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Amar Bhide says its time the government demanded that bankers take time to know their borrowers rather than punch in a few numbers into some models on the computer. Especially because the government is now virtually the guarantor of all the obligations of the banking system, including housing loans, and this much is owed to taxpayers. He says the 2300 page Dodd-Frank bill for financial reform sets forth a whole range of new rules, requiring a lot from regulators to write and implement the details, but does nothing to put back the old-fashioned borrower-by-borrower banking prudence that is essential for US economy.

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Automakers have huge problems servicing debt, with GM servicing $45 billion debt. Also all that inventory in trucks but also cars weighs heavily as cost for automakers, cars 28% overstocked, trucks 13% overstocked, as sales fall according to Credit Suisse analysts. And overseas bright spots are gone with global financial crisis. And Goldman estimates GM will use up $9 billion in 2009, and working capital cash balances need to be $11 to $14 billion. So do lower oil prices matter, not so much for automakers. And Chrysler is a bad choice for merger partner says a Merrill Lynch analyst because of its product and overexposure to the US market.

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Former Attorney General of Ohio, Richard Cordray, is nominated to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Cordray was the first attorney general to file a lawsuit against a loan servicer for violation of state consumer laws. He also sued Merrill Lynch, Ally Financial, AIG and credit rating firms for actions relating to the mortgage financial crisis of 2008. He was editor in chief of the University of Chicago Law Review and clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy. He is a graduate of Michigan State University, Oxford University and the University of Chicago Law School. He is also a five time champion in 1987 on the quiz show Jeopardy.

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The situation in 2010 in Monterrey, Mexico's third largest city after Mexico City and Guadalajara, which produces 10% of the country's economic output. Many Americans and affluent Mexicans are leaving Monterrey as two drug gangs the Zetas and the Gulf cartel launch a war in the city. Even the U.S. consulate is taking steps to move out children from the city. Long term resident expatriates are also leaving. Many leave for Texas. Local police forces are corrupted and this leaves the drug gangs free to roam in the city especially after 10 pm and often in broad daylight. So many executives from Cemex, headquartered in Monterrey, are leaving the city that CEO Zambrano is calling those leaving "cowards."

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Ceasefire arranged by president Sarkozy of France who holds the rotating Presidency of the EU when he visited Moscow and met Medvedev the Russian President. It lets Russia keep a bigger peacekeeping force in Georgia than before and preserves the internationally recognized borders and so the sovereignty of Georgia yet not the territorial integrity of Georgia, as it lets Russia continue to issue Russian passports to residents of Abhakazia and South Ossetia the two breakaway regions. The opposition in Georgia says it will question the Georgian President's decision to launch an attack in South Ossetia and ending up losing the 2 breakaway parts of Georgia and will ask him to resign after things settle down.

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Blackberry's release of the Blackberry 10 all touch smartphone with the new operating system. Blackberry 10 has a better keyboard than the iPhone and Android phones and can enable users to use the calendar and email at the same time. The delayed launch in the U.S. market to mid March or April, because of the 4-6 weeks time it takes for wireless carriers to conduct rigorous testing, means the marketing push comes before the product is available.

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BMW's first mass production electric car the i3 will go on sale inthe U.S. in the second quarter of 2014, priced at $41,350. It is a city car with a range of 100 miles from one charge. BMW will launch a i8 in 2014. The i8 is a super sports car with high fuel economy. A electric motor drives the front wheels and a 3 cylinder gasoline engine drives rear wheels. BMW's CEO Reithofer has increased spending on R&D so that it can meet the 30% of automobiles that have to be hybrids or electric vehicles by 2025 for BMW to meet higher European auto emissions standards. R&D spending was up 17% in 2012 to 9.2 billion euros, and capital spending up 42%.

