Posted Feb 01, 2011 10:19am EST by Stacy Curtin in Investing, Recession

The U.S. consumer may be on the mend as we head further into 2011, but the same story of resurgence does not apply to many of the U.S. big-box retailers.

From Wal-Mart to Sears to Target to Best Buy, if you look at what is happening in the retail space, “it looks pretty scary,” says retail expert Howard Davidowitz.

Wal-Mart — the world’s largest retailer – has seen six consecutive quarters of negative same-store sales and is now looking to put the majority of its investment capital towards emerging markets.

In the case of Target and Best Buy, they both recently missed major key earnings expectations. Making matters worse, Best Buy “tanked” even without the competition from the now defunct Circuit City, Davidowitz points out.

Tale of Two Stores

It’s ironic that the ENTIRE WORLD views it this way…Yet there is a few as we know it, that just turn their heads completely to this massive fraud! Unreal…

Posted Jul 01, 2010 08:00am EDT by Aaron Task

Day one of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s two-day hearing on AIG derivatives contracts featured testimony from Joseph Cassano, the former head of AIG’s financial products unit. Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn was also on the Hill.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are still trying to salvage the regulatory reform bill, with critical support from Senator Scott Brown (R-Mass.) reportedly still uncertain.

According to Howard Davidowitz of Davidowitz & Associates, what connects the hearings and the Reg reform debate is the lack of focus on the real underlying cause of the financial crisis: Fraud.

“It was a massive fraud… a gigantic Ponzi Scheme, a lie and a fraud,” Davidowitz says of Wall Street circa 2007. “The whole thing was a fraud and it gets back to the accountants valuing the assets incorrectly.”

Because accountants and auditors allowed Wall Street firms to carry assets at “completely fraudulent” valuations, he says the industry looked hugely profitable and was able to use borrowed funds to make leveraged bets on all sorts of esoteric instruments. “Their bonuses were based on profits they never made and the leverage they never could have gotten if the numbers were right – no one would’ve given them the money in their right mind,” Davidowitz says.

To date, the accounting and audit firms have escaped any serious repercussions from the credit crisis, a stark difference to the corporate “death sentence” that befell Arthur Anderson for its alleged role in the Enron scandal.

To Davidowitz, that’s perhaps the greatest outrage of all: “Where were the accountants?,” he asks. “They did nothing, checked nothing, agreed to everything” and collected millions in fees while “shaking hands with the CEO.”

Source: Yahoo Finance