mighty This from PC world……

Dell was found guilty on Tuesday of fraud, false advertising, deceptive business practices and abusive debt collection practices in a case brought by the New York attorney general.

The Albany County Supreme Court found that Dell deprived customers of technical support that they bought or were eligible for under warranty in several ways, including by requiring people to wait for very long times on the phone, repeatedly transferring their calls and frequently disconnecting their calls.

Dell also often failed to provide onsite repairs for customers who bought contracts for such support and often blamed software when hardware was actually the problem, the court found. The company also sometimes refused to offer support when a support contract ended, even though the user had first complained about a problem before the end of the contract. Subscribers to a “next-day” repair service sometimes waited as long as a year for support, the court found.

Dell use to have a reputation for good support.

Sometimes the numbers being thrown around are so large you sit up and pay attention no matter how jaded you have become. From the Financial Times…..

Accounting changes could force US banks to take thousands of billions of dollars back on to their balance sheets in the coming months in a move that is likely to curb further their lending and could push them into new capital raisings, analysts have warned.

Analysts at Citigroup said a planned tightening of the rules regarding off-balance sheet vehicles would force banks to reconsider arrangements and could result in up to $5,000bn of assets coming back on to the books.

h/t Market Movers

Wall Street Journal has a story from a reporter who accompanied officials from the FDIC when they went to shut down a bank. The article is short on information, but the subject is so important that I recommend reading it anyway. A bank near you is going to fail soon, and it is worth knowing how the system operates. Sometimes you can learn things even from fluff articles. Take this qoute from the article for example….

It isn’t easy for 75 federal officials and contractors to slip into a small town undetected and liquidate an 89-year-old bank without anyone knowing. But that’s what just happened in this old railroad town, population 3,200. It’s a scene that’s likely to repeat itself across the country as banks struggle through a painful credit cycle, overwhelmed by troubled mortgages and soured construction loans.

First Integrity, which had two branches and $55 million in assets, was the fourth FDIC-insured bank to fail this year.

Now think about this. If it takes 75 people to handle the shut down of one teeny bank, how is the FDIC going to handle the all bank failures coming down the pike?

To be fair, the FDIC is aware of this problem and they are trying to gear up. Still, you have to wonder if they will have enough people.

h/t Calculated Risk

A noble prize for a useless theory is a commonplace occurrence in economics field. This rant laments that fact.

From Survival Blog….

I have been selling tuna for about 20 years and over the last two years, have seen the raw material prices double. Normally, prices go up and then back down, as the catch decreases and then increases. However, since there are really no controls on the amount of tuna that are caught, I have been concerned about over fishing, especially with skipjack as it is the every day item that supermarkets sell as chunk light tuna. Given that the frozen fish price has increased from about $1,000 per metric ton to just under $2,000 per metric ton, I think that we may
have hit the point where demand will outpace a diminishing supply. I expect retail prices to continue increasing.

Read the whole post

This week’s essay is Understanding Crude Oil Prices by James D. Hamilton. Don’t be afraid to stretch your brain and don’t be afraid of the math. You need the mental exercise.

Calculated Risk has a chart comparing the year over year change in miles driven vs. the price of gas. For good measure he has marked out the various recessions. Well worth a look.

The original plan was for me to fly out of state to my boss’ headquarters and spend as much time as I needed learning the ins and outs of how his home-based department operated so that I can work in tandem with them in my remote location. One of the key items on the agenda Click Here to continue reading.

From Megan McArdle…..

If you want to know just how ridiculous our agricultural programs are, consider this: for about half a century, we priced milk based on how far the cow was from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. No, I swear, I am not making this up. Apparently, the USDA scientifically determined that Eau Claire was the perfectest place in the entire world to keep cows, and that therefore the farther you were from that fabled city, the harder you must find it to produce milk.