Goldman's Mea Culpa

Has the holiday spirit hit Goldman Sachs? On Tuesday, the Wall Street titan delivered a one-two punch, announcing its largest ever charitable contribution, a $500 million small-business assistance program on which billionaire investor Warren Buffett will play an advisory role. And hours earlier, Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein apologized for Goldman's (GS) role in the credit crisis. A skeptical press couldn't help point out that the $500 million is but a mere fraction of what it's paying its top executives. As the Wall Street Journal writes, "Goldman has earmarked $16.71 billion for compensation so far this year and repaid in June the $10 billion capital infusion it got from the U.S. government in 2008."

The New York Times is even more blunt in its coverage. "A little more than a week after Goldman’s chairman and chief executive drew fire for saying the Wall Street giant was 'doing God’s work,' the bank said Tuesday that it would spend ... about 3 percent of the $16.7 billion it has so far set aside to pay its employees this year ... to help thousands of small businesses recover from the recession," the newspaper writes. For the record, Goldman is saying there is no connection between the apology and the Buffett-branded $500 million charitable mom-and-pop business fund. 

The chocolate war is heating up again, according to a sweet scoop in today's Journal. Kraft's (KFT) unsolicited move to acquire British candy maker Cadbury could be challenged by a rival bid that teams the makers of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups with that of Nutella spread. According to the WSJ, Hershey (HSY) and Italy's Ferrero SPA "are in talks with banks to line up billions of dollars" to trump Kraft's $16 billion bid for Cadbury. Cadbury rejected Kraft's initial bid, calling it "derisory." Kraft maintains it's "fair and attractive." From candy to aviation now, where Delta Airlines has offered a $1 billion lifeline to struggling Japan Airlines (JAL) if it defects from the One World Alliance to Sky Team, of which Delta is a member, the BBC reports. JAL needs the funding, while Delta needs a way to crack into the Japanese market. This morning though the matter got all the more interesting as private equity firm TPG put a $1.1 billion funding offer on the table as precursor to a JAL tie-up with American Airlines, Reuters reports.

A Chinese court yesterday ordered Microsoft (MSFT) to cease selling some versions of its Windows operating system after it ruled that the company had infringed the intellectual property rights of Zhongyi Electronic, a Beijing-based software company. The surprise decision centred around two Chinese character fonts developed by Zhongyi that were not covered by a license agreement between the software makers and "has renewed worries among foreign patent experts about China’s management of IPR disputes," writes the Financial Times. Sticking with U.S.-Sino tensions for a moment, both President Barack Obama and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, are urging China to "look to its long-term interests and allow its tightly controlled currency to rise," the WSJ writes. Surprisingly the Beijing government appears more worried about protecting its economy in the short term.

More than 14,700 Americans have joined an Internal Revenue Service amnesty program in recent months and disclosed their secret foreign bank accounts, the NYT writes. The reason for this collective act of self-disclosure is the fact that Swiss bank UBS in August finally agreed to divulge to the IRS the names of some 4,450 American clients suspected of using the bank’s offshore services to evade taxes. The Washington Post has some more details on the deal UBS and the Swiss government made with U.S. authorities. If your Swiss bank account holdings are less than $248,200 (250,000 Swiss francs) or if you receive less than $99,280 (100,000 Swiss francs) in annual revenue from them, then the Swiss are not required to share the information with the IRS. Anything over that and you better be disclosing your income from said accounts.

And finally, if you're mulling overseas expansion, you might want to first consider New Zealand, named yesterday the world's least corrupt country in an annual ranking by Transparency International. And the most corrupt? Somalia, a terrible place to do business, apparently, unless you're in the piracy business. The United States ranks 19th out of 180 countries.