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WSJ shows how the daughter of David Rockefeller Neva Goodwin and her daughter Kaiser have led the fight against Exxon for not making the change to renewable energy from fossil fuels in time to avert climate change disasters now common worldwide. One of the major problems of the last 50 years since the Reagan administration in 1980 involve oil wealth in the Middle East used to finance wars and US involvement in these wars in Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Libya, Yemen. It haunts us to this day with conflict in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. This has its origins with John D. Rockefeller  who started the oil company Standard Oil in the 1870's in Cleveland, Ohio, now called Exxon in the US and Esso overseas. A bigger problem has emerged in recent years that remained unnoticed till about 2006 when David Rockefeller, the grandson of John D. Rockefeller, met with the head of Exxon for lunch to ask why Exxon was not doing more to invest in green energy and increase awareness of the damage to the environment by fossil fuels. This was the beginning of the dawning realization of the signs of climate change so prevalent 20 years later today in wildfires, drought, extreme heat and fast floods worldwide.   Today's Exxon is a descendent of the companies John D. Rockefeller (Library of Congress site) created by the 1880's to refine oil which he turned into a monopoly by deals with railroad companies to reduce cost of product. In 1888 he created the Anglo American Oil Company later called Esso which is a phonetic rendition of S and O in Standard Oil, which in 1972 was changed to Exxon. Many of the crises of this century have their origins in the activities of Esso and British oil companies in Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia and the wars that wasted trillions of dollars in American resources through the administrations of Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Obama have their origins in the activities of oil companies, and the governments of these countries using oil financed wealth for wars that involved the US. Huge mistakes that combined with neglect of manufacturing the lifeblood of any economy have led to the gradual decline of the US, being reversed for the first time with the decisive and complete shift made by president Biden so that investments of trillions of dollars can be made to revive the strength of the US economy and the wellbeing of its people. ...

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Internet penetration in India is increasing rapidly. India had 71 million internet users in 2009 by one estimate. Current estimates are of 80-100 million internet users. India's internet penetration as percentage of population of 5% is low compared to China which is at 28.9%, Brazil at 39.2%, and Mexico at 28.3%, according to figures from the International Telecommunication Union. Analysts expect the launch of third generation broadband networks will help increase internet use in India. One study done by investment bank Caris & Co. shows internet use growing to 180-200 million users by 2015. Most of the major internet sites are in news, job-search or match-making. Internet retail is just beginning to grow with online purchases of $1.4 billion in 2010 going up to $5 billion in 2012.

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Nokia announced a loss of 929 million euros for the first quarter of 2012. Sales declined from 10.4 billon euros to 7.4 billion euros in the same quarter prior year. The only bright spot for the company is that the Lumia 900 sold throught AT&T has made a successful launch in the U.S. Nokia CEO Elop says the phone is sold out in stores in the U.S. Lumia sales were 2 million in the 1st quarter of 2012, at an average price of 220 euros ($290). Nokia's strategy now is to bring the Lumia line including the lower end Luma 610 phone to Asian markets by June- to China, Singapore, Vietnam, Taiwan, Indonesia and Malaysia. Nokia's biggest problem is the older Symbian phones, which consumers are passing by and which now have to be discounted rapidly or replaced quickly with the Lumia line. The other related problem is falling margins on basic phones as Chinese competitors discount heavily- basic Nokia phone prices fell 18% to 33 euros ($43) from 40 euros or($52) the prior year. The speed in the drop in business for mobile phones can be guaged from the sales decline of 40% in the 1st quarter from $9.3 billion to $5.6 billion. Things are made worse by the 772 million euro ($1 billion) charge taken for Nokia Siemens Networks, a network joint venture with Siemens. Sales for Nokia Siemens fell 7% in the first quarter to $3.8 billion. Nokia Siemens has 53 contracts to build new mobile networks with Long Term Evolution Technology more than competitors Ericsson and Huawei, according to Nokia Siemens. Everything now depends on the speed with which Nokia can move to its Lumia line across the board, especially in China....

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Thomas Frank writing about the public outrage about executive compensation quotes Bill Black, a Professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, who makes an important point. Beyond the size of this compensation there was something else happening that was perverse in its design and in its effects. Black says that at each point in the development of the disaster of mortgage securitization, it was the pay for performance systems that sent the wrong signals to loan officers, real estate appraisers, accountants, and bond rating agencies. The compensation or reward systems actually encouraged wrong, unethical and ultimately disastrous behaviours for the companies and the economy. Another way to look at it, the way it happened on Wall Street- especially at Merrill Lynch and some other financial institutions- the bonuses and other compensation was a way for executives to recklessly milk (loot is the other word) the companies for all they could yield regardless of the results afterwards. And as Black says, to do this through normal corporate mechanisms. A whole range of behaviours of this type took place in the final years of the boom. See other articles by Thomas Frank. ...

