Nexis, the news and legal database company (to which The Sun has a subscription) has helpful hints!

Under the category, "How Do I Find Negative Information in the News?", Nexis says to enter the name of a person or company and then try the following search terms. (The "!" sign is a wildcard for truncation searches. For example "investigat!" hits on investigated, investigation, investigate etc.):

Enter abus! or accus! or alleg! or arraign! or arrest! or assault! or attack! or bankrupt! or beat! or breach! or brib! or ( chapter pre/1 7 or 11 ) or charg! or conspir! or co-conspir! or convict! or corrupt! or court! or crime or criminal! or critici! or deceiv! or decept! or defendant or defraud! or denied or deny or disciplin! or discrim! or distort! or embattled or fraud! or guilt! or harass! or illegal! or incriminat! or indict! or inside! info! or insolv! or investigat! or judgement or judgment or launder! or liquidat! or litigat! or manipul! or misappropriat! or misconduct or misdeme! or mismanag! or misrepresent! or negligen! or offen! or probat! or prosecut! or racketeer! or revocation or revoke* or risk! or sabotag! or sanction! or scam! or scandal! or separat! or steal! or stole* or sued or suing or suspen! or terroris! or theft or threat! or unlawful! or verdict or violat! or violen! in the blank search field directly below the previous drop-down boxes

They left out scumba! and slimebuck! and sleaz!

Posted by Jay Hancock at 1:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

From Julie Bykowicz's story on the Wells Fargo case. Nice.

Two former Wells Fargo employees have claimed in depositions that the company's prime loan officers reaped rewards for steering customers who qualified for regular lending to subprime loans. Tony Pachal, a loan officer from 1997 to 2007, also said employees used racial slurs to describe minority customers and referred to subprime loans as "ghetto loans."

Posted by Jay Hancock at 9:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: The Great Recession
        

From the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners:

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Intense financial pressure during the economic crisis has led to an increase of fraud, according to a survey of fraud experts conducted by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE). Results of the survey, published in the new ACFE report "Occupational Fraud: A Study of the Impact of an Economic Recession," also found that layoffs are pervasive and are leaving holes in organizations' internal control systems.

The study also found that:

Employees pose the greatest fraud threat in the current economy. When asked which, if any, of several categories of fraud increased during the previous 12 months, the largest number of survey respondents (48 percent) indicated that embezzlement was on the rise.

Layoffs are affecting organizations’ internal control systems. Nearly 60 percent of CFEs who work as in-house fraud examiners reported that their companies had experienced layoffs during the past year. Among those who had experienced layoffs, almost 35 percent said their company had eliminated some controls, while 44.2 percent said the layoffs had no effect on controls and only 3.2 percent said their company had increased controls.

Fraud levels are expected to continue rising. Almost 90 percent of respondents said they expect fraud to continue to increase during the next 12 months. Additionally, the fraud most expected to increase is embezzlement.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 2:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: White collar crime
        

Says Tyler Cowen:

The higher education bubble has burst. The expiration of stimulus funds in 2011 will be a crushing event for many public sector universities.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Education
        

Some reax to today's column, "Maryland politics, economy just aren't Southern anymore."

I enjoyed your column very much, but I would not be eager to see Maryland embrace too much of New England or its ways. I own with my brother a house in New Haven, CT which has been in our family since the 1920's. The real estate taxes are more than double what I pay for the same size property and age home here in Baltimore County. As you likely know each small New England town is totally independent with an amazing overlap of redundant services from town to town. Each town is its own totally separate entity with East Haven, North Haven, West Haven all maintaining separate fire, police, public works departments, and school systems. There is no chance of co-operation since each town has a seventeenth or eighteenth century founding. It gets worse as you move away from working class towns to more pedigreed "colonial" towns.

And:

Point of history: It was in 1969, for many of the reasons you cite in today's column, that Gov. Marvin Mandel, fed up with the antics of George Wallace and his fellow travelers in the Southern Governors' Conference, conceived and organized the Mid-Atlantic States Governors' Conference. The idea at the time was to create a conference for discussion of mutual concerns, such as transportation, education, the environment, the Chesapeake Bay, among the six states the make up the region. Out of the conference came many of the inter-state compacts and agreements by which we live today. What I don't know is whether the conference still exists or was abandoned or subsumed along the way.

it amazes me as taxed and regulated as we are that you still think the dems are right and the rep. are wrong. whenwill you all wake up?

