NightBlogger

Delinquencies Mount for American Express
The New York company’s stock price is down 55% so far this year, including a 34% slide in October. The percentage of loans deemed uncollectible in a pool on which American Express reports monthly performance data reached 6.7% in September, up from 3.6% a year earlier. Earnings due after the closing bell Monday are expected to show a decline of more than 30% from last year’s third quarter, according to Thomson Reuters. Known for pitching cards to affluent customers who were required to pay off their purchases every month, AmEx made a big push in the past couple of years to let many of its customers keep a balance and pay the interest that accumulates. While the company, run since 2001 by Chief Executive Kenneth Chenault, has insisted it didn’t lower credit standards, those loans are coming back to haunt AmEx now, analysts say. More

Ilargi
The Automatic Earth
…apart from Gustav making landfall in Louisiana, is the unabated decline of the British empire. Britain falls so hard and so fast that it’s getting scary to think of where it is headed. I have warned for quite a while that it would happen, but I have to admit that even I am surprised to see the speed at which events unfold. As the extent of the downfall and the reality of new-found desolate poverty seep through to the consciousness of the population, English society will reveal itself as an immensely volatile powder keg, with a very long array of very short fuses.

The de-facto resignation of Chancellor Alistair Darling -who publicly stated the UK economy is in far worse shape then the government lets on, knowing he will now have to go for saying so- reveals how desperate the situation is. Whether Darling comes or goes, the government can no longer keep up the pretense. The veneer of control has become so hard to maintain that Gordon Brown resorts to a level of nonsense that seems impossible to top:

“In the next 20 years, the world economy will double in its size and wealth and we have a great opportunity to win new business, new jobs and prosperity for Britain.”

On second thought, perhaps I underestimate the prime minister. It is entirely possible that that insane-looking statement serves the same purpose as Mr. Darling’s fatal interview this weekend. We may be looking at Mr. Brown’s own well-calculated de-facto resignation. More

July 4 (Bloomberg) — European stocks dropped, capping their fifth weekly decline, on concern banks will post more writedowns and near-record oil will curb airlines’ profits. Canada’s benchmark index and most shares in Brazil and Asia also fell. The fifth straight weekly drop is the longest losing streak since a seven- week slump ending Jan. 25. “Markets around the world have had a rough ride and news flow remains challenging,” said Andreas Nigg, head of international equities Vontobel Asset Management in Zurich, which oversees $39 billion. “The banks are not in good shape, and it will get harder to raise capital. Oil is still going up. It’s like a tax that keeps getting worse.” More

Source: Financial Times
US stocks hit their lowest level in three months on Tuesday as investors weighed a handful of mixed earnings reports, a rally in financials and new data showing the continuation of a slump in house prices and consumer confidence. Markets took another downward leg after the release of data showing a further record decline in house prices and tumbling consumer confidence.

Hollye Blades
Radical Islam is threatening to fill a “moral vacuum” in Britain as a result of a decline of Christian values, a senior Church of England bishop has said.

He quoted an academic who blamed the 1960s cultural revolution for bringing Christianity’s role in society to an abrupt end. It was said that, instead of resisting the social and sexual revolution, church leaders had capitulated. The Bishop said: “It is a situation which has created the moral and spiritual vacuum in which we find ourselves. Whilst the Christian consensus was dissolved, nothing else, except perhaps endless self-indulgence, was put in its place.” More

Photo M. Keefe

“This year is make-it-or-break-it time for Vista,” says analyst Benjamin Gray of market tracker Forrester Research. “Vista is getting hammered right and left in the press, and companies are concerned. I’m getting daily client inquiries about skipping Vista altogether and waiting for the next version of Windows. Microsoft is having a tough time convincing their corporate clients that Vista isn’t a risky bet.” Last week, Microsoft reported a 24% decline in Windows sales in the third quarter.
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Photo courtesy of Drama Queen

The average paid weekday circulation of eighteen out of twenty of the nation’s top newspapers saw a decline for the six-month period ending in March, as reported today by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The newspaper industry has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years according to figures from the Newspaper Association of America. Nielsen Online’s Top 30 News Sites listed The Drudge report as number 1, followed by Daily Kos, Fox News Digital Network, CNN Digital Network and AOL News, ranking in the top 5.

While a handful of news sources dominate the web, still bottlenecking information as did print and broadcast media, the playing field’s been leveled considerably. Options for alternative news are there. All we have to do is search for them. Citizen journalism and Blogs have skyrocketed in recent years; bloggers are reshaping the information landscape into a powerful horizontal structure, empowering its readers with unbiased views on world events, politics, books, music, consumer advice and non-vested interest opinions. Powerful corporations take this exploding trend very seriously by monitoring the daily activity in the blogosphere with companies like BlogPulse who analyze, report, and track key issues, people, news stories, news sources, blog traffic flows from discussions, and conversations.

As Mark Toner points out:

Consider the well-documented attacks on the Church of Scientology by “Anonymous,” a group of hackers and activists who’ve delighted in posting confidential documents and unflattering stories about the Church in recent months. Or Wikileaks, which invites a global audience of whistleblowers to post documents to an “uncensorable” and “untraceable” site for “maximum public impact.” Some 1.2 million documents, including information about alleged human rights violations and military interrogation procedures, are posted on the site, which in March won a U.S. court victory that attracted amicus briefs from the Newspaper Association of America, the Associated Press, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Gannett and the Society of Professional Journalists, among other groups.

Pic courtesy of Pedro

In nearly 1,000 counties that together are home to about 12 percent of the nation’s women, life expectancy is now shorter than it was in the early 1980s, according to a study published today. The downward trend is evident in places in the Deep South, Appalachia, the lower Midwest and in one county in Maine. It is not limited to one race or ethnicity but it is more common in rural and low-income areas. The most dramatic change occurred in two areas in southwestern Virginia (Radford City and Pulaski County), where women’s life expectancy has decreased by more than five years since 1983.
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