40 Richest People Lost $6.2 Billion Yesterday

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The 40 richest individuals on Earth lost a combined $6.2 billion yesterday as stocks dropped amid disappointing U.S. earnings, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a daily ranking of the wealthiest people.

Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal joined the index, which doubled the number of billionaires it tracks yesterday. Alwaleed’s fortune has increased 18.2 percent, or $3.2 billion, this year, as shares of his Kingdom Holding Co. (KINGDOM), a diversified investment group that is planning to build the world’s tallest tower, rose 36 percent. The 57-year-old ranks 24th on the index with a net worth of $20.5 billion.

“There is no secret to success,” Alwaleed said in an e-mail sent from Saudi Arabia. “It is based on a sound investment strategy, commitment and long-term vision.”

The Bloomberg Billionaires Index takes measure of the world’s wealthiest people based on market and economic changes and Bloomberg News reporting. Each net worth figure is updated every business day at 5:30 p.m. in New York. The valuations are listed in U.S. dollars.

The expanded list was published with the release of new billionaires profile pages in the Bloomberg Professional service. The profiles feature a transparent analysis of how each billionaire’s fortune was calculated.

Alwaleed’s fortune makes him richer than Google Inc. co- founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Page ranks in 29th place with $18.9 billion, while Brin ranks 32nd on the list compiled by Bloomberg News. He is worth $18.7 billion.

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A day after President Obama called for increased oversight of speculation in energy markets, House Republicans struck back, at least indirectly.

On Wednesday, the House Financial Services Committee voted on budget legislation that would, among other things, repeal the Resolution Authority granted the Federal Reserve in the Dodd-Frank legislation and subject the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to the annual appropriations process.

The developments speak to the starkly different philosophical approaches the two parties have regarding regulation of financial markets. They are related because the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) was given authority in the Dodd-Frank Act to impose position caps on oil traders, beginning in January 2011.

These limits have not yet been implemented because the CFTC’s budget was slashed ahead of Dodd-Frank’s passage, says Leo Hindery, founder of InterMedia Partners, a private equity firm, and a former economic adviser to President Obama.

“Dodd-Frank was a painful bill to get passed,” Hindery recalls. “It didn’t do everything a lot of us wanted but, that said, it was a pretty good piece of legislation despite untold opposition.”

Unable to stop Dodd-Frank from becoming law, Hindery says its opponents, a.k.a. “Republicans”, are now trying to “gut” the legislation. (To be sure, one man’s “gutting” of legislation is another man’s attempt to cut the budget and let free market capitalism work.)

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Hedge fund assets jumped to record levels in the first quarter of this year, when funds had their best first quarter in five years, according to the latest HFR Global Hedge Fund Industry Report, released on Thursday by Chicago-based research firm Hedge Fund Research.

Total investor capital allocated to hedge funds in the first quarter exceeded $16 billion, HFR said in a statement.

Combined with strong performance for hedge funds in the first quarter, when stock and credit markets gained strongly, total capital invested in the global hedge fund industry increased to $2.13 trillion, exceeding the previous record of $2.04 trillion set in mid-2011, HFR said.

Among investment strategies, those most favored by investors were fixed income-based Relative Value Arbitrage and Macro, which received “an overwhelming majority of the new investor capital for the quarter,” HFR’s statement said.

It said that in the first quarter, investors allocated $12.4 billion in net new capital to Relative Value Arbitrage and $7.8 billion to Macro and redeemed $2.9 billion from Equity Hedge and $940 million from Event Driven strategies.

Relative Value Arbitrage is an investment strategy which seeks to take advantage of price differentials between related financial instruments by buying and selling different securities simultaneously. Macro is a strategy based on macroeconomic trends. Equity Hedge involves taking long and short positions in separate stocks simultaneously. Event Driven investing is driven by specific events related to companies or countries.

In the first quarter, investors preference for the industry’s most established managers continued to be pronounced, according to HFR. Firms with more than $5 billion in assets under management were allocated $18.3 billion in new capital in the quarter, while funds managing less than $5 billion saw a combined net outflow of nearly $2 billion over the same period.

