What to watch for today Yahoo’s $1.1 billion Tumblr play. Yahoo is expected to announce an all-cash deal to buy the popular blogging site Tumblr. CEO Marissa Mayer is trying to make Yahoo hip again, but ...

Property prices in China are rising relentlessly, according to new government data, and not even strict property controls have been able to stop them. Average house prices in 70 Chinese cities climbed ...

If you’ve tried to look at something exciting in public lately, you may have noticed that there were some objects in the way. Maybe you were at a concert. Or perhaps it was your one chance in life to meet ...

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has made her first major move to try to make Yahoo cool again. The Wall Street Journal reports that (paywall) Yahoo’s board today approved a $1.1 billion deal to acquire blogging ...

Economists and management experts have begun to model what might happen when robots are smart enough to do our jobs for us. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue in their book Race Against the Machine ...

Ted Nelson, the American academic who in 1963 coined the term hypertext, and is therefore viewed as one of the World Wide Web’s founding fathers, just released a 12-minute video with a big reveal at the ...

Squeeze your employees, and you’ll pay the price. Seems obvious—but Ernst & Young has actual evidence. For its annual fraud report the firm surveyed 3,000 company board members, managers and their teams ...

If the last sixty odd years of Chinese history were told through Chinese Communist Party slogans, this year would mark a turning point in who controls the narrative. Elusive expressions like Jiang Zemin’s ...

It’s been a while now since I wrote this article on how Greece’s fertility bust and our unenlightened response to it helped build our mountain of debt in the ’80s and set us on course for the sovereign ...

Bangladesh’s best hope for a reformed garment sector hinges on retailers paying the price for safety. Nearly 40 retail companies that order from garment factories in the country have signed a six-page ...

Over the past two months, McDonald’s has axed beloved items from its menu like the Angus Third Pounder and its fruit and walnut salads. And there may be more to come, according to a Bloomberg report, that ...

Corporate America loves the US’s shale gas boom—but when it comes to exporting the stuff, companies are divided. Fossil-fuel producers like ExxonMobil are all in favor of building liquefied natural gas ...

I checked, and re-checked, and triple-checked, and I can confirm that it’s not 1979 anymore. Now, that shouldn’t be too surprising—I’m not writing this on an Apple II, after all—but it is to a generation ...

Any time a single company is responsible for nearly 10% of a country’s GDP, it’s a problem. Thanks to a lack of competition, Pemex, the Mexican oil company responsible for producing all of the country’s ...

European shareholders want to help pry Spanish oil firm Repsol from the jaws of the Argentine government. Repsol is suing the Argentine government for seizing 51% of YPF, the Argentine oil company formerly ...

Mark your calendars: After tomorrow (May 18), the US Treasury can’t borrow any more money to fund already-authorized spending until Congress increases the debt limit. And you may remember that when the ...

Yesterday, in a foreign bribery lawsuit by Wal-Mart shareholders against the retailer, Delaware chancellor Leo Strine declined a request to keep out of evidence documents that were already publicly available. (He ...

Moody’s Ratings agency upgraded Turkey’s long-term credit rating to Baa3 for the first time today, giving the country an investment-grade rating at two out of the three major credit ratings agencies. In ...

For a long time, hedge funds roped themselves to Apple and rode its remarkable rise higher. It was almost like they had to own it. The stock had such a large weight in stock market indexes, the so-called ...

The IPO for data visualization firm Tableau Software today lived up to the hype that has preceded it. Tableau opened trading at $47, compared to its IPO price of $31—and that’s even after the size of the ...

Officials in the eastern Chinese province hit hardest by a recent outbreak of bird flu are optimistic the crisis has passed. Authorities in Zhejiang province have called off an emergency response to the ...

Hard to believe but it’s true. Facebook shares priced exactly one year ago today at $38 a share, giving the social media behemoth a market value of round $104 billion. (“Pricing” is when the company gets ...

Thirty five million Indian females are missing today. Some were killed in the womb, others as infants, while still others succumbed in their desperate bid to have a male child. As the pendulum continues ...

The Obama administration is still playing it cool with environmentalists. First it skirted the protracted battle over the Keystone XL pipeline, which could carry dirty tar sands oil from Canada to the ...

