Tuesday, August 13, 2002

NY Times: Financial institutions may facilitate identity theft. Matt Richtel reports that the accomplices who enable identity theft may be their own financial institutions. What is less obvious is one of the report's central conclusions: that financial institutions are contributing to the theft by failing to take obvious steps to prevent it. "The majority of credit card fraud is the result of financial institutions' leniency in the account-opening process," according to the report. It said thieves used victims' identities to open fraudulent accounts and then used those accounts, for example, to launder money. [Scott Loftesness: Payments News from Glenbrook Partners] 10:38:14 AM

WSJ: Deflation makes a comeback. Jon Hilsenrath and Lucinda Harper write about deflation in the economy. Why buy now if things will be cheaper tomorrow? No mainstream economists are predicting a replay of the 1930s. Still, "one man's bargain is another man's pain," says Paul McCulley, an economist with the giant California bond-fund manager, Pacific Investment Management Co., best-known as Pimco. "The risk [of deflation] is real," he says. That risk would become more real if frothy home prices in the U.S. began falling. Indeed, some economists and real-estate experts worry that housing prices have risen too fast and could fall. [Scott Loftesness] 10:24:38 AM

Remember, you can create your own newsfeeds even when they aren't available.  Paolo's RSS Distiller (a tool for Radio) is available on eVector's store.  This tool essentially gives you the ability to do what Yahoo and the other big news aggegator sites do (given that three years ago these companies spent tens of millions of $$ to do this, the fact that you can run it on your desktop is a hoot).  Once you create a feed, you can share it with others using the tool.  Nice.   I particularly like the ability to generate feeds from the press release areas on corporate sites.  It's perfect for competitive intelligence.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 10:24:14 AM