“The record level of assets and the shifting distribution of these are indicative of powerful trends shaping the hedge fund industry in 2012,” Kenneth J. Heinz, President of HFR, said in a statement.

Developing…

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After a one-day reprieve, and a big rally in the Dow, financial markets were backsliding again Wednesday amid ongoing concerns about Europe generally and Spain particularly.

In Europe, major bourses fell after separate reports showed weaker-than-expected construction data for the EU and Italy. U.S. stocks slid from the open and were lower in recent trading, albeit modestly, with weakness in tech giants IBM and Intel weighing on major averages.

Beyond the daily focus on the latest earnings and economic data, global investors are focused on prospects for a bailout of Spain, notwithstanding protests from EU and Spanish officials.

This week, Euro Group president and Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker declared “Spain is on track” and said he “does not think Spain will need any kind of external support.”

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble made similar comments and said its wrong to compare Spain with Greece or Portugal. “The fundamental data in Spain is not comparable to those in the countries that are under a program,” he said, Reuters reports.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has repeatedly said Spain doesn’t need or want an international bailout.

But the data, and the bond market, tell a different story.

Spanish bond yields remain above 6% and even Tuesday’s “successful” bond auction came at much-higher yields vs. a year-ago.

Unlike Greece or Portugal, which suffered from massive deficit spending, Spain is reeling from the bursting of a housing bubble, which makes America’s look tame by comparison.

Non-performing loans at Spanish banks hit 8.2% in February, the highest level since 1994, Bloomberg reports, citing Bank of Spain data. By comparison, non-performing loans at U.S. banks (defined as over 90-days past due) stood at 2.8% in the fourth quarter and fell steadily from 3.3% at the start of 2011, according to the St. Louis Fed.

In March, Spanish banks tapped the European Central Bank’s special lending facility for around $411 billion in loans, a record amount in the short history of the ECB’s Long Term Refinancing Operation (LTRO) and double the level from February.

The good news is the ECB has put this program in place. Along with the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), the LTRO should provide a cushion for Spain to put budget reforms in place. In addition, Spain has already pre-funded about 50% of its debt rollovers for 2012.

The bad news is that it’s hard to imagine a scenario where Spanish banks won’t eventually need a bailout. Unemployment in Spain is nearly 25% and austerity measures are likely to result in less economic activity, at least in the short-term, which means more loans going bad and more pressure on bank balance sheets.

The really bad news is markets are already looking beyond Spain to prospects for a bailout of Italy, which is one of the world’s-largest economies and has a GDP 50% larger than Spain’s. If and when the time comes to rescue Italy, discussions about the sustainability of the euro and the EU “grand experiment” will move from the realm of theoretical to acute reality, as Henry and I discuss in the accompanying video.

Barbara Boxer knows a thing or two about corruption. She can tell you first hand that when you have someone abusing taxpayer money, they won’t stop unless they get fired.

Washington (CNN) — Describing the billions of dollars in contracts and services handled by the General Services Administration as a den of temptation, senators from both parties called Wednesday for the agency at the center of a spending scandal to clean house as it roots out corruption.

“The party’s over,” declared Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, at the third congressional hearing in three days on the controversy that has embarrassed the Obama administration in an election year.

Speaking to GSA Inspector General Brian Miller and Acting Administrator Dan Tangherlini, Boxer said the panel “will support you and encourage you to clean house” at the vast federal procurement agency.

At the same time, Boxer emphasized that the GSA has a history of misconduct dating back decades under Republican and Democratic administrations, and that it was a person appointed by President Barack Obama who uncovered the latest wrongdoing.

Boxer and other Democrats sought to frame the controversy as an ongoing problem at GSA rather than anything unique to the Obama administration, and Republicans on the panel cited what they called a systematic failure resulting from a culture of misconduct at the agency.

Ranking Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma said of the GSA that “if there’s anyone who has a propensity to do something dishonest, that’s where they ought to be” because “they deal with huge numbers.”

“I am concerned that this type of waste has become an embedded part of the culture at the GSA,” Inhofe said, noting the wrongdoing occurred at a time of fiscal austerity, including calls by Obama to cut government waste. “One can only wonder what kind of waste would have occurred in a better economy.”