Because simple charts are more efficient than most economies these days. Read: What a joint business and law degree gets you

On Tuesday (May 14), the US government seized accounts that Japan-based Mt. Gox, the world’s largest bitcoin exchange, held at its US bank, Wells Fargo, and with Dwolla, an online payments company. The ...

While the Syrian Electronic Army gets all the publicity and the US-China hacking campaigns are now well known, India and Pakistan quietly have their own thing going on. According to two anti-virus firms, ...

The numbers: Decent, for an industry in a rut. A.P. Møller-Maersk’s quarterly revenue fell slightly to $14.047 billion in the first quarter from $14.327 billion a year earlier, and profits declined a more ...

Offshore from Syria, Russia’s navy is conducting probably its largest naval deployment outside its own waters since the Soviet breakup. The Chinese navy is in another potential confrontation today with ...

Microsoft India yesterday issued a press release with the title, “Staying on Windows XP to cost three times more than migrating to Windows 8.” The release is based on a study commissioned by Microsoft ...

World War II would have ended much faster if Japanese soldiers actually died like Shi Zhongpeng, an extra at the Hengdian film studios in Zhejiang who met his end in spectacular style over 200 times last ...

With the arrival of Google’s new wearable computer, Glass, it’s fair to ask: What’s going to happen to our eyes? After all, Glass is meant to be worn all the time—and early adopters like the effusive Robert ...

What to watch for today Tension in Syria. Russia just sent a bunch of anti-ship cruise missiles to Bashar al-Assad. That’s going to make a US-led intervention, should it ever come, a lot tougher. Meanwhile ...

A Chinese firm best known for building air conditioning units is constructing a vertical city. Broad Sustainable Construction (BSB) said this week that next month it will finally break ground on its the ...

A court in China’s Zhejiang province has sentenced a businesswoman to death for fraud and “illegal fund-raising,” after she racked up 428 million yuan ($69.7 million) in trading losses. Lin Haiyan raised 640 ...

Imagine combining the ubiquity of Twitter, the e-commerce might of Amazon, and the location-awareness of Google Maps. Such a coalition is taking shape in China after a flurry of dealmaking by Alibaba, ...

When dealing with its volatile and unpredictable North Korean ally, China giveth, and China taketh away. Under pressure to curb North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, Beijing closed the Kim Jong-un regime’s ...

It’s a refrain that seems to get recycled every few years: London’s storied financial center, “the City”, is under existential threat from onerous new regulations or competition from emerging financial ...

Cyclone Mahasen made for an ominous sight as it bore down on the Bangladeshi coastline on Thursday. It claimed around 12 lives and caused extensive damage, but the most palpable emotion was relief—the ...

What to watch for today The state of the world’s largest shipping line. A.P. Moller-Maersk reports earnings as it gears up to launch the largest ships the world has ever seen. The company has been hit ...

The Financial Times reports that France gets 25% more Chinese tourists than the UK (paywall). British retailers are upset. They claim that the visa process for Chinese nationals is too burdensome. Some ...

Have some dirty money you need to launder? You may want to consider Argentina as an option. Lawmakers there are considering a measure that would give amnesty to anyone who wants to pull undeclared cash ...

Yesterday Google CEO Larry Page said it would be nice if there were some part of the world that were free of regulation so that companies like Google could experiment without fetter. He cited Burning Man, ...

The numbers: Bad. The department store chain reported that net income fell by 113% for a loss of $348 million. The company also reported a 16.6% decline in same store sales. The takeaway: The market had ...

A surging stock market helped Microsoft founder Bill Gates retake the title of world’s richest man, according to Bloomberg’s latest tally of the world’s wealthiest. A surge in Microsoft shares—they hit ...

The numbers: Not good. PC maker Dell reported earnings per share of $0.21, which missed estimates, and net income fell by 79% to $130 million. But it reported better-than-expected revenue at $14.1 billion. ...

Since Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro took office last month, the country’s already decimated economy has not only floundered but also continued its neglect in providing people with the most basic ...

For better or worse, Asian companies are loading up on debt at a staggering rate. By 2017, Standard & Poor’s estimated in a report this week, non-financial corporate debt for Asia-Pacific countries will ...