In recent weeks one part of the debt market after another has buckled. High-risk loans used to finance corporate buyouts have plummeted in value. Securities backed by commercial real estate mortgages and student loans have fallen sharply. Even auction-rate securities, arcane investments usually considered as safe as cash, have stumbled.

(categories: economics)

“Could we possibly have a nominee who hasn’t won any of the significant states — outside of Illinois?” Chief Strategist Mark Penn said. “That raises some serious questions about Sen. Obama.”

Howard Wolfson, communications director, pointed out, “We do better the more voters vote. The largest turnout primaries, by in large, are the ones that have favored us. …The presidential election is not a caucus; it’s an election for the most people to get out and vote.”

(categories: elections)

Countrywide Financial brags in its ads that “No one can do what Countrywide can” and that “Countrywide can show you the way home.” Wachovia ads feature an “Approved” stamp prominently at the top, and Bank of America says, “Homeownership is the best medicine.”

(categories: economics)

"If Hillary walked on water, she would be criticized for not swimming," Lehane said. "And if Obama swam, he would be lauded for being able to do what Hillary could not do."

(categories: elections)

Pakistanis dealt a crushing defeat to President Pervez Musharraf in parliamentary elections on Monday, in what government and opposition politicians said was a firm rejection of his policies since 2001 and those of his close ally, the United States.

Almost all the leading figures in the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, the party that has governed for the last five years under Mr. Musharraf, lost their seats, including the leader of the party, the former speaker of Parliament and six ministers.

(categories: news)

The German government is considering exiting the United States-led anti-terror operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) in Afghanistan and has already sent out feelers in Washington about the issue.

(categories: news)

With the price of oil near record levels, import costs grew in January at the highest annual rate in a quarter century, the Labor Department said. In New York, manufacturing activity fell to its lowest level in five years. And consumers, responding to a national survey, said they felt worse about the economy than any time since the recession era of the early 1990s.

(categories: economics)

Representative John Lewis, an elder statesman from the civil rights era and one of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s most prominent black supporters, said Thursday night that he planned to cast his vote as a superdelegate for Senator Barack Obama in hopes of preventing a fight at the Democratic convention.

(categories: elections)

US industrial production rose a meagre 0.1% in January, official figures have shown, the latest indication of weakness in the US economy.

(categories: economics)

The House voted Thursday to hold two of President Bush’s confidants in contempt for failing to cooperate with an inquiry into whether a purge of federal prosecutors was politically motivated.

(categories: politics)

US retail sales rose 0.3% in January official figures show, bolstered by sales of new cars and petrol.

(categories: economics)

Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA has announced it is suspending sales of crude to Exxon Mobil, in response to legal action brought by the US firm.

(categories: news)

The Bank of England governor, Mervyn King, admitted yesterday that the economy might grind to a halt this year – but warned that the continuing risk of inflation made further interest rate cuts unlikely.

(categories: economics)

US mortgage insurer MGIC has reported quarterly losses of $1.47bn (£750m) after being hit by the housing slump and resulting high levels of bad debt.

(categories: economics)

On Wednesday, the first full day of a Wisconsin primary campaign that he hopes will solidify his emerging lead over his once "inevitable" rival, the Illinois senator started in Janesville, where he delivered a rebuke to free-trade policies of the Bill Clinton and George Bush eras that sounded a little like a speech Feingold might have delivered.

(categories: economics elections)

The US trade deficit narrowed in 2007, official figures show, as a rise in exports offset the country’s large growth in oil imports.

(categories: economics)

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress Thursday that the country’s economic outlook has deteriorated and signaled that the central bank is ready to keep on lowering a key interest rate — as needed — to shore things up.

(categories: economics)

The Bush administration’s latest move is to simply hide the data. Forbes has awarded EconomicIndicators.gov one of its “Best of the Web” awards. Yet the Bush administration has decided to shut down this site because of “budgetary constraints,” effective March 1.

(categories: economics)

The German government is to bail out the troubled IKB bank to the tune of 1 billion euros. It is the second cash injection for IKB, one of the many German casualties of the US subprime crisis.

(categories: economics)

The "Panorama" section of this year’s Berlin International Film Festival opened with the world premiere of "Lemon Tree," the story of a Palestinian widow’s fight to save her family’s lemon orchard.

(categories: news)

Like subprime mortgages, many prime loans made in recent years allowed borrowers to pay less initially and face higher adjustable payments a few years later. As long as home prices were rising, these borrowers could refinance their loans or sell their properties to pay off their mortgages. But now, with prices falling and lenders clamping down, homeowners with solid credit are starting to come under the same financial stress as those with subprime credit.

(categories: economics)

He offered to takeover the insurance of $800bn-worth (£408bn) of local government bonds, currently covered by MBIA, Ambac Financial and FGIC.

(categories: economics)

The comeback of German manufacturing contradicts the notion that the future belongs to the service industry. Manufacturing firms are currently the engines of growth in the German economy, even for the service sector.

