“The U.S. is facing international pressure to avoid running off its fiscal cliff amid warnings that failure to avert course would trigger another global recession.

“It’s a very serious situation for all of North America and for the entire world,” Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty told Bloomberg Television Thursday at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund. “It means we’ll all go into recession. So it’s important this gets dealt with.”

The U.S. will incur $100 billion in automatic spending cuts and more than $500 billion in expiring tax cuts in January, unless lawmakers strike a deal. The IMF this week said that such a consolidation would tighten fiscal policy by 4 percent of gross domestic product, the most since the 1940s.”

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“Here’s the case: Shareholders have accused a bunch of private equity titans like KKR, Blackstone, Bain Capital and more, of colluding to keep the prices of take-over target companies down, and agreeing on who would buy what. The prosecution is alleging that these firms engaged in bid-rigging, or made “club deals,” to eliminate good old fashioned competition.”

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“The workers are protesting company attempts to “silence and retaliate against workers for speaking out for improvements on the job,” according to a United Food and Commercial Workers news release. Walmart workers, who are not unionized, have long complained of low pay and a lack of benefits.”

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The Greeks are upset over austerity and have taken to the streets bringing  the capital city of Athens to a halt. Instead of red carpets Merkel is getting a joyful reception  of eggs being pelted.

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“World food prices rose in September to the highest in six months as dairy and meat producers passed on higher feed costs to consumers, the United Nations’ Food & Agriculture Organization said.

An index of 55 food items tracked by the FAO rose to 215.8 points from a restated 212.8 points in August, the Rome-based agency reported on its website today. Dairy costs jumped the most in more than two years.

Livestock breeders and dairy farmers are passing on the higher cost of feed, after grain prices jumped in June and July, according to Abdolreza Abbassian, an economist at the FAO in the Italian capital. Higher prices don’t mean a food crisis is imminent, he said today by phone.

“Despite a very difficult market, the fundamentals that suggest a food crisis are just not there,” Abbassian said. “Market sentiment is now accepting high prices more as a rule than as an exception.”

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“(Reuters) – Bank of America (BAC.N) said it will pay $2.43 billion to settle a class action lawsuit with investors who held its securities at the time the company announced plans to acquire Merrill Lynch.

The company expects to incur total litigation expense of about $1.6 billion for the quarter ending September 30.

The litigation expense and a U.K. tax charge are expected to hurt the bank’s third-quarter earnings by about 28 cents per share, the company said in a statement.

The bank will also institute certain corporate governance enhancements until January 1, 2015, under the settlement.”

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“Security experts say the recent “denial of service” cyberattacks on big U.S. banks were the largest ever recorded by a wide margin. Since Sept. 19, the banking websites of Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC), J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM), Wells Fargo & Co. (NYSE: WFC), U.S. Bancorp. (NYSE: USB) and PNC Financial Services Group Inc. (NYSE: PNC) have all suffered day-long slowdowns and been at times unreachable for many customers.

It is not unusual for banks to get hit by cyberattackers and they have some of the best defenses against them. But this time the volume of traffic sent to these sites in order make then crash was unprecedented — 10 to 20 times the volume that normally seen.”

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“European Union regulators are preparing to charge Microsoft for failing to comply with a 2009 ruling ordering the company to offer users of its desktop operating system a choice of web browsers,Reuters is reporting.

The EU opened an investigation into the case back in July, to determine whether Microsoft had kept the commitments it made under the antitrust ruling which stipulated users should be offered a choice of browsers to ensure a more level playing field for competitors to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser.

At the time of the investigation Microsoft conceded it had “fallen short” of the ruling — a mea culpa flagged up by EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia in the latest comments on the case.

“The next step is to open a formal proceeding into the company’s breach of an agreement. We are working on this,” Reuters quotes Almunia as saying. ”It should not be a long investigation because the company itself explicitly recognized its breach of the agreement.”