And:

As it was before the Civil War, Baltimore continued to be the banking, commercial and industrial supplier to the Old South. However, this all changed during the 20th century with the rise of such commercial centers as Atlanta and Charlotte.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

When every other asset was plunging a few months ago, U.S. Treasury securities reached what may have been the peak of a long and amazing bull market that began in the early 1980s. Despite soaring U.S. debt and questions about whether it will all be paid back, Treasuries, backed by the taxing power of the government, were deemed a safe harbor during the financial collapse.

But when storms begin to abate, safe harbors empty out.

In a reverse image of soaring stock markets, Treasuries have fallen sharply since March. The longer the maturity, the worse they have done. Mutual funds owning lots of 30-year and 10-year Treasuries have gotten hammered. T. Rowe Price’s U.S. Treasury Long-Term Fund is down 13 percent so far this year. The Wasatch-Hoisington U.S. Treasury Fund has lost more than 20 percent, according to Reuters.

There is a big debate about whether the plunge heralds increasing fiscal problems for Washington and resurgent inflation or just signals that the emergency is over. (Bond interest rates and prices move in opposite directions. Investors bid rates up and push prices down when they fear inflation is near.)

It’s true that Treasury rates have spiked. But at 4.5 percent the yield on the 30-year bond is merely back where it was last summer. If the economy keeps improving it’ll go much higher

Posted by Jay Hancock at 9:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Personal Finance
        

The bluff has been called -- and it is a bluff. The Boston Globe Newspaper Guild rejected the publisher's demand for $10 million in wage and benefit givebacks.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here -- about 6 inches from the trunk on a branch a foot thick -- and predict that the New York Times Co. won't follow through on its "threat" to shut down a company with $400 million in revenue.

UPDATE: What a shock.

"Because we have achieved the $20 million in savings we needed, we do not foresee closure at this time and are focused on executing the Globe's turnaround plan," says a Times Co. statement.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 9:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
        

Tax authorities are really pushing electronic filing these days. Now that the IRS and comptroller's office are well set to receive electronic returns, it saves tons of money. They're getting out the message in different ways. I still file on paper. The IRS found a bogus reason to delay my refund -- on my itemized deductions I had forgotten to distinguish noncash charitable donations from cash donations. In the accompanying letter the agency said -- I'm paraphrasing -- if you had filed electronically, this would have happened to you.

In Maryland, here's a funny video from Comptroller Peter Franchot pushing e-filing with a takeoff on the "real men of genius" beer commercials. The singer fabulously bad. I can't get the video to embed, but the link is here.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Taxes
        

A couple links for energy prices. BGE's summer prices, which took effect June 1 unless you switched to an alternate supplier, can be seen by clicking here. BGE's default price for residences through September will be 12.669 cents per kilowatt-hour, the highest it has ever been. (Add 2 cents and change for BGE's delivery on top of that, plus all the nuisance charges.) Non-summer prices starting in October are also there.

And BGE just posted its latest monthly price change for natural gas. The June price (again, excluding delivery) is 57.05 cents per therm, a slight increase from May but less than half the price from a year ago. To see the chart of monthly gas prices back to 2002 click here.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 5:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)
Categories: BGE/electricity
        

Since this blog has become the global authority on botched national junk-food giveaways, it has assigned staff to see if Doughnut Day (in which Krispy Kreme and Dunkin Donuts have pledged to give a free sweet round greasy puntured piece of fried starch to every customer) is going OK.

So far no reports of free-fatty-food rights being violated, except maybe in Fresno. Yum Brands and KFC could learn a thing.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 2:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Marketing
        

Daniel Gross addresses the debate over what rising interest rates and plunging Treasury-note/bond prices (ignore the Slate headline reference to "bills." It's long-term debt we're talking about) are telling us. Are they the market's panicked response to all the deficit spending in DC? Or are they a relieved return to normality?

Gross correctly limns the suspect motivations and arguments of those who say Treasuries are "discounting" inflation apocalypse. And he notes that Treasury yields were ridiculously low in December because the financial world was falling apart and U.S. debt was the only safe port. Looked at in a historic time series, today's Treasury yields look perfectly normal. Investors are responding to a strengthening economy and not impending doom.

