This comes from Bloomberg. Unfortunately it is pretty scary stuff:
The World Health Organization said the first pandemic since 1968 is imminent after an outbreak of swine flu spread to eight nations and 11 U.S. states.
The WHO’s Director-General Margaret Chan raised the agency’s six-phase pandemic alert to 5 from 4, the second jump in three [...]

This comes from Bloomberg:
President Barack Obama plans to announce tomorrow that Chrysler LLC will be placed into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, leading to an alliance with Italian automaker Fiat SpA, people involved in the matter said.
Administration officials are still resolving outstanding issues, and the plan is not finished yet, said one of the people, who declined [...]

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Watch the video below and then read the text and the linked full article. No cheating!

As anyone who has ever been in a verbal disagreement can attest, people tend to give elaborate justifications for their decisions, which we have every reason to believe are nothing more than rationalisations after the event. To prove such [...]

The U.S. GDP report for the first quarter of 2009 was pretty awful.  GDP came in much worse than expected at an annualized  -6.1% below Q4.  Here are a few data points (all referencing real GDP data):

The numbers were much worse than expectations of  -4.6 to -4.7%
The -6.1% comes on the heels of a -6.3%, [...]

The following is a worthy analysis from Marc Chandler of Brown Brothers Harriman regarding the recent GDP numbers released in the U.S. and their significance for currencies (emphasis mine):
The initial reading of the US Q1 GDP was worse than expected, though the dramatic fall in inventories and the tax cuts that went into effect April [...]

This individual is live-blogging BofA’s annual shareholder meeting via Twitter.  Hat tip Deal Breaker.
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Real U.S. GDP declined at an annualized 6.1% in the first quarter (Jan-Mar) of 2009. This almost exactly matches the 6.3% decline in Q4 and is a MUCH larger decline than expected. While I have not crunched all the numbers yet, I am providing snippets of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) below.
I [...]

Holdouts Jeopardize Debt Plan for Chrysler – DealBook Blog – NYTimes.com
You sorta knew this was coming: “some smaller banks and hedge funds are still balking at the terms, setting the stage for a tense final two days in which the fate of Detroit’s third-largest automaker will be decided.”

Decline and Fall of Western Civilization: headwaters of [...]

From the FT:
The US reported the first death outside Mexico from the swine flu virus on Wednesday as governments around the world stepped up preparations for a possible pandemic.
As Germany became the eighth country to report cases of the infection, a US government official confirmed to Reuters that a 23-month-old child had died in Texas [...]