Boxer later used an extended closing statement to encourage Tangherlini to take substantive steps to solve the problems at GSA once and for all, no matter what it takes.

“There still are ugly things that are going to come out. Let’s face it,” Boxer said of continuing investigations by Miller.

Government or corporate instances of corruption welcome.

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From the General Services Administration’s lavish parties and outrageous bonuses to reports that U.S. Secret Service agents partied with prostitutes, the actions of some government employees has raised new questions about how the U.S. government and its agencies are spending hard-earned taxpayers’ money.

If you know of instances of wasteful spending or gross misconduct by major corporations or federal government agencies and their employees, drop FoxNews.com a line. We’ll investigate your confidential tips and, if they check out, we will expose what’s happening to your taxpayer dollars. Send tips to: [email protected]

I’m just using the news section to talk my own book.

Nothing to see here.

But C only lost 92% of its stock price over the last 5 years. If you don’t pay a jackass like Pandit $15 million, you might get second rate management like Dick Fuld, and then where would you be?

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Is Citigroup (C) CEO Vikram Pandit worth $15 million?

Citi shareholders don’t think so. They gave a vote of no confidence to Pandit’s board-approved compensation package on Tuesday, snubbing Pandit and sounding a clarion call to other investors: It’s time to fight excessive executive pay.

Shareholders definitely made a bold statement by rejecting the offer but their vote is nonbinding, meaning Citi’s board can still pay Pandit the proposed $14.9 million compensation package this year.

After accepting a $1 salary in 2009 and 2010, Pandit’s compensation increased to around $7 million last year. He also received a $40 million retention package that will be paid out over the next few years.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Citigroup is the first major bank to have experienced shareholder backlash against executive pay. Just two percent of compensation packages were voted down last year based on research by ISS Proxy Advisory Services, a provider of corporate governance solutions to financial firms.

Shareholders have singled out executive pay over the past few years as CEO salaries have reached unprecedented levels, even in the face of falling stock prices and disappointing company performance.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The government will face a major test on whether it has the capacity to govern when it faces big tax and budget decisions at the end of the year, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on Wednesday.

Before 2013, the country will be forced to deal with the expiration of tax cuts that affect nearly all taxpayers, automatic budget cuts, as well as another debate over raising the country’s debt limit.

“It will be a big test in Washington, a big test of the country to govern itself in how Washington deals with those challenges,” Geithner said ahead of a meeting on Friday of finance ministers from the Group of 20, representing the world’s leading industrialized and emerging market economies.

A protracted fight over how to rein in the country’s trillion dollar plus deficits and raise the debt limit in 2011 forced the government to the brink of several shutdowns and stripped the country of its top credit rating.

The Treasury expects the country to hit the debt ceiling or the legal limit it is allowed to borrow before the end of the year and individual tax cuts enacted under former President George W. Bush – known as the Bush tax cuts – will expire December 31.

As well, $1.2 trillion in automatic budget cuts are set to kick in early January, which will force the Obama administration and Congress to deal with the country’s fiscal problems.

“Hopefully we use it as an opportunity to make another significant step towards long term fiscal reform at that time,” Geithner said.

(Reuters) – BlackRock Inc (NYS:BLK – News), the world’s largest asset manager, said first-quarter profits were steady, bolstered by strong inflows into its popular iShares exchange-traded fund business.

But despite the inflows and booming equity markets during the first quarter, revenue at New York-based BlackRock declined $33 million, or 1 percent, to $2.2 billion, the firm said on Wednesday. Investors continued to favor the firm’s indexed funds over actively managed accounts, which typically generate higher fees, though not necessarily higher profit margins.

Shares of BlackRock, fell 2.4 percent to $196.88 on Wednesday on the New York Stock Exchange. Through Tuesday, the shares had gained 12 percent this year, compared with a 10 percent gain in the S&P 500 index (.SPX).

Chief executive Laurence Fink kept a tight hand on expenses. Even as BlackRock rolled out a new global ad campaign around the slogan “Investing for a New World,” Fink cut operating expenses by $50 million, or 3 percent, to $1.4 billion on lower office occupancy, fund and compensation costs.

