How do you lose $7 billion and still consider yourself pretty lucky?

When you're still worth $42 billion - and most other rich folks lost a bundle as well.

A onetime compliance director at Moody's warned the Securities and Exchange Commission about the firm's apparent out-of-date ratings on thousands of municipal bond ratings.

Scott McCleskey, who left the rating agency in September 2008, sent a letter to the SEC in March after officials at Moody's purportedly failed to act on his concerns. McCleskey, who also testified on Wednesday before the House Government Oversight Committee, told the regulator that debt securities from high profile issuers like the City of New York received periodic reviews, but bonds from smaller municipalities rarely did. He told the House Panel that, due to the sheer numbers of issuers, "tens of thousands of municipal securities... aren't getting the same scrutiny as corporate bonds."

Liverpool Football Club takes on Italian side Fiorentina today in an early Champions League match. The game in Florence promises to be a tense, nail-biting affair.

Off the pitch, Liverpool co-owner Tom Hicks will probably be feeling a little more relaxed about the outcome. In past years, Liverpool has relied on advancing in the Champions League to bring in much-needed revenue. But now it appears that the club's balance sheet, shaky at best, could get a very big boost.

A new survey conducted by Sixty Minutes and Vanity Fair, which was reported by the AP, yielded some surprising results. At the top of the list: giant retailer Wal-Mart was named as the company that best symbolizes the good ol U.S. of A.

It's hard to tell if the respondents meant this in a good way or not. Nevertheless, the poll offered up some other unusual results as well, particularly the way some Americans would fight obesity.

Other than when I'm unemployed -- which, given my line of work and my single-digit IQ, is always a distinct possibility -- I tend to steer clear of job sites.

From what I can see, most of these websites feature crumby jobs that don't remotely match your skills. In fact, it seems like many of the sites mostly employ search engines that sift through resumes and help-wanteds in an attempt to match up key words. Once, on a lark, I sent my resume to one of these sites, indicating that I was highly trained engineer with degrees from Columbia and Stanford. Two days later, the site sent me a listing for a job as a train engineer on a route from South Carolina to Connecticut.

The CEOs of Kraft and Cadbury seemed to be engaged in a game of ‘made you move.' And it's starting to annoy me.

Now, I realize it's the job of Cadbury CEO Todd Stitzer to wrangle as splendiferous an offer as he can from Kraft. And I realize this does require some acting. But Stitzer seems to be burying himself in the role.

The World Health Organization is pretty clear on the subject. On June 11, the WHO declared that a global pandemic of H1NI (don't-call-it-the-Swine) flu is underway.

It's not entirely clear that employers got the message, however. Given the recession, bosses continue to focus on maximizing worker productivity --not business continuity.

Looks like ‘too big to fail' is here to stay.

Paul Volcker, the head of President Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, said today that the administration's proposed financial reforms preserve the concept of bank bailouts. In prepared testimony for the House Finance Committee, Volcker said he backs the idea -- as long as it's applied strictly to commercial banks.

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday upgraded its assessment of the U.S. economy.

"Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in August suggests that economic activity has picked up following its severe downturn," the Fed said in a statement after its two-day policy meeting.

For a second, I thought I had taken in a trip in the accounting Way-back Machine.