But what about gold? I'm the first to say that Gross's deprecation of the market as an intelligent discounting machine -- markets resemble "the Star Wars bar scene more than they do the economics faculty lounge at Princeton," he says -- applies equally to gold investors. But it's difficult to argue that the price of gold, a traditional if unreliable inflation hedge, is well within a historical range. It's near $1,000 and all-time highs, although it has lost steam over the last couple of days. Gold investors seem to be worried about something.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Inflation/Deflation
        

UPDATE: Diane also has this to say. Will nudge the company.

I still see that WGES' FAQ page on residential electricity shows the $75 or $7.00 month cancellation fee, though. They really should update that ASAP to reflect the increase as detailed in the terms and conditions of the current offers. As an alert consumer, I have an issue with a company publishing conflicting information. I'd imagine it could create problems for them as well? http://www.wges.com/page/faq.php?c_type=ELE

I've been recommending the electricity package being offered by Washington Gas Energy Services as an alternative to the standard BGE product. You can sign up for up to three years for 10.8 cents per kilowatt hour with WGES. This summer's standard BGE price will be over 12 cents. (This is transmission and generation only. BGE, which stays as your delivery service no matter whom you buy juice from, adds on a delivery charge.)

Alert reader Diane D. notes that WGES has changed the termination fee if for some reason you want to get out of the contract early. Formerly it was $75 or $7 per month remaining in the term, whichever was greater. Now it's $150 or $20 a month. I asked WGES boss Harry Warren about the reasons for the change. His response, via email:

"WGES increased its residential electricity supply termination fees in May 2009. This change is in response to the price volatility energy markets have recently experienced, moving as much as 20% in less than 6 months.

"When a customer signs an electricity supply contract with WGES for a guaranteed price and a 1, 2 or 3 year term, WGES purchases wholesale supply at that time at prevailing prices to fulfill its obligation to the customer. This puts us in a different position from other companies that charge termination fees such as cell phone or cable operators. We need to cover potential losses on reselling the electricity if a customer breaks their contract. Note that our contract terms still waive this fee if the customer moves."

I still think the three-year deal for 10.8 cents is a good bet. And note that if you change residences, they don't charge you the termination fee.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: BGE/electricity
        

From Tyler Cowen, of course:

Most importantly, there is a critical distinction between hypocritical discourse on race and racism itself. Hypocritical discourse on race is harmful and often Sailer does a very good job skewering it. But racism itself is far, far more harmful, whether in the course of previous history or still today. It is fine if a given individual, for reasons of division of labor, spends his or her time attacking hypocritical discourse about race rather than attacking racism itself. (For instance we shouldn't all focus on condemning Hitler and Stalin, simply because they were among the most evil men; there are other battles to fight.) But I still wish that specified individual to ardently believe that racism is the far greater problem.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
        

Hancock, May 29:

On Thursday, GM disclosed that the government would own 72.5 percent of the company immediately after the bankruptcy process ends. This confirms the corollary of the famous aphorism made by Charlie Wilson, GM's boss in the 1950s: What's bad for GM is now really bad for America.

Robert Reich, June 1:

Wilson’s edict, too, has been turned upside down: in many ways, what has been bad for GM has been bad for much of America.

(I'm not really accusing him of plagiarism, a charge that gets thrown around too freely. I doubt he read my piece, and in any event it's sort of an obvious thing to say.)

Posted by Jay Hancock at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: The Great Recession
        

From Matt Wald at NYT:

More than a year before a twin-engine turboprop flown by Colgan Air crashed on approach to Buffalo, a Federal Aviation Administration inspector complained to his superiors about the rocky start the airline was having with that model.

Three times, he said, the pilots flew the airplane faster than the manufacturer’s specifications allowed, but they initially refused to report this and have the plane inspected for damage. They flew with a broken radio and did not want to write that up in the maintenance log, as the rules require, he said, because it might delay the next test flight. And they tried three approaches to the airport in Charleston, W. Va., and “botched” all of them, failing to get the plane at an appropriate altitude, on the right path and at the right speed for landing.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 1:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Airlines
        

I'll be on Ron Smith on WBAL, AM 1090, at 4:45 today to talk about this column on how we need to end the Age of the Deal and begin the Age of the Sustainable Relationship. Over the past 20 years we've worried too much about scoring the big transaction and not enough about what happens later.