Net income increased to $572 million, or $3.14 per share, from $568 million, or $2.89 per share, in the same quarter a year before.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Shares in Chesapeake Energy Corp (NYS:CHK – News) fell nearly 10 percent on Wednesday after a Reuters report that Chief Executive Aubrey McClendon had borrowed as much as $1.1 billion over the last three years against his stake in thousands of company wells.

The stock dropped 9.6 percent to $17.28 in early afternoon. Shares last traded at that level in July 2009.

The volume of Chesapeake shares changing hands was more than double the 10-day moving average, and the stock was the most actively traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

“It’s certainly not a positive article,” said Capital One Southcoast analyst Marshall Carver. “I think that has something to do with” the stock drop.

At a previously planned presentation to analysts and investors Wednesday morning, McClendon did not mention the Reuters report.

The CEO, who appeared subdued compared with his usual upbeat demeanor, was not asked about the report as he discussed the company’s drilling program and asset sales.

The news threatens to “put a cloud” over the company’s planned initial public offering of its oilfield services unit, Brean Murray analyst Ray Deacon said.

Chesapeake wants to raise up to $862.5 million from the IPO, first announced on Monday.

“Now that loan documents are made public, it just adds another layer of complexity to an already opaque corporate web,” Deacon said.

FORTUNE — Daniel Yergin, author of the new bestseller The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, is one of the planet’s foremost thinkers about energy and its implications. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his previous book, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. Yergin is chairman and founder of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, is on the U.S. Secretary of Energy advisory board, and chaired the U.S. Department of Energy’s Task Force on Strategic Energy Research and Development. He talked recently with Brian Dumaine about the role natural gas will play in America’s energy future.

Fracking technology has given the U.S. a 100-year supply of cheap natural gas. What’s its impact on coal, nuclear, wind, and solar power?

Inexpensive natural gas is transforming the competitive economics of electric power generation in the U.S. Coal plants today generate more than 40% of our electricity. Yet coal plant construction is grinding to a halt: first, because of environmental reasons and second, because the economics of natural gas are so compelling. It is being championed by many environmentalists as a good substitute for coal because it is cleaner and emits about 50% less carbon dioxide.

Nuclear power now generates 20% of our electricity, but the plants are getting old and will need to be replaced. What will replace them?

Only a few nuclear plants are being built in the U.S. right now. The economics of building nuclear are challenging — it’s much more expensive than natural gas.

Isn’t the worry now that cheap natural gas might also crowd out wind and solar?

Yes. The debate is over whether natural gas is a bridge fuel to buy time while renewables develop or whether it will itself be a permanent, major source of electricity.

What do you think?

Over the past year the debate has moved beyond the idea of gas as a bridge fuel to what gas means to U.S. manufacturing and job creation and how it will make the U.S. more globally competitive as an energy exporter. The President’s State of the Union speech was remarkable in the way it wrapped the shale gas boom into his economic policies and job creation.

I believe natural gas in the years ahead is going to be the default fuel for new electrical generation. Power demand is going to go up 15% to 20% in the U.S. over this decade because of the increasing electrification of our society — everything from iPads to electric Nissan Leafs. Utilities will need a predictable source of fuel in volume to meet that demand, and natural gas best fits that description.

And that won’t make the environmental community happy?

Well, natural gas may be a relatively clean hydrocarbon, but it’s still a hydrocarbon.

So wind and solar will have a hard time competing?

Remember that wind and solar account for only 3% of our electric power, whereas natural gas is 23%, and its share will go up fast. Most of that 3% is wind. Natural gas has a new role as the partner of renewables, providing power when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining.

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Secret Service agents and members of the U.S. military brought as many as 21 women back to their hotel during their assignment to Colombia last week, a top senator briefed on the prostitution scandal said Tuesday.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the top Republican on the Senate homeland security committee, said she was briefed for a half-hour Monday night by Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan. Collins said she learned that U.S. Marines, as well as the 11 Secret Service agents now on administrative leave, were allegedly involved — which could account for why so many women were brought back to the hotel.

“There are 11 agents involved. Twenty or 21 women foreign nationals were brought to the hotel, but allegedly Marines were involved with the rest,” Collins said in a statement.

