SEC Disciplines 7 Employees

The Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday disciplined seven agency employees over their failure to stop Bernie Madoff’s investment fraud—but the agency stopped short of actually firing anyone. An eighth employee resigned before any disciplinary action could be taken. Disciplinary measures consisted of suspensions, pay cuts, and demotions; one of the most severe measures was a 30-day suspension and demotion. SEC spokesman John Nester said the employees were not fired, because it “would have an adverse impact on the agency’s work.” A 2009 report indicated that the SEC had received “numerous substantive complaints” since 1992, but investigators “disregarded these concerns or relied inappropriately upon Madoff’s representations and documentation in dismissing them.”
Read it at The Washington Post"

Fool's Gold - Africa Investigates - Al Jazeera English

Fool's Gold - Africa Investigates - Al Jazeera English:

"Gold is back. With global investments delivering little returns, the eyes of many investors have turned to the old favourite. But the new gold rush has come with a big rise in scams and confidence tricks. They now represent a major threat for companies and individuals and many of them take place in Africa.

Todd, a businessman from Texas, who recently lost $7,000,000 in a gold scam, is just one of many victims. He was lured to Ghana by an email offering cheap gold from a supposedly legitimate gold trading company. Over a series of meetings he was shown all the official documentation needed to run a legitimate operation. Then he was taken to a small scale mine and shown samples of gold. Todd was convinced he was dealing with serious professionals, so he put a downpayment on the purchase, received all the necessary paperwork and left Ghana feeling happy. When, weeks later, the gold still had not arrived, Todd emailed the company. But the address and telephone numbers were no longer valid and the website had disappeared."

'My kind of journalism' - Ghanaian journalist Anas Aremeya Anas explains his resolve to name, shame and jail those undermining the aspirations of his country by duping foreign investors

Ghana is the second-largest producer of gold on the continent and is now home to a large network of gold fraudsters. Investors have lost millions at their hands.

In this investigation, we go undercover to lift the lid on this illusory pot of gold.




'via Blog this'

CHART OF THE DAY: The Fed Has Done Wonders For Traders -- Savers Not So Much

There are clear winners and losers to Federal Reserve's strongly accommodative monetary policy.

According to investor Doug Short, "The past three years have been an exciting time for many professional traders and their seasoned amateur counterparts. And it's been a dream-come-true for institutional HFT (high frequency trading) with computerized algorithms."

But your average—with investments in CDs, Treasury yields, and FDIC insured money markets—have clearly lost out.

What's clear is that during periods of QE or varous forms of easing (shaded in green) equities have done quite well.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-the-fed-is-doing-wonders-for-market-but-killing-savers-2011-11?nr_email_referer=1&utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Money%20Game%20Chart%20Of%20The%20Day&utm_campaign=Moneygame_COTD_110711#ixzz1dKaVlTTf

Capitalism has its fans.

In the course of evolution and a higher civilization we might be able to get along comfortably without Congress, but without Wall Street, never.

- Henry Clews, 1900

Quotes to think about later

"Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder."
- George Washington

 

Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he
is only completely a man when he plays.
--Friedrich Schiller

"Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing."
- Albert Schweitzer

"You must do the thing you think you cannot do."
- Eleanor Roosevelt

“To be nobody but yourself in a world that's doing its best to make you somebody else, is to fight the hardest battle you are ever going to fight. Never stop fighting.”
- E. E. Cummings


All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has
consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the
absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly.
It is ready to pay up. In other words, there may be responsible
persons, but there are no guilty ones, in its opinion. At very most,
such a mind will consent to use past experience as a basis for its
future actions.
--Albert Camus

Krugman: It's time for solar power

Solar Power has been my pick for the future of alternative, sustainable energy for a while now - years not weeks.  China has weighed in on solar by with aggressive trade practices to kill competition, distorting pricing and otherwise upsetting the course of the industry built up around solar power. Its not a walk in the park to see how to invest in this area.  Lots of money has been lost already by investors and companies bankrupted....


Solar Power
By PAUL KRUGMAN, NEW YORK TIMES
Updated Monday, November 7, 2011

For decades the story of technology has been dominated, in the popular mind and to a large extent in reality, by computing and the things you can do with it. Moore's Law - in which the price of computing power falls roughly 50 percent every 18 months - has powered an ever-expanding range of applications, from faxes to Facebook.

Our mastery of the material world, on the other hand, has advanced much more slowly. The sources of energy, the way we move stuff around, are much the same as they were a generation ago.


The success story you haven't heard about is Solar Energy

But that may be about to change. We are, or at least we should be, on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power. That's right, solar power.