We’ve reached out to Microsoft and the EC for comment and will update once we hear back. Microsoft said its July 2012 statement on browser choice compliance still stands — in which it admits “falling short”, apologizes for doing so and blames the failure on a “technical error”:

Due to a technical error, we missed delivering the BCS [browser choice screen] software to PCs that came with the service pack 1 update to Windows 7. The BCS software has been delivered as it should have been to PCs running the original version of Windows 7, as well as the relevant versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista. However, while we believed when we filed our most recent compliance report in December 2011 that we were distributing the BCS software to all relevant PCs as required, we learned recently that we’ve missed serving the BCS software to the roughly 28 million PCs running Windows 7 SP1.”

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Matt Damon and John Krasinski ran into a big problem while making their film “Promised Land”; how they solved it tells us a lot about Hollywood.

Some time ago, the two actors decided to make a movie about fracking — a method of getting once-inaccessible oil and gas out of the ground that has become the bête noire of many environmentalists.

….

I broke the news that “Promised Land” was about fracking and now I can reveal that the script’s seen some very hasty rewriting because of real-world evidence that anti-fracking activists may be the true villains.

In courtroom after courtroom, it has been proved that anti-fracking activists have been guilty of fraud or misrepresentation.

Read the rest here.

Typical behavior…

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Shit is hitting the fan…

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“Sharp Corp. (6753) plans to cut more than 10,000 jobs, or about 18 percent of its workforce, and is in talks to sell plants as the Japanese TV maker tries to return to profit, two people with knowledge of the proposal said.

The job cuts and sales of television factories in Mexico, China and Malaysia and U.S. solar developer Recurrent Energy LLC were in the plan Sharp presented to its lenders Sept. 24, the people said, declining to be identified because the matter isn’t public. Sharp is negotiating with Foxconn Technology Group to dispose of the three plants, the people said.”

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“DETROIT (AP) — General Motors is recalling nearly 474,000 Chevrolet, Pontiac and Saturn cars to fix a transmission problem that can cause the cars to roll away unexpectedly.

The recall affects 2007-2010 Chevrolet Malibus, Pontiac G6s and Saturn Auras in the U.S., Canadaand Mexico as well as a small number of exports. All the cars have four-speed automatic transmissions.

GM says part of the transmission cables can break. When this happens, the shifter can show that the car is in park when it’s really in gear. GM says it knows of four crashes from the problem but no injuries.”

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Strange days in America….

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In an ongoing dispute between China and the U.S. on trade, China has filed a trade case with the WTO against he U.S. as a response our anti dumping measures and complaints.

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The Chicago Teachers Union will continue its week-old strike in the nation’s third-largest city, extending an acrimonious standoff with Mayor Rahm Emanuel over teacher evaluations and job security provisions.

Emanuel said he would seek a court order to end the strike, which he said is illegal under state law.

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Unbelievable.

First, the Pentagon called Pastor Jones to ask him to withdraw his support for the film that is being used as a lame pretext to explain the Islamist mobs attacking our embassies. Today, Press secretary Carney did the same. And the White House contacted YouTube in order to get the video removed. The violent attacks and burning embassies aren’t a result of Islamists who want to kill us. No, no. They are all about a crummy video.

Read the rest here.

“Bank of America Corp has agreed to settle U.S. Department of Justice civil accusations that it violated federal laws by discriminating against mortgage applicants on the basis of disability.”

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“ATHENS (Reuters) – Greece’s main labor unions urged workers to walk off the job for 24 hours on Sept 26, to protest a new wave of austerity measures demanded by the country’s international lenders, a union official told Reuters on Thursday.

“We can’t take any more austerity,” said Ilias Iliopoulos, secretary general of public sector union ADEDY. Greece’s private sector labor union confederation GSEE also takes part in the strike.”

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“To live out his retirement years, He Zhongkui was counting on steady income from an investment that promised interest payments five times higher than what he could earn in a Chinese bank.

Now He, a 62-year-old former municipal official in Wenzhou who rides a rusty bicycle, is cutting back on food and gasoline, having found himself one of a growing number of victims of China’s nebulous world of shadow banking. A “friend,” who he said had been paying him 2,400 yuan($379) a month after He gave him one-third of his 600,000-yuan life savings to invest in real estate, suddenly disappeared. So did the payments and principal.”

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