Fortune Watch

U.S. taxpayers are still owed $132.9 billion by companies that benefited from the financial bailout and haven’t fully repaid. Some of that money will never be recovered, a government watchdog said.

Big companies like General Motors and AIG, which benefited from the bailout, still owe U.S. taxpayers $132.9 billion. Some of that money will never be recovered, a government watchdog said.

Christy Romero, the acting special inspector general for the $700 billion bailout, has said the bailout that began in September of 2008, could actually last for several more years. Romero told The Associated Press that some bailout programs such as the effort to reduce home foreclosures will last up to 2017 and such programs could cost an additional $50 billion or more.
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Here is the plain truth for everyone, yet people will continue to do the same shit over and over again, voting for the same moron, having the same stupid arguments over two sides of the same corrupt coin, begging for the same entitlements.The West, esp the US, thinks they can have their cake and eat it too. They deserve the shitstorm that will be coming, they have been warned way too long and have ignored it like the arrogant idiots they are.

A  Miami man, Albert Gonzalez, 28, his motto is “operation get rich or die trying”. Two Russians and Albert Gonzalez are being indicted for allegedly stealing 130 million credit card numbers, the largest identity theft in history. That’s a lot of credit card numbers — like, one for every housing unit in the United States. Just how did they do it?

The historic theft involved five corporate data hackings, between 2006 and 2008, including Heartland, Hannaford, 7-Eleven and two unnamed companies, according to Channel Web. US investigators say the team scanned lists of Fortune 500 companies and learned about their checkout counter machines (also known as point-of-sale systems).

Then they would write specific codes to corrupt their data systems and launch a virus from computers in the United States and Europe to pull hundreds and thousands of credit card numbers, and sort through them using a “sniffer,” which is basically a data analysis system that decodes big chunks of information.
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This is a real world situation that could impact each of you as professionals, investors, and friends of persons who could fall for such schemes. So please get angry about it!

An envelope arrived yesterday from a worried investor (not a client of mine) in Appleton, Wisconsin. He had been contacted with an “investment partner” opportunity touting a “guaranteed investment program” that would absolutely “double and triple his money every sixty days” with no worries, work, or risk involved.

So why was this total stranger contacting me?

Inside the envelope were four separate documents: (1) a call for twenty-five new investors who would become partners in this special, private, guaranteed investment program, and (2) an endorsement of the program from Helen Taylor, the founder of ResponseLink Pros, Inc.
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Would you marry a bachelor with a million dollars? My friends used to raise the same question when we were kids. What usually sparked a debate was the ensuing query: What if that man or woman is ugly and cruel? Obviously, we were totally clueless about romance and marriage back then.

Now, friends still raise the issue from time to time, but discussions have taken a different twist. “Would you marry for love or money?” They now ask.

I just found a report that attempts to answer the million-dollar question. According to “Marriage for love of money” at Wall Street Journal, two-thirds of women and half the men said they would marry for money.

When asked about their “price” to see them walk down the aisle, the singles said it would have to be over $1 million to $2 million in net worth.

But isn’t love the end-all and be-all of happiness? Doesn’t almost every chick-flick end with a blushing bride marrying the “man with a good heart” and they live happily ever after? Not necessarily. It’s the marriage that comes in bundles of money that lasts.

That’s at least according to Daniela Drake, a former McKinsey consultant, who recently raised the issue in her piece in Reuters. Are women better off marrying for money?

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Until now, the official line is that the two Madoff sons, Mark and Andrew, only worked on the market-making side of the business.

Dad’s business — Bernie Madoff Investment Securities — was not their domain, they say, and thus they have nothing to do with the fraud. For a long time, people have suspected this wasn’t true, but a story in offers the best evidence yet. Far from just being in the back office on the brokerage side of the business, the sons were salesman for the Madoff fund:

Dalton Givens saw the warning signs.

Madoff’s sons wined and dined Givens, then a senior vice president of Wachovia Securities, at a steakhouse in Charlotte, N.C., to try to persuade Wachovia to invest in Madoff’s hedge fund.

Givens, now retired from the firm and living in Boonville, said he took a few sniffs and didn’t like the aroma.

Read the whole thing >

This is new. There have never been reports of the sons going out to sell the fund, let alone wining and dining bankers. Obviously, if they thought the fund was legitimate, then there’s nothing wrong with selling it. But obviously their involvement is more than they’ve let on, which means everything else they’ve said should be suspect.

A company’s ownership of its equipment, furnishings and supplies, as well as its employees’ time, would seem to be an obvious fact. To appropriate company property is theft, or if money – then embezzlement.

But if we look closer, we will see that some form of corporate theft is happening every day in every workplace, and it may be difficult to know what is theft and what is not. Perhaps you phone your husband from the office. That’s technically theft of facilities but widely accepted everywhere. Charging-up your cell-phone is using the company’s electricity. If you work in a clothing factory, there’ll be clothes that can’t be sold, owing to faulty cutting or stitching. But they can still be worn, and if you don’t take them, they’ll just go in the bin. That perhaps seems reasonable enough – except that it could encourage dishonest workers to produce rejects to order!

Consider the theft of usable merchandise. I once knew a storeman in a small bakery who liked to bake his own bread at home, and the manager was happy to let him have a bucket of dough every few weeks. As nobody else was involved, there were no complaints. However, this kind of gesture could be taken, by the bakery owner, as theft, i.e. supplying or taking company property without payment or authority.

And scale is the key to this issue – the danger of small pilfering turning into something more serious, i.e. serious theft.
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A judge decided today that the accused mastermind of what is allegedly the largest Ponzi scheme in history will remain free on a $10 million bond but will continue to be under house arrest at his posh Manhattan penthouse.

U.S. prosecutors had asked that Madoff be jailed while awaiting trial on a federal fraud charge. U.S. Magistrate Judge Ronald Ellis ruled that Madoff was not a flight risk and did not pose a threat to society.

Prosecutors had requested that his bail be revoked because Madoff had mailed more than $1 million in jewelry and heirlooms to people over the holidays and apparently had written, but not mailed, millions of dollars of checks to people.

The decision is sure to further outrage investors who have been clamoring for Madoff to be sent to jail for allegedly carrying out the largest financial fraud in history. Prosecutors said the gifts were grounds to have his bail revoked because what’s left of Madoff’s assets will have to be returned to burned investors.

According to the report, Madoff’s new bail conditions include an inventory of his personal property and searches of his mail. The judge ruled that federal prosecutors failed to prove their contention that Madoff posed risks sufficient to merit his incarceration pending trial.

The anxiously awaited decision does put further restrictions on Madoff, including forcing him to come up with a list of items at his apartment and allowing a security firm to check on the items. The security company will also be allowed to search all outgoing mail from Madoff to ensure that no property has been transferred.
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