Elizabeth Spiers and the Reinvented New York Observer
By Felix Salmon There are three main reasons that I like entering into bets with people. The first is, simply, that it’s fun. The second is that I love to win bets. And the third is that I love to lose them. I don’t ever trade the...
Audit Notes: Minimum Wage and the Recession, Facebook’s Numbers, Most Powerless
By Ryan Chittum The Wall Street Journal runs an editorial today criticizing Mitt Romney for his support for increasing the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation. Few policies are as destructive as the minimum wage at keeping the young and ...
NYT With More on the SEC’s Soft Touch With Big Banks
By Ryan Chittum The New York Times has an excellent investigation today that shows in a new light how the SEC lets Wall Street off the hook despite repeated fraud. Edward Wyatt reports that the SEC has given banks waivers 350 times in the last...
NYT Paywall Datapoints of the Day
By Felix Salmon Ken Doctor has a very smart and interesting take on the news that the NYT now has 390,000 paying digital subscribers — plus another 16,000 at the Boston Globe. It’s unambiguously good news, on many fronts. First, and most i...
Audit Notes: CDO Charges, Facebook’s Board, Deficits
By Ryan Chittum Sure enough, the Justice Department charged former Credit Suisse CDO executive Kareem Serageldin with fraud for allegedly artificially inflating CDO values. Two of his underlings pleaded guilty and say Serageldin orchestrated t...
The WSJ’s Sony Story Is a Page-One Dud
By Ryan Chittum News that Sony's board has picked a new CEO gets page-one play in The Wall Street Journal, apparently because Kazuo Hirai gave the paper an exclusive interview. But the story is weak, almost entirely from Hirai's and the compan...
The Old-School Value of Facebook
By Ryan Chittum The New York Times's curtain-raiser on the Facebook IPO this morning asks, "Personal Data’s Value? Facebook Is Set to Find Out." But is that really what Facebook is set to find out? The Times says about all this private data:...
Audit Notes: Finally, Fraud Charges; Gee Whiz Wired; Freddie
By Ryan Chittum The Wall Street Journal reports, and as far as I can tell, scoops that the Justice Department is preparing to file criminal charges against mortgage-bond traders at Credit Suisse for fraud. The WSJ says two traders will plead g...
Bloomberg’s Big Miss in Silicon Valley Hiring Story
An analysis forgets mergers and acquisitions
Audit Notes: Data Pool 3, The UK Prints, Copyright
By Ryan Chittum Scotland Yard arrested four top current and former Sun journalists and a cop. The Guardian's Nick Davies gives us the context and says it's a major development: And technicians have retrieved an enormous reservoir of material f...
ProPublica and NPR on Freddie Mac’s Conflicts
By Ryan Chittum Why haven't Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae been much more aggressive about refinancing the mortgages they hold? That's a $50 billion question. ProPublica and NPR have a $3.4 billion possible answer. Jesse Eisinger and Chris Arnold ...
Audit Notes: Fukayama on the Crisis, WSJ on Exec Pay, Nonprofit News
By Ryan Chittum The Browser has a great interview with Francis Fukayama on his five favorite financial-crisis books. Here he is on whether companies like Goldman Sachs were really capable of committing systematic fraud: It depends what you mea...