(categories: economics)

Fortune.com reported Friday that Goldman added coverage of sex-reassignment surgery to its medical plan last year.

Goldman employees can undergo the procedure, which normally costs anywhere from $5,000 to $150,000, and have it paid for entirely by their medical insurance.

(categories: news)

Venezuela’s state-run oil firm has denied that US oil giant Exxon Mobil had won a court order to freeze up to $12bn (£6bn) of its assets.

(categories: news)

Australia has released graphic pictures of minke whales caught by a Japanese hunt in the Antarctic.

(categories: animal-welfare)

One of the world’s best-known CEOs, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, admitted to fellow participants that he had become skeptical of the very notion of capitalism.

(categories: economics)

India expects its economy to grow by 8.7% in the financial year ending March, the slowest rate of expansion in three years.

(categories: economics india)

The nation’s retailers delivered more evidence of a stumbling economy Thursday, as merchants reported their weakest January performance in nearly four decades, extending a malaise that has deepened since the holiday shopping season.

(categories: economics)

A weak report about the services sector has caused some experts to declare that the economy has already entered downturn.

(categories: economics)

The CIA has for the first time publicly admitted using the controversial method of "waterboarding" on terror suspects.

(categories: torture)

A judge has ruled that the US Navy must adhere to a curb on the use of strong sonar in waters off California, amid concerns about its effect on whales.

(categories: animal-welfare)

The same day John Edwards exited the race, longtime consumer advocate Ralph Nader launched a presidential exploratory committee to decide whether to run as an independent candidate.

(tags: elections)

The company reported Friday that it beat its own record for the highest profits ever recorded by any company, with net income rising 3 percent to $40.6 billion, thanks to surging oil prices. The company’s sales, more than $404 billion, exceeded the gross domestic product of 120 countries.

(tags: news)

William Galvin, the Massachusetts secretary of state, filed a civil fraud complaint against Merrill a day after the firm took the unusual step of agreeing to reimburse Springfield for losses on the investments.

(tags: news)

As the subprime mortgage debacle drives a recession that threatens financial markets around the world, the Democratic presidential candidates are pushing plans to address the crisis. John Edwards and Hillary Clinton are pledging substantial federal resources to stabilize the mortgage market and intervene on behalf of borrowers. Barack Obama’s proposal is tepid by comparison, short on aggressive government involvement and infused with conservative rhetoric about fiscal responsibility. As he has done on domestic issues like healthcare, job creation and energy policy, Obama is staking out a position to the right of not only populist Edwards but Clinton as well.

(tags: Obama)

When it comes to using information technology well, people power is as important as wires, chips, and radio signals. That’s one of the assumptions driving the new Connectivity Scorecard benchmark put together by Leonard Waverman of the London Business School. Waverman found that the US takes the worldwide lead on "connectivity" when measured in this way, but subpar broadband infrastructure holds the country back.

(tags: hype tech)

Clive Thompson has been getting some well-deserved attention for his recent Fast Company piece, in which Columbia University sociologist Duncan Watts explodes the hierarchical theory of social influence and trend propagation popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in the bestselling book The Tipping Point.

(tags: hype)

[B]eneath the spectacular "India Shining" story lurks an area of darkness — the unequal status of its women, who constitute more than half its demographic. The latest official document to highlight this inequity is the 2007 Gender-Gap Index Report by the World Economic Forum (WEF); it places India at the bottom of the global pyramid.

(tags: feminism india)

The RIAA’s habit of roping numerous unrelated defendants into a single "John Doe" lawsuit has drawn the attention of a federal magistrate—and not in a good way. In the case of Arista v. Does 1-27, a lawsuit targeting students at the University of Maine, Magistrate Judge Margaret J. Kravchuk suggests that the court look into imposing Rule 11 sanctions on the RIAA’s legal team.

(tags: news tech)

The US Department of Commerce says the economy grew at an annual rate of just 0.6% from October to December.

In the previous three months, between July and September, the economy was growing at annual rate of 4.9%.

(tags: economics)

The homeownership rate has plunged back to the levels of the summer of 2001.

(tags: economics)

Mozilla published financial statements earlier this week showing that the organization made $66.8 million in revenue for 2006, a 26 percent increase from 2005. That’s some strong growth, and it shows that Mozilla has the potential for long-term fiscal sustainability.

(tags: open-source tech)

In nearly half of the cases they reviewed, over a 14-year period ended in 2006, a litigant or lawyer had contributed to at least one justice, sometimes recently and sometimes long before. On average, justices voted in favor of their contributors 65 percent of the time, and two of the justices did so 80 percent of the time.

(tags: corruption)

The FBI is investigating 14 companies embroiled in the sub-prime mortgage crisis as part of a crackdown on improper lending.

(tags: news)

The increasingly tangled debate over federal surveillance powers reached a new milestone today when a Republican cloture motion failed to pass after receiving only 48 of the required 60 votes. If the cloture motion had passed, it would have blocked all further attempts to remove controversial telecom immunity provisions from a Senate intelligence committee surveillance bill by forcing an immediate vote on the bill itself.

