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More than a dozen current and former college coaches -- including Texas Tech's Billy Gillispie, Arizona's Lute Olson, Baylor's Scott Drew and Gonzaga's Mark Few -- are believed to have lost investments most recently valued at over $7.8 million combined with the late Houston-area businessman and AAU basketball operator J. David Salinas, sources close to the matter tell SI.com. According to documents reviewed by SI.com, the value of Gillispie's investment alone was purported to be $2.3 million; Olson's, $1.17 million; Drew's, $621,000; Few's, $353,000. Salinas, who committed suicide on Sunday amid a months-long investigation into his businesses by the U.S....

AMBER ALERT AN AMBER ALERT HAS BEEN ISSUED: BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR THE "SOCIAL SECURITY LOCK BOX" LAST SEEN IN WASHINGTON, D.C., In 1967. IT WAS LAST SEEN IN THE POSSESSION OF ONE LYNDON JOHNSON, A RESIDENT OF TEXAS. THE LOCK BOX WAS REPORTED MISSING BY BARACK OBAMA, ON 7-13-11. INFORMATION AS OF 7/18/2011 7:18:12 PM. THE SOCIAL SECURITY LOCKBOX IS LARGE ENOUGH TO CONTAIN ROUGHLY $2.5 TRILLION DOLLARS. IT MAY BE TRAVELING IN THE COMPANY OF ONE AL GORE, JR., WHO MAY POSSIBLY BE A RESIDENT OF TENNESSEE. DO NOT TRY TO APPREHEND THE SOCIAL SECURITY LOCK BOX,...

Prev Previous Article Editorials Print Comments 3 Debt crisis punctures Social Security myth By: Examiner Editorial | 07/14/11 9:00 PM "I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on Aug. 3,” President Barack Obama warned “CBS Evening News” viewers about Social Security on Tuesday night. “There may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it.” But how can that be? Haven’t Washington, D.C.’s professional politicians been telling us for decades that Social Security is in no danger of bankruptcy because of those trillions of dollars supposedly just sitting there in the Social Security Trust Fund? Why can’t...

One of my earliest memories of revulsion against war came from seeing a photograph from the First World War when I was a teenager. It was nothing gory. Just a picture of a military officer, in an impressive uniform, talking to a puzzled and forlorn-looking old peasant woman with a cloth wrapped around her head. He said simply: “Don’t you understand, madam? The village is not there any more.” To many such people of that era, the village was the only world they knew. And to say that it had been destroyed in the carnage of war was to say...

Is it ethical for the American homeowner whose mortgage has been securitized to default, even If they are not financially distressed? First, consider it is unlikely that marketable, fee simple, insurable title can be obtained as a result of fulfilling the obligations of the related promissory note. On the contrary the titles to some 60 million homes in America are badly clouded. Secondly, encouraging investment in an asset class that has been artificially inflated, then deliberately destroying the price of the asset, as part of a separate profit making scheme is unethical, and any agreement based on this type of...

Caught in the sluggish recovery from the last recession, Social Security and Medicare face an increasingly dismal fiscal future, the federal government reported Friday in its annual review of the two mammoth entitlement programs. Medicare, which now provides health insurance to some 47 million elderly and disabled Americans, could begin running a deficit in 2024, five years earlier than projected last year. And Social Security, which last year began paying out more in benefits than it collected in taxes, now faces insolvency in 2036, compared to 2037 in last year’s projections. Over the years, the Social Security and Medicare trustees...

For more than a decade, Michael Goldberg tricked hundreds of investors into giving him more than $100 million on a promise of fat profits on diamonds and distressed properties. He turned himself in to authorities in 2009 and pleaded guilty last year to wire fraud charges in connection with the Ponzi scheme. But after his arrest, prosecutors say Goldberg tried to lure investors on a promise of big profits on gold, only this time a prostitute named Rain who was solicited to invest alerted authorities. Goldberg, a 40-year-old former Wethersfield resident, faces more than 12 to 15 years in prison...

The wife of Scott Rothstein will give up much of the couple's belongings in a deal she cut with the attorneys cleaning up her husband's $1.4 billion Ponzi scheme. Kim Rothstein will keep some clothing and household items, but is relinquishing her rights to almost all of the high-end purchases taken out of their homes in Florida, New York City and Rhode Island, according to court records filed Tuesday afternoon. Gone are the Zola Keller designer dresses, the pairs of Jimmy Choo and Christian Louboutin shoes, and much of the couple's 240-bottle wine collection. She kept a pair of Coach...

Gov. Christie said last week that he had mulled defying a possible order from New Jersey's Supreme Court to restore funding to schools. ... If Christie ignores the ruling, scholars said, he could be ruled in contempt of court and personally fined, he could be impeached for violating his oath of office, or he could trigger a constitutional crisis and the statewide closing of schools. ... The current case had its origins nearly 40 years ago. The nonprofit Education Law Center sued the state for more money for poor schools, saying equitable funding was a right under the state constitution...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Bobby Bradley, a 70-year-old retired bus driver, was duped out of $215,000 -- his entire life savings. Now, he's desperate for any work he can get. "I've been looking for jobs but I'm too old, nobody wants to hire you at this age so it makes it rough -- I drove a bus for 35 years, so what am I supposed to do now?" Frances Wills, 67 years old and also a former bus operator, has 75 cents to her name and can't pay rent after losing her $156,000 retirement fund. "I can barely pay for...

