killer anecdote: It was the 1970s, and the... More

The Hamster Wheel and the AOL Way

By Ryan Chittum   Jun 20, 2011 at 11:23 AM

Audit Chief Dean Starkman's "Hamster Wheel" piece has now been enshrined in the lexicon of the bureaucracy with the release... More

Audit Notes: Cash Giveaway, Bloomberg Views (in the WSJ), Lede of the Week

By Ryan Chittum   Jun 17, 2011 at 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... More

SEC Scooplets From the WSJ

By Ryan Chittum   Jun 17, 2011 at 12:28 PM

The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that the SEC is finally considering charging the credit raters—critical components of the... More