Banking, Finance & Services
Billionaire businessmen and lobbyists are lining up to help Donald Trump after his victory in the U.S. presidential election. Trump appears to be welcoming them with open arms, despite his claim to bring change to Washington DC and get rid of special interests.
In Kearny, New Jersey, a 20-minute drive from Manhattan, a Wal-Mart-branded automated teller machine is reigniting fears among small banks that the world's largest retailer wants to drive them out of business.
Protests at the 2012 annual general meetings of companies may rank as the most diverse, widespread and sizeable in history. They have been bolstered not just by Occupy activists outside but also by institutional investors inside who have started a "shareholder spring" against excessive CEO pay.
Ernst & Young, one of the Big Four auditing firms, has agreed to pay a $10 million to New York state to settle a lawsuit for overlooking accounting gimmicks by Lehman Brothers, the defunct Wall Street bank. The scheme allowed Lehman to hide billions of dollars in bad deals.
A company controlled by Democratic Party donor Norman Hsu recently received $40 million from a Madison Avenue investment fund run by Joel Rosenman, who was one of the creators of the Woodstock rock festival in 1969. That money, Mr. Rosenman told investors this week, is missing.
The midterm elections are days away, but the winners are virtually certain: the corporations and conservative operatives like Karl Rove who have taken advantage of the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling to establish a well-heeled "shadow party" of networked trade associations and G.O.P. front groups.
Andrew Fastow considered himself "a hero for Enron'' for hiding losses and bolstering earnings for the company through partnership deals he created.
This profile of Westdeutsche Landesbank is from CorpWatch's EuroZone Profiteers report which investigates the role of six major banks in Greece, Ireland and Spain during the EuroZone crisis. Loans from these banks helped fuel the credit boom that left the countries deep in debt.
The General Accounting Office (GAO) dismissed protests by two competitors to WorldCom Corp.'s $450 million Defense Department contract, despite acknowledging that the agency "relied on grossly inaccurate financial information" in making the award.
Richard F. Scruggs, a Pascagoula lawyer who rose to prominence as he helped win a $250 billion settlement from the tobacco industry a few years ago, argues that in selling home insurance with many references to windstorms and hurricanes, Nationwide and other insurers led customers to believe that any hurricane damage - whether from wind or water - would be covered.