If that surprises you, if you still think of solar power as some kind of hippie fantasy, blame our fossilized political system, in which fossil fuel producers have both powerful political allies and a powerful propaganda machine that denigrates alternatives.

These days, mention solar power and you'll probably hear cries of "Solyndra!" Republicans have tried to make the failed solar panel company both a symbol of government waste - although claims of a major scandal are nonsense - and a stick with which to beat renewable energy.

But Solyndra's failure was actually caused by technological success: The price of solar panels is dropping fast, and Solyndra couldn't keep up with the competition. In fact, progress in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that, as a blog post at Scientific American put it, "there's now frequent talk of a 'Moore's law' in solar energy," with prices adjusted for inflation falling around 7 percent a year.

This has already led to rapid growth in solar installations, but even more change may be just around the corner. If the downward trend continues - and if anything it seems to be accelerating - we're just a few years from the point at which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated by burning coal.

And if we priced coal-fired power right, taking into account the huge health and other costs it imposes, it's likely that we would already have passed that tipping point.

But will our political system delay the energy transformation now within reach?

A large part of our political class, including essentially the entire GOP, is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives. This political class will do everything it can to ensure subsidies for the extraction and use of fossil fuels, directly with taxpayers' money and indirectly by letting the industry off the hook for environmental costs, while ridiculing technologies like solar.


So what you need to know is that nothing you hear from these people is true; solar is now cost-effective. Here comes the sun, if we're willing to let it in.

 

Krugman is a columnist for The New York Times.

Source:
http://www.chron.com/opinion/outlook/article/Krugman-It-s-time-for-solar-power-2257045.php

Ticker Tape Days

One Facebook post becomes national movement to abandon big banks - latimes.com

One Facebook post becomes national movement to abandon big banks - latimes.com:

By Stuart Pfeifer and E. Scott Reckard, Los Angeles Times

November 4, 2011, 6:42 p.m.

When Kristen Christian learned that Bank of America Corp.planned to charge her a $5 monthly debit card fee, she did what many people do these days when they get mad: She ranted on Facebook.

Her Facebook post urging friends to abandon big banks unwittingly blossomed into a national campaign. More than 75,000 people have pledged to participate in "Bank Transfer Day" by moving their money from large U.S. banks to nonprofit credit unions by Saturday, Christian said.

'via Blog this'

Groupon shares surge but concerns linger | Reuters

Groupon shares surge but concerns linger | Reuters:
By Clare Baldwin and Alistair Barr

NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO | Fri Nov 4, 2011 8:45pm EDT
(Reuters) - Shares of Groupon Inc surged as much as 56 percent on Friday, a solid debut aided by a small number of shares sold, yet still fell short of the first-day performances of recent Internet IPOs.

 

'via Blog this'

Groupon Public Offering

Groupon set to price closely watched IPO | Reuters:

* Groupon may raise IPO price above current range

* Low float may help shares in IPO debut

* Longer-term outlook for daily deal leader cloudy

By Alistair Barr and Clare Baldwin

Nov 3 (Reuters) - Groupon Inc is set to price one of the year's most closely watched initial public offerings late Thursday, to strong demand for the scaled-back stock market debut of the largest daily deal company.

Chief Executive Andrew Mason and his executive team have spent almost two weeks on the road pitching to investors and addressing criticism about a replicable business model, slowing growth and accounting concerns.

To pull the deal off the company cut its valuation by about half. Existing shareholders aren't selling and only 4.7 percent of the company is being offered -- the second-smallest stake float in the past decade. It also skipped meetings with potential investors in Europe and Asia.

Solid demand for a limited supply of Groupon stock may support the IPO on its Friday debut.

Longer-term, Groupon shares may be volatile on concern about the company's ability to generate profits and the likelihood that existing investors will sell some of their holdings at some point.

A year ago, Groupon turned down a $6 billion offer from Google Inc . Earlier this year, the daily deal company began talking to bankers about an IPO that would have valued it at more than $20 billion.

By October, Groupon was planning to raise about $540 million from the IPO, down from $750 million earlier in the year.

COMPETITION

Long term, Groupon's many competitors will likely push the money-losing company even further into the red, said one investor at a $350 million hedge fund who attended the New York roadshow but decided to pass on the IPO.

"On the roadshow they say they're going to keep marketing spending relatively flat on absolute terms yet they'll get margin expansion from it but I seriously doubt it," said the investor. "Competition is coming: you're going to have to spend more."

Amazon.com , the world's largest Internet retailer; Google, the biggest online search company; and American Express, a leading credit card issuer, have all launched daily deal businesses this year.

"When you take a closer look, the only reason that they're generating cash flow is because they stretch out the payment terms to merchants to 60 days," the investors said. "If that wasn't the case, they'd actually be burning cash."

'via Blog this'