Today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average experienced its largest gain in a single day since 1933. Read the rest

Recession fears are spreading, along with COVID-19. The coronavirus outbreak and unknowns about preparedness caused massive financial losses this week.

The Dow closed down 350+ points.

The S&P 500 dropped for the seventh day in a row, and posted its biggest drop in a single week since the 2008 financial crisis.

More from Reuters:

The S&P 500 fell for the seventh straight day on Friday and the benchmark index suffered its biggest weekly drop since the 2008 global financial crisis on growing fears the fast-spreading coronavirus could lead to a recession, although stocks cut losses at the end of the day’s session.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI fell 356.88 points, or 1.39%, to 25,409.76, the S&P 500 .SPX lost 24.7 points, or 0.83%, to 2,954.06 and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC added 0.89 points, or 0.01%, to 8,567.37.

Read more:S&P 500 drops for seventh day, posts biggest weekly fall since 2008 crisis Read the rest

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummetted more than 1,000 points as news of a spreading coronavirus outbreak suggests wider coming damage to the global economy. Read the rest

The Financial Times, which is like The Wall Street Journal but with a three-digit IQ, has an amusing 404 Not Found page.

Why wasn't this page found?

We asked some leading economists.

Stagflation The cost of pages rose drastically, while the page production rate slowed down.

General economics There was no market for it. Liquidity traps We injected some extra money into the technology team but there was little or no interest so they simply kept it, thus failing to stimulate the page economy. Pareto inefficiency There exists another page that will make everyone better off without making anyone worse off.

China’s central bank today announced plans to inject 1.2 trillion yuan worth of liquidity ($174 billion in U.S. dollars) into the financial markets via reverse repo operations on Monday, as stock markets prepare to reopen amid an escalating Wuhan coronavirus outbreak. Read the rest

Some activists must have been heard, California's Attorney General has delayed the transaction wherein a private equity firm is buying the .ORG tld, seeking more information.

Mashable:

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra sent a letter to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) demanding more information about the private equity takeover of the .org domain registry. The attorney general is seeking answers to 35 questions concerning the sale as well as documents sent between ICANN, private equity firm Ethos Capital, and Public Interest Registry (PIR), which manages the .org domain.

Ethos Capital disclosed last year that it was acquiring PIR from its non-profit parent organization, the Internet Society, for $1.135 billion.

ICANN, the non-profit organization that oversees domain names, disclosed the letter on its website along with its own correspondence with PIR, informing it of the development. Previously, ICANN had until Feb. 17 to approve or deny the sale. According to ICANN, as a result of the California AG’s letter, it’s seeking to delay this deadline until April 20.

Last week, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency handed down stiff penalties for John Stumpf (previously) who was CEO of Wells Fargo during its scandal-haunted decade, during which time it stole from rich people, poor people, veterans, active-service military personnel, homeowners, small businesses, etc, as well as 2,000,000 ordinary customers who had fraudulent accounts opened in their names in order to bleed them of transaction fees, sometimes at the expense of their good credit and even their financial solvency. Under the deal, Stumpf will have to pay $17.5m in fines and cannot ever work in finance again (don't worry, he's still a multi-multi-multi millionaire). Read the rest

Jeff Carpoff (49) and Paulette Carpoff (46), owners of DC Solar in California, pleaded guilty to running a Ponzi that bilked investors of $1 billion, including $340 from Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc, reports AP. The could spend 15 - 30 years in prison.

As part of their plea deal, prosecutors said the husband and wife team from Martinez agreed to forfeit over $120 million in assets, including a fleet of collector cars and vacation homes in the Caribbean, Lake Tahoe and Las Vegas purchased entirely with cash... The Carpoffs used the money from the scheme to buy and invest in more than 150 luxury cars, 32 properties, subscription to a private jet service, a semipro baseball team and a suite at the new Las Vegas Raiders stadium.

Image: DC Solar Facebook page/video screengrab

[via Super Punch] Read the rest

Cum-ex (previously) is a technical, boring financial engineering technique that lets fraudsters file multiple tax-refund claims for the same stock transactions (they called it "dividend arbitrage"); from 2006-2011, the EU's largest, most respectable banks, law firms, and investors used the scam to steal $60,000,000,000. Read the rest

Here’s a good explainer from Reuters on the airline industry’s response to the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak so far. If the virus spreads becomes a pandemic, this could impact world financial markets as did SARS in 2003. Read the rest

Impeached phony president and utter turd of a man Donald Trump will attend a breakfast meeting on Wednesday at Davos with Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook, Reuters reports. Read the rest

The U.S. Labor Department Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) today announced changes to BLS economic data “lockup” procedures that involve removing a number of legacy computers from its Washington newsroom, effective March 1. There has been controversy around whether the change initiated today by the federal government under Donald Trump may have been aimed at Michael Bloomberg, which BLS denies. It's complicated. Read the rest

Capitalism has a foundational dependence on auditors -- outside entities who evaluate companies' claims about their financial state so that investors, suppliers and customers can understand whether to trust the companies with their money and business -- but those auditors are paid by the companies they're supposed to be keeping honest, and to make matters worse, 40 years of lax antitrust enforcement has allowed the auditing industry to contract to a four gigantic firms that openly practice fraud and abet corruption, with no real consequences. Read the rest

The whistleblowers who brought us The Paradise Papers and The Panama Papers risked their freedom and even their lives (Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated for reporting on the stories). Years later, financial secrecy havens are still on the rise, and it's easy to think that all that blood and treasure thrown at ending money laundering and corruption was wasted. Read the rest

Neoclassical economics was built on the straw-man of "homo economicus," an inherently selfish utility-maximizing actor, and since the mid-1970s, we've been building systems and institutions that take this kind of sociopathic behavior for granted. Read the rest

In 2006, Aaron Patzer founded Mint. Patzer had grown up in the city of Evansville, Indiana—a place he described as "small, without much economic opportunity"—but had created a successful business building websites. He kept up the business through college and grad school and invested his profits in stocks and other assets, leading to a minor obsession with personal finance that saw him devoting hours every Saturday morning to manually tracking every penny he'd spent that week, transcribing his receipts into Microsoft Money and Quicken. Read the rest

The Distributed Denial of Secrets Twitter account has published links to terabytes of data identified as raw data from the Cayman National Bank and Trust; Phineas Fisher (previously), the public-interest hacker(s) behind the Hacking Team breach, is credited with the leak. Read the rest