Whether we're interacting with a banker, a CEO, a doctor, a car dealer or a politician, we need to be able to see him or her the morning after and agree it was good for both of us.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: The Great Recession
        

Economist Ed Yardeni says dealing with the budget deficits can placate the bond market, bring interest rates down and keep the housing recovery going. He's probably talking about addressing deficits mainly with cost cutting. (He hates tax increases.) He does mention means testing as a way to cut spending in Medicare and Social Security. The truth is we need to cut costs and raise taxes.

The Obama Team needs to negotiate a peace treaty with the Bond Vigilantes. The Administration will agree to slash the structural federal deficit. The Vigilantes will stop pushing bond yields and mortgage rates up to levels that will abort the recovery. This would be a win-win solution in the spirit of doing what is best for the country. The President could do what Nixon did. It took an anti-communist hawk to recognize Red China. It may take a liberal community organizer to address the looming financial crisis in the social welfare state, particularly Social Security and Medicare. Now is a good time to push for means testing of these two programs.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: The Great Recession
        

UPDATE: The Boston Herald says it was arson:

It appears at least one person felt a topless coffee shop in Maine was too hot. Fire officials say a blaze that destroyed the Grand View Topless Coffee Shop in Vassalboro at about 1 a.m. today was set by an arsonist.

Donald Crabtree thought a topless coffee and doughnut store was just the way for a merchant to fight the recession, so he opened the Grandview Topless Coffee Shop in Vassalboro, Maine, a few months ago. The place drew legions, but last night it burned down, according to the Boston Globe.

No word yet on suspected arson, but apparently not all the good Mainers were happy about the Grandview's dress code. Last month a state trooper was called to the Grandview after one of the waitresses went outside in her uniform, according to AP. The Vassalboro town fathers/mothers are scheduled to vote on an ordinance regulating topless restaurants on Monday.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)
Categories: The Great Recession
        

Cracker, playing The State Theater in Falls Church tonight, has written the theme song for The Great Recession. A little Thoreau, a little Timothy Leary, a little black helicopter paranoia.

Come on, turn on, tune in, drop out, with me

Baby you need a break so lets just run away

Well I'm tired of coding perl, and I'm tired of VBA

Maggie throw your lawbooks away

Turn on, tune in, drop out, give up, with me

Well we will find a little meadow high up in the Cascades

Baby we wont ever come down

Turn on, tune in, drop out, give up, with me

The whole thing's coming down

So lets just get out of the way

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: The Great Recession
        

I'll be on Dan Rodricks' Midday show on WYPR at noon to talk about Electricite de France's proposed investment in Constellation Energy, owner of BGE. FM 88.1.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 9:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
        

Blair Lee says I am left-leaning.

The Baltimore Sun's left-leaning business columnist Jay Hancock got it right this month when he wrote, "Four decades of research shows that the conventional wisdom is correct. Recessions destroy jobs, budgets, attitudes and health. Economic growth is still the best prescription for human welfare."

UPDATE: Pulled from comments. From my editorial commisar in Pyongyang:

Jay:

Blair must not of gotten the last issue of the Internationale in which we downgraded you to a flaming moderate with alarming corporatist tendencies...

The Editor

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
        

Cute. This has been around for months, but I hadn't seen it before. In a stunning last-minute development, IKEA will rescue GM and cut costs to finance GM's cripping pension and health-care expense by shifting assembly to car buyers. And you do it all with that little hex wrench they give you.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Manufacturing
        

Check out The Sun's new tech blog, BaltTech, authored by Gus Sentementes.

Somewhere out there, maybe here in Maryland, the next Google could be being born right now. Maybe it'll be a white-hot startup. Or maybe it'll branch out of groundbreaking work done by students and professors at one of Maryland's colleges and universities. Either way, I want to be there to Tweet it, blog it, report it, photograph it, and videotape it. (Did i just say videotape?)

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Technology & Innovation
        

I'll be in C4's show on WBAL AM 1040 to talk about the General Motors bankruptcy filing. Today at noon.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)