It was previously unclear how many women might have been involved in the incident that has brought international embarrassment upon the agencies tied up in the scandal. President Obama had traveled to Colombia for a series of meetings that were supposed to focus on trade and other pressing issues between the U.S. and its Latin American ally, but the scandal overshadowed those issues.

Collins said Sullivan is “rightly appalled by the agents’ actions and is pursuing a vigorous internal investigation.”

The senator also questioned whether the incident indicates “a problem with the culture of the Secret Service” and whether the men could have been compromised by their alleged behavior.

“Who were these women? Could they have been members of groups hostile to the United States? Could they have planted bugs, disabled weapons, or in any others jeopardized security of the president or our country?” she said, referring to questions she raised with Sullivan.

The Secret Service has already revoked the security clearances for the 11 agents accused of misconduct.

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The practice of gaming the system in order to bill taxpayers for food at lavish conferences was so widespread within the General Services Administration that it became a “running joke” among certain employees, the GSA inspector general testified Tuesday.

Inspector General Brian Miller, who blew the whistle on agency spending with a report on its $820,000 conference in Las Vegas, explained how leaders with the western region of GSA got around the administration’s rule of not having food at conferences. The work-around was simple — just hold an awards ceremony, and food would be provided at taxpayer expense.

“Many times in Region 9, witnesses told us that it became a running joke with the Region 9 regional commissioner that even at staff meetings he would say, ‘We’re going to have a meeting in another location and we’re going to have food so we have to do what?’ And his senior staff is said to have said, ‘Give out awards,'” Miller said.

Fox News earlier reported that the GSA was creating questionable awards so employees could have free food. They even created something called a “Jackass” award.

The Region 9 commissioner Miller referred to in his testimony Tuesday before a House transportation subcommittee is Jeffrey Neely. That official did not attend Tuesday’s hearing, after having invoked his right not to answer questions at a congressional hearing a day earlier.

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The National Association of Home Builders today reported its first decline in homebuilders’ confidence in seven months, but that may be just a blip in the fledgling housing recovery.

“The housing crash is now over…and by this time next year, housing will no longer be a drag for the economy but a tailwind,” Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics tells The Daily Ticker.

Zandi says this year’s spring selling season is off to a pretty good start, although by historic standards prices are still low. But that may not be all bad: Low prices means homes are more affordable to buy.

“House prices are now low enough relative to incomes that single family housing is about as affordable as its ever been in the data we have going back to World War II,” Zandi says.

Low prices also attract investor interest, which is helping to stabilize the housing market. “Investors can come in, buy homes, rent them, cover costs and look for a capital gain down the road,” he says.

Rising rents have been attracting those investors, but at some point they may compel consumers to buy homes.

“Another year from now if prices stay flat and rents rise another 4, 5 or 6%, then the decision to rent or buy will be firmly in favor of buying rather than renting,” Zandi says, adding that’s already the case in some parts of the country.

Demand to buy homes will also increase when potential buyers get a whiff of rising interest rates.

“At that point …. they will want to jump in and buy that home before they lose those very advantageous mortgage rates,” says Zandi. The rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage is currently 3.88%, according to Freddie Mac.

Until there is a substantive recovery, Zandi says housing will continue to be divided between a distressed market — filled with homes in foreclosure or on the verge of it — and a non-distressed market, which is holding up well. He also expects multifamily housing will continue to outpace the single-family market.

Zandi says the government could help accelerate the housing recovery by making it easier for homeowners to refinance and to reduce principal owed.

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – Billionaire George Soros warned on Monday that the euro crisis is growing deeper, tearing at the fabric of European Union cohesion, because policymakers are prescribing the wrong remedies.

“I’m afraid that the euro crisis is getting worse. It’s not over yet, and it is going in the wrong direction,” Soros said in discussion with Denmark’s economics minister hosted by the daily newspaper Politiken.

“The euro is undermining the political cohesion of the European Union, and if it continues like that could even destroy the European Union,” Soros said. “That is due to a misunderstanding of what the problem is.”

Soros, the Hungarian born U.S. investor, said that the creators of the single European currency believed that imbalances were created in the public sector without understanding that markets themselves can create imbalances.