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Didi Kirsten Tatlow describes the experience of Angel Feng, a 26 year old Chinese graduate from a business school in France, fluent in English, French, Japanese and Chinese. She intervews with Chinese companies in 2010, who always ask a last question about whether she is planning to have a baby and refuse to believe her when she says she does not plan this for five years. Her first job is with a company promoting Chinese brands, which turns out to be bad as the company fires people immediately to slash costs, maintains long working hours and does not respect basic rights. One woman has a miscarraige and is ordered back to work in three days. The socialist era structures have been removed in China and this includes some of the protections for women, and the old ideas are returning in force. Angel decides to work for a semi-state organization run by the Ministry of Education. Women's rights are better protected in state sector companies. The pay of $625 a month is abit lower but it has benefits, including lunch at the canteen, housing allowance, and hours are 8.30 to 5 pm for 5 days a week. Her employer, China Education Association for International Exchange, covers childbirth with employees given at least 90 days maternity leave with full pay....

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The size of the municipal CDS market is about $50 billion. Five large derivatives dealers- Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley- met in November 2010 to discuss standardizing paperwork for "muni CDSs" to attract more buyers and sellers. The biggest banks are hoping to profit from the deteriorating finances of US cities and states. The CDSs or credit default swaps require swap sellers to compensate buyers if a municipal issuer misses an interest payment or restructures its debt. This makes states nervous and they are suspicious of CDSs, believing that this encourages speculators to bet on, and worsen states' financial situation. California is about to require all 86 of its underwriting banks to disclose what CDSs they have traded on the states' debt, for customers or for their own accounts.

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Clive Crook points to the dangers of complacency in 2010. He reminds readers that the critical thing is as Charles Goodhart mentioned in the Financial Times, that capital and liquidity requirements must be time varying and strongly anti-cyclical. He points out that in good times when lending is expanding quickly and financial institutions are least concerned about capital, liquidity requiremets must tighten, something that is not happening under current rules. Repairs in areas of "too big to fail", separating investment banking and commercial banking, and others, will not succeed unless this principle is adopted. And this he says will be opposed by financial institutions because it reduces their growth. But this fight has to be won. It goes back to William McChesney Martin's idea of taking away the punch bowl before the party gets going.

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Takeda Pharmaceutical is negotiating the acquisition of Swiss drugmaker Nycomed for about $14 billion. Takeda has cash reserves of $10.8 billion and will be using this to fund the acquisition, as well as loans from banks. The strong yen has made acquisitions easier for Japanese companies. Takeda's Prevacid ulcer treatment and the Actos diabetes treatment have both expired. A generic launch of Actos is expected in August 2011. Takeda bought the U.S. unit of Millenium Pharmaceutical in 2008 for $8.9 billion for a significant presence in the oncology field. Takeda projects a drop in net profit by April 2013 by 35%, and sales by 11%, for the fiscal year 2013. Takeda's president says it will make investments in China of about 20-30 billon yen and target a ten fold increase in sales in China to 30 billion yen by 2015.

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All the major investment banking houses are highly leveraged in their ratio of assets to shareholders equity. Bear Stearns was 32 to1, but so is Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers is 30 to 1, and Merril Lynch 27 to 1. And so what is Goldman Sachs ratio? It is 26 to 1. These are the ratios according to WSJ at the end of 2007 and likely haven't changed that much today. All of these banking houses searched for higher returns through high leveraging. This is becoming a problem in this crisis as a lot of capital has to be raised by these firms to reduce the extent to which they are leveraged. And the speed in which the unwinding is occurring in this nervous hangover for the markets requires that firms stay way ahead of the curve and some paranoia is in order.

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Department of Education invites controversy because of diversity programs and "transgender" as culture ignoring health risks. Established by president Jimmy Carter in 1979. Education in the US is run at the state level by each American state administration compared to UK where it is done at the national government level. It has one of the smallest budgets of any agency at 4%, Transportation is 1.7%, Agriculture 3.0%. Most of its work is overseeing $120 billion of federal grants and programs for public education through high school. It supports districts with low income students with $18 billion aid. Head Start program supporting 883,000 low income pre school children in 2022 gets federal aid from Department of Health and Human Services. National School Lunch Act of 1946 by Harry Truman is not affected as it is run by states,  federal aid comes from Department of Agriculture to 20+ million children. Republicans oppose spending about $1 billion to support Diversity program DEI initiatives and support for "cirtical race theory." There is opposition to "transgender." Britain's NHS had a commission look into transgender and says it poses health risks to children and young people. It also adds to anxiety of parents. Republicans are 53 -47 in majority in Senate- to scrap the agency Republicans need 60 votes in the Senate. The likely option is that they will pass a bill putting many of the functions in other agencies reducing its impact- between HHS, Treasury and Interior agencies. ...