(tags: news)

The "source code defense" has become a popular one, in part because the companies that make the devices are so reluctant to reveal their proprietary code that cases are often dropped instead.

(tags: tech)

The vehemently anti-US leader says Nicaragua, Bolivia, Cuba and Dominica should create one united force.

(tags: imperialism)

For Isabelle Mercier, 44, queuing outside a Société Générale branch in Paris, the ‘rich and the powerful’ always find someone to blame: ‘Anyone who is a threat to them is eliminated one way or another.’ Mohammed Benali, a market trader at the nearby Marché d’Aligre, agreed. ‘It is time the bosses and the rich were taken down a peg,’ he said.

(tags: news)

The memorandum, which has not been previously disclosed, cited a number of “significant points of vulnerability.” Those included: the building’s public access, the center’s location on the 23rd floor, a 1,200-gallon diesel fuel supply for its generator, a large garage and delivery bays, the building’s history as a terrorist target, and its placement above and adjacent to a Consolidated Edison substation that provided much of the power for Lower Manhattan.

(tags: 9/11 Giuliani)

They say the banks will need extra money if bond insurers, who insure the products at the centre of the sub-prime crisis, lose their top credit ratings.

(tags: news)

Analysts are trying to assess whether the trader’s actions contributed to the stock market turmoil and the Fed decision to cut interest rates.

(tags: news)

Even as stocks ended five days of losses with a surprising recovery on Wednesday, officials began moving to defuse another potential time bomb in the markets: the weakened condition of two large insurance companies that have guaranteed buyers against losses on more than $1 trillion of bonds.

(tags: economics)

In March 2000, an undercover officer killed Patrick Dorismond, a security guard, during a fight when the police mistook him for a drug dealer. The outcry infuriated the mayor, who released Mr. Dorismond’s juvenile record, a document that legally was supposed to remain sealed.

The victim, Mr. Giuliani opined, was no “altar boy.” Actually, he was.

(tags: human-rights Giuliani corruption)

French bank Societe Generale has revealed that it has been hit by one of the biggest alleged cases of fraud in banking history. The bank discovered that fraud by one of its traders had led to losses of €4.9 billion.

(tags: news)

Humans inflicted $47 trillion worth of damage to the environment from 1961 to 2000, according to a new study, and poor nations are disproportionately footing the bill. Taking their estimates a step further, the researchers conclude that high- and middle-income nations owe poor nations $3.2 trillion for the damage their development has caused.

(tags: environment hypocrisy)

Former US Senator Fred Thompson has withdrawn from the Republican presidential race, after a string of poor finishes in early voting rounds.

(tags: news politics)

Students of how the Bush administration led the nation into the Iraq war can now go online to browse a comprehensive database of top officials’ statements before the invasion…

(tags: iraq)

After commissioning … study … that showed collegiate file-swappers were responsible for 44 percent of movie studio "losses" to piracy, the MPAA then used the report … to bludgeon Congress into considering legislation… Now the MPAA admits … collegiate piracy accounts for only 15 percent of "losses."

(tags: drm human-rights)

Palestinian suffering has reached new depths. Peace cannot be built by reducing 1.5m people to a state of abject destitution

(tags: palestine israel human-rights)

the furor over Barack Obama’s praise for Ronald Reagan is not, as some think, overblown.

(tags: news politics Obama reagan)

Last year, Macau’s gambling revenues overtook those of the 40 casinos along Las Vegas Strip.

(tags: news)

Osama Nahal, a paediatric doctor in the European hospital’s special care baby unit, looked resigned. "Politics is politics, but the care of human beings must be away from politics," he said. His unit now has 10 newly-born patients, of whom two are on ventilators.

(tags: israel terrorism palestine)

THE FBI has been accused of covering up a key case file detailing evidence against corrupt government officials and their dealings with a network stealing nuclear secrets.

(tags: news Plame)

A US citizen held for more than three years without charge as an "enemy combatant" was today sentenced to 17 years and four months…

(tags: news)

Monsanto, Syngenta and BASF resigned after a draft report from the project highlighted the risks of GM crops and said they could pose problems for the developing world.

(tags: news environment)

Alan Greenspan – the man primarily responsible for the current crisis. Greenspan, always accommodating to the needs of Wall Street, worked on the principle that the best way to cope with the collapse of one bubble was to blow another one.

(tags: economics news)

The United States has been listed as a country where prisoners are at risk of torture in a training document produced by the Canadian foreign ministry.

(tags: news human-rights)

More than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, died in the riots, although independent groups say the toll was nearly 2,000.

(tags: news india human-rights)

Time Warner’s plan includes installing bandwidth meters on new high-speed accounts and giving users access to a Web page where they can track how much they have consumed and upgrade to more expensive plans if necessary. Users will pay on a per-gigabyte basis for bandwidth they use above and beyond their plan.

(tags: news tech)