Business

Over the better part of the past year, we’ve documented the curious case of 1MDB, Malaysia’s government investment fund founded in 2009.

It’s a long and exceptionally convoluted story that doesn’t exactly lend itself to a concise summary but suffice to say that the development bank was something of a black box right from the beginning and in 2013, some $680 million allegedly tied to 1MDB ended up in Malaysian PM Najib Razak’s personal bank account just prior to an election.

Back on April 9 we described the latest example of how criminal Wall Street behavior leads to zero prison time and just more slaps on the wrist, when Warren Buffett's favorite bank, Wells Fargo, admitted to "deceiving" the U.S. government into insuring thousands of risky mortgages.  According to the settlement, Wells Fargo "admits, acknowledges, and accepts responsibility" for having from 2001 to 2008 falsely certified that many of its home loans qualified for Federal Housing Administration insurance.

Three weeks ago, a recent report by Pew revealed something stunning: one third - the poorest - of US households can no longer afford even the most basic necessities: food, rent and transportation.

Submitted by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

Since the end of the financial crisis, economists, analysts, and the Federal Reserve have continued to predict a return to higher levels of economic growth. As I showed in my discussion of the Fed’s forecasts, these predictions have continued to fall short of reality.

Some companies rely on non-GAAP EPS gimmicks to make their earnings looks pretty; others rely on stock buybacks to reduce the number of shares outstanding; a third group of companies merely adds back everything it believes is not part of SG&A to boost its bottom line... and then there is IBM which does all three at unprecedented levels.

Recall that last quarter, just as IBM's revenue was plunging, the company "beat" courtesy of a collapsing tax rate. This is what we reproted last quarter: