News Links: Missouri Attorney General Files Criminal Lawsuit on Robosigning

What is striking about the indictment by a Missouri grand jury is that the Missouri AG Chris Koster has decided to challenge the banks’ party line that robosigning and related abuses were mere "paperwork problems." He’s called robosiging what it is: forgery.

According to the bulls, stock prices don’t remotely reflect a historic surge in profits. Here’s why they’re wrong.

India Tuesday again cut its economic growth forecast for the current fiscal year to 6.9%, which will be the slowest in three years, as aggressive monetary tightening at home and a shaky global economy crimped industrial activity.

those problems of deindustrialization, deemphasizing full employment, a collapsing welfare state in scope and size and runaway inequality didn’t just stop.  They’ve keep on moving, causing destabilizing insecurity right up the economic ladder.

Professor Charles Goodhart is right when he says that the value of a currency depends on the confidence people have in the issuer. It is easy to trade US dollars or Swiss francs because of the stability of the US and Switzerland. There will always be valuable goods you can buy with these currencies and the relevant governments will not mess you around. But it is increasingly hard to deal in euros in Greece because no one can be confident any longer that the basis on which they trade will not be changed tomorrow.

It’s clear that the US Federal Government is ramping up its fight against illegal file sharing and hosting. It’s the new war on drugs. The plan is to have taxpayers foot the bill and then attack websites rather than regulating or encouraging innovation. The only thing missing is a C.A.R.E. (Computer Abuse Reinforcement Education) presentation at your kids’ grade school. Just say no to perfectly legal data sinks, everyone.

In exchange for trying their experimental build, you can get up to 4.5GB of extra space for free.

The lesson of the Great Crash was that unequal enrichment provokes asset bubbles, excessive demand for debt and, finally, economic failure. Now we are painfully learning that again

Word of the day is Grexit. It has been coined by Willem Buiter, chief economist at Citigroup, which now sees a greater chance of a Grexit – or Greek exit from the eurozone. Against the backdrop of still to be concluded Greek talks over the latest bailout for the debt-choked country, Citigroup has raised its estimate of such an unravelling of Greece’s situation to one in two. It now sees a 50% chance of a Grexit over the next 18 months, up from its previous estimate of just 25-30%.

Die österreichischen Kritiker um Max Schrems sehen Facebook auch nach einem Treffen mit Vertretern der Firma nicht auf die europäischen Datenschutzanforderungen eingestellt. Schrems fordert ein Einschreiten irischer Datenschützer.

A COTTAGE in Co Leitrim is to go under the hammer next month with a reserve price of just €7,500. The two-bed rural retreat is one of 100 lots to be auctioned in the next Allsop Space auction on March 1.

The Tennessee House voted in favor of Bill 740 Thursday. The bill would revoke, suspend, or deny a state license to teachers who default on federal and state-issued student loans.

A small number of GMail related engineers have access to the servers as a matter of necessity to do their jobs; a very small number of people actually access the contents as a matter of necessity to do their jobs, and even then, almost always only the associated metadata. The rest have to file a request and justify any access they ever need, which is extremely rare. All have to sign paperwork re users’ privacy at the risk of dismissal & legal action, knowing that whatever they do is discoverable. And ultimately, an internal culture of respecting users’ privacy helps keep one another in check.

A new study from the Archives of Neurology says playing brain stimulating games can improve your memory and delay or prevent the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

For those wanting more details on the euro break-up plan drafted by French economists, here is the link to the L’Observatoire de L’Europe website.

The economy ministry calculated that German industrial production dropped by a bigger-than-expected 2.9pc month-on-month in December after stagnating in November.

Dwindling marriage rates are concentrated among the poor – the very people whose living standards would be most improved by having a second household income. The trend is especially pronounced among men.

"What’s a man overboard?" Mrs Kroes told the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant. "It’s always said that if you let one country get out, or ask it to get out, then the whole structure collapses. But that’s simply not true.