He said the euro crisis is being dealt with by policymakers as a fiscal crisis though the crisis began as a collapse of the banking system in the United States and was compounded by a divergence of competitiveness among European countries.

He said that failure to deal with the crisis was creating tremendous tensions because people, who see that policy is failing, are driven into anti-European positions and dissent is growing within and between the countries of Europe.

“It could be reversed at any time if only the authorities understood that the box is broken and you need to find some out-of-the-box invention to bring it back inside the box and then put it right, change the rules of cohesion,” he said.

Soros said the crux of the problem was that debt reduction was coming at a bad time for the European economy. “You can grow out of excessive debt, you cannot shrink out of excessive debt.”

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Retail sales rose 0.8% in March, better than expected and another sign U.S. consumers can keep spending, despite high gasoline prices.

While many economists have wrongly been predicting high gas prices would crush consumers, Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, as been more upbeat, a view reinforced by Monday’s retail sales data.

“Growth isn’t as strong as it appears in the data that came out of the winter because it was incredibly warm, but even [accounting for] that underlying growth is pretty solid,” Zandi says.

Notably, retail sales excluding auto and gasoline sales — which Zandi calls a “key gauge of where consumer are” — rose 0.7% in March and are up 5.6% on a year-over-year basis. “It’s not boom times, but that’s pretty good,” he says. Overall retail sales are “up and up in a solid way.”

Zandi attributes two main forces to the surprising strength of U.S. consumers: jobs and the stock market.

While the labor participation rate is down and the “real” unemployment rate remains stubbornly high, Zandi notes job growth has been “increasingly broad based,” across various industries, regions and occupations. He believes payroll growth will average 175,000 to 200,000 per month this year, which is enough to bring the unemployment rate down and sustain solid consumer spending.

Meanwhile, strength in the stock market, until very recently at least, has provided further impetus for spending by wealthier households, who account for a disproportionate of overall consumer spending.

Pyongyang, North Korea (CNN) — The U.N. Security Council met Friday to discuss North Korea’s botched rocket launch amid concerns that the secretive and often unpredictable regime will try to recover from its embarrassing failure with a nuclear test or military move.

“Members of the Security Council deplored this launch,” said U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, who said she was speaking on behalf of the council. “Members of the Security Council agreed to continue consultations on an appropriate response, in accordance with its responsibilities given the urgency of the matter.”

The rocket broke apart 81 seconds into its launch Friday morning, then fell into the ocean, according to a U.S. official.

The launch drew condemnation from United States and countries in the region, as well as an unusual admission of failure from Pyongyang. The normally secretive regime has previously insisted that failed launches had actually been successful.

“Scientists, technicians and experts are now looking into the cause of the failure,” North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said in a report, which was also read out in a news broadcast on state-run television.

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The U.S. will not go forward with planned food aid for North Korea after the nation’s unsuccessful attempt to launch a long-range missile rocket, the White House said.

“Despite the failure of its attempted missile launch, North Korea’s provocative action threatens regional security, violates international law and contravenes its own recent commitments,” the White House said in a statement condemning the launch.

President Obama has been prepared to engage with North Korea in a constructive manner, the statement said, but he also insists that the country live up to its earlier commitments and international obligations.

North Korea’s much-anticipated rocket launch ended quickly in failure early Friday, splintering into pieces over the Yellow Sea soon after takeoff.

North Korea acknowledged in an announcement broadcast on state TV that a satellite launched hours earlier from the west coast failed to enter into orbit. The U.S. and South Korea also declared the launch a failure.

A senior U.S. official told Fox News the rocket broke apart between 90 seconds and 2 minutes after launching.

Data suggests the rocket broke up in mid-flight inside the Earth’s atmosphere. Officials say the rocket did not fall into any populated areas, suggesting it fell into the ocean.

The rocket likely broke apart between the first and second stages of a three phase process.

“This is just a reminder,” Seoul-based North Korea expert Alexi Lankov told Fox News, “ that Pyongyang hasn’t developed a credible vehicle for a nuclear weapon delivery system.”

Japan’s Defense Minister Naiki Tanaka said, “We have confirmed that a certain flying object has been launched and fell after flying for just over a minute.” He did not say what exactly was launched.

He said there was no impact on Japanese territory from the launch.