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Subaru makes 80% of its cars in Japan compared to 21% for Honda. Toyota also makes a larger percentage of its cars in Japan. The swing in exchange rates bringing the yen to 116 to the U.S. dollar is likely to benefit both exporters. Experts expect both companies to launch a product offensive in the U.S. market and and not start a price war with American makers. Subaru sales of Forester and other models surged 18% in 2014 to about 500,000 cars in 2014. Toyota is the largest shareholder of Subaru's parent company Fuji Heavy. Fuji shares have quintupled since Nov. 2012. Subaru has always pursued a strategy of making in Japan to keep high product quality, according to CEO Yoshinaga, with half of its sales coming from the U.S. market. For the year ending March 2015 Fuji Heavy net profit is expected to reach $2 billion.

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This example of how Forest Laboratories hoped to market an antidepressant Lexapro to doctors through financial incentives to prescribe the drug is detailed in a document that was made public by the Senate's Special Committee on Aging. The document is the "Lexapro Fiscal 2004 Marketing Plan." Forest licensed Celexa from Lundeck of Denmark and brought it to the US market in 1998. Then as the drug's patent life was short it tinkered with it and developed a new version calling it Lexapro and introduced it in the US market in 2002. Withits marketing effort Lexapro had $2.3 billion in sales in 2008, while all the time generic versions of Celexa and other durgs in its class sell for afraction of the Lexapro price. For instance amonth's supply of 5 millgram tablets of Lexapro costs $87.99 at drugstore.com, while a month's supply of generic version of Prozac is $14.99. Forest spends a lot compared to its larger rivals on sending money to doctor's. In the plan $34.7 million was to go to pay 2,000 psychiatrists and primary care doctors to deliver 15,000 marketing lectures to their peers that year. $36 million was to go to providing lunch to doctors in their offices. Asks Senator Herb Kohl, a Democrat from Wisconsin who is chairman of the Committee on Aging- "is the line between medical education and marketing blurred." For these companies there was no line. ...

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This condensed adaptation of the book by McNish and Silcoff on the collapse of Blackberry with the launch of the iPhone, tells a story of complacency at Research in Motion. Supreme Court Justice Brandeis once said that complacency was like all the seven sins rolled into one. In the smartphone industry the results were lethal. RIM founders Lazaridis and Balsillie responded to the iPhone launch believing this would not affect Blackberry. The founders rationalized that what would determine success in the business was security, battery life, ability to type, and using less capacity so as not to strain networks, areas in which RIM was strong and on which it had built its market presence. Design, using mobile to offer broad access to internet content, and the touch screen, were not seen as changing the very nature of the phone market. During the summer of 2007 many users shifted to the iPhone, and it cultivated a cult following using strategies Apple had honed on earlier product launches, reaching 1 million in sales. RIM was completely unprepared and could offer Verizon Communications a prototype called the Storm, which was launched hastily with product glitches still remaining. This happened in November 2008 and turned out to be complete disaster- initial sales were great selling 1 million units in 2 months of 2008, but reversed when almost all of the units were returned because the browser was slow and the clickable screen did not respond well. Nokia, another competitor, is also caught unawares sticking to its formula of success, when all the rules were being rewritten by Apple by showing what the new possiblilities were with the right technology in what one could do with a smartphone. Blackberry introduced a smartphone in 2012 by putting together a patchwork of licensed technologies. By this time Apple, Samsung and other competitors had captured significant market share, and the smartphone flopped. The successor Z10 also flopped in 2013. Nokia faced another problem- the inability to convert R&D, at times larger than Google and Apple, into new products, and the failure of management to grasp the potential of new technologies. According to a former employee, Nokia management turned down a internet ready phone with touch screen developed by its engineers in 2004....

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Green Mountain's share price fell 48% on May 3, 2012. It has fallen 75% since fall 2011 after climbing fivefold in the last three years. The situation has changed for Green Mountain, the maker of the Keurig single cup coffee product, with two of its patents on K- cup coffee expiring and Starbucks plans to launch a high end espresso brewer. Green Mountain, based in Waterbury, Vermont, acquired Keurig Inc. in June 2006 for $100 million. Its Keurig single cup brewers and K cup coffee packs have taken the largest market share, with Kraft Foods Tassimo product struggling. Green Mountain continues to grow, with sales of Keurig brewers and accessories increasing by 21% and K- cup sales up by 59% in first quarter of 2012. Profits were up 42%. Investors and hedge funds are short selling the stock, or waiting for the price to decline, and a quarter of the shares traded are being "shorted," according to FactSet.

