Participants in the Madoff investment scandal group of hedge funds owned by Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co, as well as, its parent companies in December 2010, seeking more than $2 billion and alleging that company executives ignored "obvious warning signs" that Madoff was running a fraud. Picard alleged that Tremont failed to do any meaningful review of Madoff's operations or purported investment results, blindly allowing Rye to turn over half its $6 billion in client assets to Madoff and losing half that money when the scheme finally collapsed. The payment of $1 billion to the Madoff truste, provided by Massachusetts Mutual Life as a loan to
Global financial crisis in December 2008 the last six months of 2008. Global financial crisis in December 2008 On December 1, the National Bureau of Economic Research officially declared that the U.S. economy had entered recession in December 2007, a full year earlier. (See late 2000s recession) The Labor Department said that the US lost 533,000 jobs in November 2008, the biggest monthly loss since 1974. This raised the unemployment rate from 6.5% to 6.7%. On December 9, the Bank of Canada lowered its key interest rate by 0.75% to 1.5%, the lowest it had been since 1958; at the same time the Bank officially announced