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.

Nobody in the business world has emerged unscathed from the financial carnage wreaked by the global recession.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A proposal to give American shareholders a vote on executive pay was overwhelmingly approved by the lower house of Congress last week as Demo­crats fought to tackle increasingly lavish multimillion-dollar boardroom handouts. American unions, politicians and institutional investors are angry about telephone number-sized sums.