The BBC is reporting that UBS had to write down 3.4 billion dollars. Citigroup has lost the ominous distinction of biggest loser of the day. UBS announced the loss a bit more then an hour ago. UBS shares jumped a little over $1.69 in afterhours trading yesterday. It seems those gains will be maintained as institutional selling has not begun. Concurrent to the loss, UBS announced plans to lay off nearly 1,500 employees. Nothing reassures the market like immediate belt-tightening in response to bad quarterly reports.| MORE ›

As a pro-American and free-market resident of Canada I have always been extraordinary pleased with the benefits offered by the NAFTA treaty, sort of what we would call the Reagan-Mulroney legacy. Yet free trade in Canada has always been a decisive issue, and the left often uses it as key evidence that Canada’s sovereignty has steadily eroded by the slash-and-burn capitalism that Americans, thanks to NAFTA, brought in across the 49^th parallel. And at times even conservatives have made these arguments if they felt it gave them some sort of electoral edge.| MORE ›

My book club pick for October is Embers by Sándor Márai, published by Knopf. Click here to see how you can earn a free copy of the book, as well as here for a review.

Happy Reading!

[Cross-posted at my blog. For all of my posts on Iran, click here.] For the fifth time in the last 32 months, Seymour Hersh has written about U.S. plans to attack Iran. In “Shifting Targets,” he states that the current plan differs markedly from earlier ones:

The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites.| MORE ›

Many are reporting that CitiGroup is

taking $1.3 billion in pretax losses on the value of subprime mortgage-backed securities it had warehoused to repackage into collateralized debt obligations, and leveraged loans it had planned to repackage into collateralized loan obligation securitizations.

This is just another casualty in the continuing subprime mortgage crisis.| MORE ›

In the U.K., the Guardian reports that John Bolton, the former U.S ambassador to the United Nations, told Tory delegates that “he saw no alternative to a pre-emptive strike on suspected nuclear facilities in the country”.

More:

Mr Bolton, who was addressing a fringe meeting organised by Lord (Michael) Ancram, said that the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was “pushing out” and “is not receiving adequate push-back” from the west. (more…)