Welcome to the weekly roundup of great articles, facts and figures. These are the weekly finds that made our eyes pop.
Target Knows You're Pregnant Before You've Told Anyone
The never ending invasion into our privacy knows no bounds. We just saw Google ignoring browser privacy settings and even when you delete cookies, flash cookies and even use proxy servers, you're being tracked. For those who have strong boundaries this is just irritating as hell. It's also stupid in terms of statistics. One percent, which is the typical dismissed exception of these profiling algorithms, equates to 3 million people in the United States.
Think Occupy Wall Street has dribbled to the oblivion of political history? Think again. It seems an offshoot of the OWS movement, The 99 Percent Working Group, Ltd., a non-profit, came up with the 99% Declaration and National General Assembly.
Here we go again. The Greece parliament has approved more austerity, code speak to cut pensions, wages and dump Greek debt on the backs of the people. Literally Athens is burning.
Rob a 7-11 with a gun? Get at least 20 years in prison. Rip-off investors to the tune of $1.6 billion, get no jail time, no charges and you don't even need to make restitution. MF Global represents yet another example how financial crime goes unpunished and not penalized.
We know MF Global played around with customer's money. The amount they lost is even larger than originally estimated, now at $1.6 billion bucks. Seems there is $700 million overseas and that branch of MF Global in the U.K. ain't giving the money back.
As expected, states were strong armed by the administration and have agreed to a $25 billion, 50 state mortgage fraud settlement with five banks for robo-signing and mortgage fraud. According to the Wall Street Journal:
The agreement covers five banks: Ally Financial Inc., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. Together, the five firms handle payments on 55% of all home loans outstanding, or about 27 million mortgages, according to Inside Mortgage Finance.
About $5 billion would be cash payments to states and federal authorities, $17 billion would be pegged for homeowner relief, roughly $3 billion would go for refinancing and $1 billion would be paid to the Federal Housing Administration.
Last week the CBO released their report, The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2012 to 2022. Deficits everywhere, high unemployment, lackluster economic growth and one very scary year, 2013. Below are the CBO economic forecasts.
The January unemployment report created quite a stir. Many believed the BLS had simply dropped 1,252,000 people out of the labor force, discarded like trash. Is the BLS an evil doer as so many declare, or could the culprit possibly be the 2010 Census?
We already showed how comparisons between December and January cannot be done due to the incorporation of the 2010 Census data and the yearly population controls, benchmarks and seasonal adjustments incorporated into the January unemployment statistics.
While there is no mythical 1.252 million dropping out of the labor force, there are some highly unusual numbers in the BLS population controls.
The BLS starts the January month with revised population estimates, seasonal adjustments and benchmarks. This year the 2010 Census data was also incorporated into the BLS statistics. They do not go backwards in these revisions. The BLS does not backwards adjust December 2011. Here are the BLS population controls for 2012:
We all know the story of the three little pigs and the big, bad wolf.
Little pig, little pig, let me come in.
No, no, not by the hair on my chinny chin chin.
Then I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house in.
To date that's been the story of the banks as the big bad wolf, blowing houses down all over America with fraudulent foreclosures, viewing home owners as tasty piglet snacks of profit.
Will we ever see role reversal in this never ending grim tale? Will the big bad wolf finally be our government, blowing down the Banks' house of mortgage and foreclosure fraud? Can the government at least hand Americans just a few bricks at least? It's yet to be seen.
The latest seems to be dueling events. One the one hand, there is a foreclosure fraud settlement in the works for all 50 States, which supposedly gives banks immunity and waves all future legal actions. Yet at the same time, the New York Attorney General filed a civil fraud lawsuit against three major banks over MERS.
Welcome to the weekly roundup of great articles, facts and figures. These are the weekly finds that made our eyes pop.
Rob a 7-11 with a gun? Get at least 20 years in prison. Rip-off investors to the tune of $1.6 billion, get no jail time, no charges and you don't even need to make restitution. MF Global represents yet another example how financial crime goes unpunished and not penalized. 
As expected, states were strong armed by the administration and have agreed to a $25 billion, 50 state mortgage fraud settlement with five banks for 
The January 
We all know the story of the
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