Financial services reform in the US includes a ban on punitive charges for credit card infractions.
The Cuban government has begun releasing jailed dissidents in a political concession brokered by the Catholic Church.
Barack Obama has warned that BP will ‘pay’ for the environmental damage caused by the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico.
The bank gave credit agencies a false picture of its value ahead of the sale, writes Andrew Clark
No image available
/ 26 January 2010
After a catastrophic year for US carmakers, the head of the United Auto Workers union has emerged as one of the most powerful men in the industry.
No image available
/ 18 December 2009
The heads of leading banks in the US were summoned to the White House this week for a "frank and candid" discussion with President Barack Obama.
Wall Street bank has recovered from the credit crunch and may pay bonuses of $900 000 this year, reports Andrew Clark.
They seem, at first blush, the model of a prosperous immigrant couple. A handsome pair, "Serge and Elina" from New Jersey sashayed across a stage.
The subject of the greatest popular vitriol is Madoff’s wife, Ruth, who still lives in the couple’s $7-million penthouse on New York’s Upper East Side
Nobody in the business world has emerged unscathed from the financial carnage wreaked by the global recession.
The rump of Conrad Black’s former newspaper empire, Sun-Times Media, filed for bankruptcy protection recently.
No image available
/ 10 January 2009
Property markets on both sides of the Atlantic have plunged, but nowhere has the collapse been more spectacular than in Detroit.
No image available
/ 12 October 2008
The world’s largest insurance company spent $440 000 on a corporate retreat days after accepting a $85-billion emergency government loan.
An official "watch list" of potentially troubled US banks has lengthened from 90 to 117 as the credit crunch wreaks havoc.
An emergency plan by the US government to stabilise the nation’s two biggest mortgage finance corporations won cross-party support last week.
Private New Zealander puts $50m into a new business school aiming to produce a generation of business leaders in poverty-stricken parts of the globe.
Wal-Mart refuses to see the funny side of a musical based on its global dominance. Andrew Clark reports in New York.
If there is anything more satisfying than being rich, it must be basking in the glow of being proved right. The world’s wealthiest man, Warren Buffett, was lauded by 31 000 devotees in his home town last weekend for eclipsing the biggest brains on Wall Street through his homespun approach to business.
No image available
/ 11 February 2008
Holed up in a caravan on the campus of Stanford University in California, two graduate students were supposed to be finishing their doctoral studies. Instead, Jerry Yang and David Filo began messing around on something new called the world wide web. Yang and Filo started fiddling with quirky home pages. Yang put up his golf scores, his name in Chinese characters and a list of his favourite websites.
No image available
/ 6 February 2008
The sheer scale of the misery wreaked by the United States sub-prime mortgage crisis became clear on Tuesday in research showing that more than 1% of Ameri- can households were hit with some stage of repossession proceedings last year. About 2,2-million foreclosure docuÂÂments — including default notices, auction sale notices and repossession papers — were filed on 1,28-million properties last year.
No image available
/ 18 December 2007
Conrad Black was sentenced on December 10 to six-and-a-half years in a United States prison for abusing shareholders’ trust money through a sophisticated plot to embezzle $6,1million from his Hollinger media empire.
No image available
/ 18 December 2007
The Federal Reserve this week cut interest rates for the third time this autumn as the United States central bank sought to prevent the rapidly deteriorating housing market from dragging the world’s biggest economy into recession. Fearful of inflationary pressures from rising oil prices and a falling dollar, the Fed limited itself to a quarter-point cut. Share prices fell sharply in the wake of the Fed’s cutting its Fed funds and the discount rate by a quarter point.
No image available
/ 3 December 2007
United States house prices have suffered their worst plunge for two decades as defaults on sub-prime mortgages have shattered homebuyers’ confidence and lenders have withdrawn cheap loan deals. According to the key Standard & Poor’s housing index, released on Tuesday, third-quarter US prices were down 4,5% on 2006.
No image available
/ 5 November 2007
Merrill Lynch parted company this week with its CE, Stan O’Neal, leaving the investment bank’s leadership in a state of limbo and prompting unease on Wall Street. Merrill announced that O’Neal had decided to retire with immediate effect after agreeing with the board that a change in leadership would "best enable Merrill Lynch to move forward".
If it so desired, Goldman Sachs could use its income for the year to fund the entire Chinese army — and, if the run-up to Christmas went well, it would have a few billion dollars left over. The investment bank expects to rake in about $45-billion during the year to this November, roughly equivalent to the budget for the world’s biggest fighting force.
No image available
/ 4 September 2007
The affluent waterside enclave of Greenwich is 48km east of New York and has been the United States’s hedge-fund capital since the September 11 attacks made Manhattan less appealing. Nicknamed "Wall-Street-on-Sea" or "Upper Hedgistan", the town is home to more than 380 firms managing $100-billion.
After a tough day of deal-making, it is only right that the king of Wall Street should retire home to a palace. Stephen Schwarzman does just that — his Manhattan apartment boasts 35 rooms including a foyer the size of a ballroom, his-and-hers saunas, a pine-panelled library and 13 bathrooms. Works by Claude Monet adorn the walls of the two-floor Park Avenue residence.
Concerns about Google’s dominance in online advertising have prompted the United States Federal Trade Commission to investigate its $3,1-billion takeover of internet marketing company DoubleClick. The purchase of DoubleClick, announced last month, is intended to give Google enhanced software and stronger relationships with agencies.
A huge shift in global capital flows is forecast after the Chinese government’s acquisition of a $3-billion stake in the sprawling United States private equity group Blackstone, owner of Café Rouge restaurants, Madame Tussauds and Center Parcs. The purchase is likely to be only the starting point of a $200-billion foray into world stock markets and private companies by the communist government in Beijing.
A proposal to give American shareholders a vote on executive pay was overwhelmingly approved by the lower house of Congress last week as DemoÂÂcrats fought to tackle increasingly lavish multimillion-dollar boardroom handouts. American unions, politicians and institutional investors are angry about telephone number-sized sums.
No image available
/ 28 November 2006
The heads of the United States’s big-three car manu-facturers were granted a long-awaited audience at the White House last week to plead the case for help in overcoming chronic financial problems that have decimated jobs and led to scores of factory closures.
No image available
/ 27 November 2006
The price of Google shares reached $500 on Wall Street this week as the internet search company continued a phenomenal rise that has turned it into one of the United States’s most valuable enterprises. Google’s shares were priced at a mere $85 when the world’s favourite search engine went public on Nasdaq in August 2004.