$$$ Dominique Strauss-Kahn told the New York hotel maid, “Don’t you know who I am! Don’t you know who I am?” while pinning her down during the alleged sexual assault, law enforcement sources close to the investigation told FoxNews.com…“Please stop. I need my job, I can’t lose my job, don’t do this. I will lose my job. Please, please stop! Please stop!” she told Strauss-Kahn, according to law enforcement sources. Strauss-Kahn allegedly responded: “No, baby. Don’t worry, you’re not going to lose your job. Please, baby, don’t worry,” Strauss-Kahn responded, according to investigators. (Fox)

$$$ Belgium’s Debt Outlook Revised to Negative by Fitch on Political Stalemate (Bloomberg)

$$$ ‘Fear Gauge‘ Tops 20 for First Time in Two Months (WSJ)

$$$ How An Inquiry Of Goldman Might Play Out (Dealbook)

$$$ LinkedIn site has security vulnerabilities-expert (Reuters via Easy Street/Heidi Moore)

$$$ David Stockman: “The real problem is the de facto policy of both parties is default. When the Republicans say no tax increases, they’re saying we want the U.S. government to default. Because there isn’t enough political will in this country to solve the problem even halfway on spending cuts. When the Democrats say you can’t touch Social Security, when you have Obama sponsoring a war budget for defense that is even bigger than Bush, then I say the policy of the White House is default as well.” (YouTube)

$$$ AIG Underwriters Signal Deal May Price at Close to $30 (CNBC)

$$$ Walker: US Worse Off Financially Than Euro Nations (CNBC)

$$$ Greece to start selling domestic assets to ease debts (BBC)

$$$ More banks targeted in US probe (FT)

$$$ Carlyle Returns Record $6.4 Billion in First Quarter on Strong Dealmaking (Bloomberg)

$$$ Former Fed Monetary Chief Madigan Hired by Barclays Capital (Bloomberg)

$$$ Steven Cohen wants a five-year-old stock manipulation lawsuit filed by Canadian insurer Fairfax Financial Holdings to go away. (Reuters/Unstructured Finance)

$$$ Hintz Says Smith Barney Is ‘Checkmated’ by Krawcheck, McCann (Bloomberg)

$$$ China’s Buffett plays the long game (FT)

$$$ Senate Banking chair Tim Johnson discusses hedge funds [AR]

$$$ IBM passes Microsoft’s market cap after 15 years (Reuters)

$$$ Lady Gaga Breaks Amazon (MarketBeat)

$$$ Barack Obama’s car, nicknamed ‘the beast‘, gets stuck (BBC)

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Ex-Banker Gives Data on Taxes to WikiLeaks (NYT)
Rudolf M. Elmer, who ran the Caribbean operations of the Swiss bank Julius Baer for eight years until he was dismissed in 2002, refused to identify any of the individuals or companies, but he told reporters at a news conference that about 40 politicians and “pillars of society” were among them.

Goldman Limits Facebook Offering (WSJ)
The bank slammed the door on U.S. clients hoping to invest in a private offering of shares in Facebook Inc., because it said the intense media spotlight left the deal in danger of violating U.S. securities laws…The change could damage Goldman’s ties to some of its most lucrative clients, left empty-handed just as they were deciding whether to invest in Facebook, clients say. Facebook executives were frustrated by the headache of restructuring the deal at the last minute, according to people familiar with the situation.

Goldman Fails to See Hype That Derailed Facebook Sale (Bloomberg)
“You would have thought that this was an issue from the start, they should have realized this up front,” said Peter Hahn, a lecturer in corporate finance at Cass Business School in London. “If I invited my 500 best friends to a party, would it be a secret? And the answer is no.”

Toward A 21st Century Regulatory System (WSJ)
Barack Obama: “…creating a 21st-century regulatory system is about more than which rules to add and which rules to subtract. As the executive order I am signing makes clear, we are seeking more affordable, less intrusive means to achieve the same ends—giving careful consideration to benefits and costs. This means writing rules with more input from experts, businesses and ordinary citizens. It means using disclosure as a tool to inform consumers of their choices, rather than restricting those choices. And it means making sure the government does more of its work online, just like companies are doing.”

Schumer Will Push Currency Measure Aimed at China (Bloomberg)
The legislation, which will be officially introduced when the Senate returns from a break next week, would allow domestic manufacturers to seek duties on imports from any country that is found to have a currency that is “fundamentally misaligned.”

Urn Stolen By Ash-Hole (NYP)
A Connecticut man has been charged with stealing a funeral urn containing the ashes of his girlfriend’s grandmother. Mark Kzakrzeski, 37, of Southbury, said he threw the ashes and urn — taken during a fight Friday at the girlfriend’s Oxford home — in the woods, say Connecticut State Police.

Citigroup Gain Masks Flawed Mortgages Sold to Freddie Mac (Bloomberg)
Three years after bad home loans helped trigger the recession and six weeks after the government cashed in the last of its $45 billion Citigroup investment, the New York-based bank is still selling mortgages that violate quality standards, according to an internal Freddie Mac review obtained by Bloomberg.

Steve Jobs’s health to overshadow quarterly Apple sales (Reuters)
Apple said on Monday Jobs was taking a medical leave of absence without specifying a return date or detailing his condition.