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The S&P speculative grade composite index shows that for the first time sine the crisis hit in October of 2009, high yield debt traded June 5, 2009 at 9.66 percentage point premium over comparable Treasurys. This is below the distressed debt benchmark of 10%, and shows how the credit markets are coming back to normal. High yield issuers, who pay a big premium over Treasurys to sell debt have had to pay at spreads which reached apeak of 17.54% in December according to S&P data. The retailing and auto sectors were the hardest hit in 2008. Merril Lynch has its own index which has not dropped below 10%, and which peaked at 22 percentage points in December. On June 4, Merrill's index was at 11.01 percentage points. The last time Merrill's index went above 10% was in 2002, and in 2006 before the crisis the index was at 2.41 percentage points.

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This France24 report looks at the question of whether the policies of four term German chancellor Angela Merkel emboldened Russia under president Putin to launch the invasion of Ukraine. FR24's interview with the vice president of the German Marshall Fund and head of its Berlin office, Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, shows there are many reasons why Merkel's policies were serious errors that ignored caution from past experience and from other western leaders in the US and Eastern Europe. Kleine-Brockhoff says that "Europe did not go wrong, Germany and France did. France and Germany tend to speak for the rest of Europe. Bit these mis-assessments were made in Paris and Berlin, not elsewhere. Eastern Europe didn't go wrong. Northern Europe did'nt go wrong."  Kleine-Brockhoff says the war in Ukraine calls for an urgent re-assessment of the German and French policy towards Russia. "Not only is the post Cold-War order crumbling before our eyes, so are the strategies employed by Germany and France." Under particular scrutiny comes Merkel's policy, and policy supported by Steinmeier of the SPD, that took German dependence on Russian energy supplies from 36% during the annexation of Crimea to 55% in March 2022 with the invasion of Ukraine. Germany's conservative Die Welt has this to say- "What Germany and Europe have experienced over the last days is nothing short of the reversal of the Merkel policies of guaranteeing peace and freedom through treaties with despots," describing Merkel's policies as "an error." About France Kleine-Brockhoff says there were lofty ambitions under Sarkozy and Macron of European strategic autonomy, which did not correspond to reality, to fantasies of European armies when there was nothing but NATO. It is not dialogue with Putin and Russia that was a problem, says Laure Delcour, international relations expert at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. Some form of dialogue is necessary she says, but the dialogue has to have clear objectives. We must not confuse cause with consequence, she says. We know  that NATO enlargement had a big impact on Russia's perceptions, but the real problem is how Russia responded to enlargement. "In this case the problem is the consequence."  ...

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Bank of America CEO loses confidence in Thain after a brief meeting on January 22, 2009, in which Thain was asked about mounting losses at Merrill, which Lewis had learned of from other Merrill executives and not from Thain. Lewis says he could not get agood explanation of what was happening or why. Thain was head of Merrill when Bank of America made the $50 billion acquisition of Merrill on Sept 15, the same week that Lehman Brothers collapsed. Merrill was in a perilous situation with the government intervening to arrange the acquisition on short notice.

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Episode 121 of Mann Ki Baat by PM Modi of India on April 27, 2025 covers a range of subjects from the economic advancement of Kashmir region and the efforts to disrupt this economic progress, to the fight for freedom at Champaran and the role played by Rajendra Prasad. It looks at the British rule in India forcing farmers in Bihar to destroy their land's productivity by planting indigo to meet British traders demands. This was leading to farmers and their families starving for lack of food till Mohandas Gandhi took up the struggle to help farmers with the first test of Satyagraha struggle.Modi describes the months of April as a period of independence struggles from the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre by the British in the Punjab, and the Dandi March from the sea to protest British Salt Tax. Modi describes the efforts to aid Myanmar in earthquake relief, and vaccine aid to Nepal and Afghanistan. He talks about India's scientific mission to Moon, Mars and its 106th launch of space satellite flights. He describes how science is attracting the nation's youth and its imagination as even in Chhatisgarh science centers are attracting young people. This gives a good sign about the future for modernization of the biggest nation in the world. ...