"Cap"ping off the Gemini

Capgemini has more staff in India than at HQ

BANGALORE: The employee strength of many global technology companies in India is the largest outside their home country. Capgemini, the French IT consulting, services and business process outsourcing major, however, has reversed the equation by hiring more employees in India than in its home country.

India became No. 1 for Capgemini in terms of the size of its workforce this year when it hired around 10,000 people to take its total employee strength in the country to 30,000. Till January this year, Capgemini had 20,000 employees in France , and that number remains almost unchanged today.

Capgemini has a little over 1,00,000 employees globally, which means that India constitutes almost a third of its total strength.

Na-Na Nano

The Fabled Nano...

How Tata Nano hit a big bump in India

MUMBAI: The Tata Nano was a small car that was expected to deliver big numbers — the new plant at Sanand in Gujarat was built to produce 2.5 lakh units a year, eventually ramping up to 5 lakh units. But 15 months after a high-profile launch, it has encountered trouble at every turn — three instances of the car going up in flames and a few cases of smoke emanating from it (the last was in September), confusion about its positioning, a rather unexpected bunch of affluent initial buyers, poor distribution reach, and financing bottlenecks. Nano’s sales have dipped from 9,000 units in July to 3,000 in October to just a little over 500 in November.

An ETreporter who visited Sanand on Tuesday met workers at the industrial zone who said production of the Nano has come to a near standstill; the number of workers there has decreased by 80% in the last month. The company declined to answer a specific emailed query on the firm stopping Nano production, even though it opened up to detailed interviews on all other aspects of the car.

The Street Loots the Treasury, and Runs over the Poor

WHile Wall Street and other major firms looted the country's Treasury and enriched themselves with fat bonuses, the BOWLES AND SIMPSON "Catfood"Commission recommends reducing social and medical benefits. These reductions are designed to hurt the poor, disproportionately.

Money For Nothing: Wall Street Borrowed From Fed At 0.0078 Percent: "For the lucky few on Wall Street, the Federal Reserve sure was sweet.

Nine firms -- five of them foreign -- were able to borrow between $5.2 billion and $6.2 billion in U.S. government securities, which effectively act like cash on Wall Street, for four-week intervals while paying one-time fees that amounted to the minuscule rate of 0.0078 percent.

That is not a typo.

On 33 separate transactions, the lucky nine were able to borrow billions as part of a crisis-era Fed program that lent the securities, known as Treasuries, for 28-day chunks to the now-18 firms known as primary dealers that are empowered to trade with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The program, called the Term Securities Lending Facility, ensured that the firms had cash on hand to lend, invest and trade"

Fed aid in financial crisis went beyond U.S. banks to industry, foreign firms: "The Fed's efforts to prop up the financial sector extended to stalwarts of American industry including General Electric and Caterpillar and household-name companies such as Verizon, Harley-Davidson and Toyota. The central bank also helped U.S. subsidiaries of banks based in East Asia, Europe and Canada while rescuing money-market mutual funds held by millions of Americans.

The biggest users of the Fed lending programs were some of the world's largest banks, including Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Swiss-based UBS and Britain's Barclays, according to more than 21,000 loan records released Wednesday under new financial regulatory legislation.

The data reveal banks turning to the Fed for help almost daily in the fall of 2008 as the central bank lowered lending standards and extended relief to all kinds of institutions it had never assisted before."

Wall Street Dares to Indulge Itself Again - NYTimes.com: "This despite the fact that bonuses on Wall Street are not likely to be up much from last year, though they will still be strong. Over all, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase have set aside $89.54 billion this year to pay employees, 2.8 percent less than a year ago, according to data from Nomura.

....n the years leading up to the credit crisis some executives became famous for their expenditures, like L. Dennis Kozlowski, the former chief executive of Tyco International, whose $6,000 shower curtain became a symbol of unnecessary extravagance.

Some of that excess remains. A Morgan Stanley trader recently tried to hire a dwarf for a bachelor party in Miami, asking the dwarf to meet him at the airport in a “Men in Black” style suit, according to e-mail exchanges. ..."

Transparency...when the Government likes it

After the cataclysmic failure of Enron, Worldcom and others, the Congress and Administration rushed to enact disclosure laws. Part of the "reform" involved the disclosure of 'Off-Balance Sheet' activities. Interestingly, shareholders were not screaming for these reforms at the time.

Now, when WikiLeaks wants to bring greater transparency to the government, it is attacked ferociously. Its founder is being hounded and hunted, both by governments and the media. The private corporations, which benefit from government largesse, are also going after WikiLeaks. A very tragic state of affairs, one that indicates how far down the moral slope the world has slid.

Firedoglake: "Julian Assange should be assassinated, or designated an enemy combatant, according to leading political figures around the world. And this rhetorical fervor has been matched by action. Interpol popped up all of a sudden and issued a global arrest warrant for Assange on a Swedish rape charge that was put together after the last leak, taken down, and then revived for this leak. And now, Amazon has decided to stop hosting Wikileaks.

Amazon has terminated the account of Wikileaks and apparently the site has been down most of the day. Joe Lieberman has issued a statement on Amazon’s decision. Amazon has not commented directly on what happened to Wikileaks account. But they appear to have told Lieberman — or that’s the clear import of Lieberman’s statement — that they unilaterally terminated the account.

Most consumers aren’t aware of this. But in addition to the Amazon retailer you know, Amazon has also become a big, big player in the ‘cloud’ web hosting market. I assume they’re the largest. But I do not know that last point for certain. Regardless, they’re a huge player in the market."

WikiLeaks website kicked off Amazon's servers - Yahoo! Finance: "Amazon.com Inc. forced WikiLeaks to stop using the U.S. company's computers to distribute embarrassing State Department communications and other documents, WikiLeaks said Wednesday.

The ouster came after congressional staff questioned Amazon about its relationship with WikiLeaks, said Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut.

WikiLeaks confirmed it hours after The Associated Press reported that Amazon's servers had stopped hosting WikiLeaks' site. The site was unavailable for several hours before it moved back to its previous Swedish host, Bahnhof AB."