Santander Chief Is Said to Be Banned From Banking (Dealbook)
Alfredo Sáenz, chief executive of Santander, has been fined, sentenced to a suspended eight-month prison term and banned from banking by the Spanish supreme court, the daily newspaper El Mundo reported on Monday…Without citing sources, El Mundo said Mr. Sáenz, the most important executive at Santander after its chairman, Emilio Botín, had been sentenced for fraud and making false claims while he was president of Banesto in the 1990s.

Fed Officials Signal Growth Pickup Won’t Alter Bond Purchases (Bloomberg)
Bernanke said last week that “we see the economy strengthening,” and added, “you’re not going to reduce unemployment at the pace that we’d like it to.” Fed Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard said in an interview that while the U.S. outlook has improved, he wants to see more evidence before altering the Fed’s plan to buy $600 billion in Treasuries through June.

The New Starbucks Trenta Cup Is Bigger Than Your Stomach (Gizmodo)
Starbucks will introduce a 916ml Trenta cup. That’s more than the average capacity of the human stomach.

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

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Just sit tight for a bit.

Austan Goolsbee, the President’s top economist, will try patching up relations in an Oct. 13 meeting in New York with business leaders. A rapprochement, however, will not occur until after the midterm elections, when the Administration will know the strength of the Republican opposition in Congress. That timing also will help Obama avoid looking like he’s giving Wall Street a pass just when he’s trying to turn the Democratic base out to vote. At an Oct. 4 meeting of Obama’s economic advisory board, Laura D. Tyson, a former Clinton Administration economist, suggested not renewing the Bush tax cuts for top earners and using the savings to pay for a temporary cut in Social Security taxes. At the same meeting, Obama said he’d be “very interested” in lowering the top corporate tax rate, now 35 percent, so U.S. companies aren’t at a disadvantage against overseas rivals.

Obama Wants A Detente With Business [BW]

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Apparently Cayne, a conservative, never appreciated one-time Bear Stearns co-president Warren Spector, who JC felt didn’t much care about his job, and who must’ve really not given a shit for the guy who took 3 month sabbaticals to attend bridge camp and spent most afternoons stoned to think was slacking on the job. Also, Cayne thought the guy to be a fruit, a suspicion he believed was confirmed by the spotting of Spector in shorts while he was in Florida volunteering for Obama.

Warren Spector was known inside Bear for his lack of emotion. Some, like Cayne, considered him moody and arrogant, a by-product of a privileged life (an upper-middle-class upbringing, a fancy MBA, and so on). Cayne was so disdainful of Spector’s attitude he used to refer to Spector as “Lord  Fauntleroy.” Others who took a more nuanced view of Spector pegged his attitude as an indifference to his job; even while he was gambling billions of dollars of company money in esoteric bond markets, Spector acted as if he had better things to do, like read the Sunday Times book review.

But Spector was now legitimately excited to be working for the man he believed was going to be president [Spector went to canvas for Obama in Florida after leaving BSC], even if his post-Bear lifestyle was being mocked by Cayne, now Bear’s disgraced ex-CEO (in addition to allowing the firm’s risk taking to expand to dangerous levels under his watch as CEO, Cayne had been playing bridge while the firm was imploding in March 2008, when he still held the title of company chairman). Cayne, who had always incessantly questioned Spector’s manliness, was now having a field day as he received a report from a former Bear Stearns executive who said he had spotted Spector at a local country club in “tight, tight shorts with a poodle under his arm.”

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Article courtesy of Los Angeles | Guest of a Guest – Los Angeles People, Places, Parties & Nightlife

The proposal would nearly double the available amount of bandwidth for wireless broadband, from today’s 547 megahertz to about 1,000 megahertz. (Don’t confuse these megahertz of bandwidth, which counts the amount of the radio dial allocated to Internet access, with the megabits used to measure throughput speed of a connection. “Bandwidth” is a popular misnomer for connection speed rather than actual wireless radio band width.)

Obama’s Presidential memorandum issued today, “Unleashing the Wireless Broadband Revolution,” could just as well be called, “Taking Back Lots of Wireless Spectrum Assignments.” Obama’s proposal is based on the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, a wonky but pragmatic proposal to reassign 300 megahertz’ worth of bandwidth between now and 2015.

The Obama administration wants to make a full 500 megahertz of bandwidth available for auction to companies that would use it for wireless broadband data connections for consumers and possibly first-responder networks. About 120 megahertz would come from broadcast TV. Administration officials told The New York Times that around 45 percent, or 225 megahertz, would come from various government spectrum blocks that are used lightly or not at all.

The FCC’s plan comes with a footnote: “Timing and quantity depends on Congressional action to grant incentive auction authority as well as voluntary participation of broadcasters in an auction.” Broadcasters, represented by the National Association of Broadcasters, may not be too voluntary about participating. They’ve complained that the government’s most recent spectrum auctions took parts of the airwaves that had been reclaimed by disabling traditional analog TV broadcasts, and sold these radio frequencies to buyers who are now “warehousing” it, i.e. letting it lie idle rather than developing new consumer services. An NAB spokesman told The New York Times that broadcasters hope “further reclamation of broadcast television spectrum will be completely voluntary.”

Tags: broadband

Companies: FCC

People: Barack Obama

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » MediaBeat