Standard & Poor’s decision to downgrade the long-term outlook for U.S. sovereign debt came as a shock. It shouldn’t have. Credit-rating agencies (CRAs) such as S&P are a government-chartered cartel, with constraints on competition and a customer base guaranteed by statute. They are the sleepy backwaters of the financial world — and they are always the last to know. As one investment strategist put it to me this morning: We’ve been watching this train go by for a while now, and this is the caboose. The textbook example of this is the case of Enron. All of the credit-rating agencies...

The federal debt ceiling is the amount of money Congress will let itself borrow. Typically, each time it has been reached, Congress has reacted by merely voting to raise the limit. Now, with the urging of the Obama Administration, it wants to do so again. Failing to do so, according to the White House, would create “Armageddon-like” circumstances. The reference is to biblical prophesies of the end of the world. In other words, if the federal government doesn’t authorize itself to further enslave us to national debt, the sky will fall, the world will end and things will be otherwise...

To those who think that buying food in the corner deli is becoming a luxury, we have five words: you ain't seen nuthin' yet. U.S. consumers face "serious" inflation in the months ahead for clothing, food and other products, the head of Wal-Mart's U.S. operations warned Wednesday talking to USA Today. And if Wal-Mart which is at the very bottom of commoditized consumer retail, and at the very peak of avoiding reexporting of US inflation by way of China is concerned, it may be time to panic, or at least cancel those plane tickets to Zimbabwe, which is soon coming...

HERSHEY, Pa. (AP) -- Chocolate is going to cost a little more green. The Hershey Co. on Wednesday said it raised wholesale prices by 9.7 percent, because its own costs have risen. The candy maker says the price increase takes effect immediately. It cited higher costs for raw materials, packaging, fuel, utilities and transportation as driving the hike.

As the man who allegedly bilked him and hundreds of others out of millions of dollars stood before a federal judge Monday to plead guilty, Nadeem Sharafi turned to another victim who had also come to downtown Chicago for the court hearing. Sharafi shook the man's hand forcefully, a smile spreading over his face. But with two co-defendants still on the run and so much money gone, Amjed Mahmood's guilty plea provided limited relief for Sharafi and other victims in the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse.

Two thousand years ago, Marcus Cicero said “any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error.” By such logic our species is idiotic indeed. For our ability to pass knowledge down through the generations applies only to the physical sciences. In the realms of the social decision making, where humility and realism are so often the dupe of hubris and self-delusion, each generation is condemned to relearn the mistakes of generations past. The abuse of political power, wars and popular uprisings are as prominent in ancient history as in today’s newspapers. In the 5th century BC...

Saul Katz, Fred Wilpon's BIL, co-founder of Sterling Equities, and Mets co-owner, will repeatedly tell you he is a CPA........the brains behind Sterling's investment portfolio and business operations.....in charge of all the family finances invested with Madoff. And yet the investment pro, claims he had no knowledge that Madoff was running a Ponzi. Katz took out over $120M just in the last six years. Katz's three sons, who work for Sterling Equities, snared more than $237M. Katz married Wilpon's sister, Iris, more than 50 years ago and in 1972 went into business with Fred.

The anti-government “throw-the-bums-out” crowds have had their chance to speak out on how to curtail the deficit and what to do with those hated entitlements that are the antithesis of the America they pine for. A recent WSJ/NBC News poll provided a glimpse of just how dependent on big government entitlements Americans have become–even among the Tea Party. Not that this should be a surprise to anyone watching the slow shift of the American mindset from citizen, to consumer, to ward of the State over the past century. According to the Wall Street Journal who co-sponsored the poll, “Americans across...

Kleiner Perkins, the well known Silicon Valley venture capital firm, just released a stunning analysis prepared by their new partner Mary Meeker, a very well-known financial analyst who worked for years at Morgan Stanley and was prescient about the impact of the Internet. Meeker spent about a year gathering publicly available data and refining an analysis of the dire debt and spending fiscal crisis facing the U.S. The result appears to be the definitive compendium of data documenting the incredibly precarious and dangerous situation facing the U.S. from generations of recklessness as welfare state policies and incentives triumphed. In over...

Want a recipe for ruckus? Merely suggest that Social Security might be a “Ponzi scheme”. You might even end up on Drudge Report. Yet the facts bear out the thesis, as we shall see… For starters, let’s be clear on what a Ponzi scheme is. Say you’re in a scheming kind of mood and looking to get rich off it. Say you’re Bernie Madoff! You start by convincing a small group of people, say five of them, to each give you some money, say $1,000, with the promise that each month thereafter, you’re going to give them $50 back. That...