As Wall Street drags its feet on reining in bonuses, the European Union is forcing its banks — by law — to show some self-restraint.
The European Parliament this week approved one of the world’s strictest crackdowns on exorbitant bank pay,
going beyond some of the limits that many banks were pressed to adopt in the wake of the financial crisis.
Diageo, the maker of Johnnie Walker whiskey, has found an innovative way to plug a gaping deficit in its pension plan:
put aside 2 million barrels of maturing whiskey from its distilleries in Scotland.
Diageo announced it would transfer ownership of £430 million, or $645 million, worth of whiskey to a pension funding partnership.
Diageo employees would not receive their pensions in whiskey rather than cash,
Robert Prechter, the market forecaster and social theorist, is convinced that we have entered a market decline of staggering proportions — perhaps the biggest of the last 300 years.
He understands that no other forecaster was likely to accept his reasoning, which is based on his version of the Elliott Wave theory — a technical approach to market analysis that he embraces with evangelical fervor.
Last week, the French Competition Authority officially declared Google a monopoly.
That conclusion is hardly novel, but the decision appears to go beyond any previous official ruling in the United States or elsewhere.
“Google holds a dominant position on the advertising market related to online searches,” the French authority concluded.
Many groups in the United States are using tax-exempt donations to help Jews establish permanence in the Israeli-occupied territories —
effectively obstructing the creation of a Palestinian state, widely seen as a necessary condition for Middle East peace.
The result is a surprising juxtaposition:
As the American government seeks to end the four-decade Jewish settlement enterprise and foster a Palestinian state in the West Bank,
India’s drug industry — on track to grow about 13 percent this year, to just over $24 billion —
was once notorious for making cheap knockoffs of Western medicines and selling them in developing countries.
But India, seasoned in the basics of medicine making, is now starting to take on a more mainstream role in the global drug industry,
The environmental group Greenpeace has accused one of the world’s largest pulp, paper and palm oil companies of aggressively clearing Indonesian rain forests
and throwing into doubt a landmark billion-dollar deal that aims to fight climate change by curbing deforestation.
In a report released Monday, Greenpeace accused a subsidiary of the Indonesian family conglomerate Sinar Mas
On the eve of a seemingly critical Congressional vote on a sweeping measure to regulate Wall Street,
the prominent lobbyist Tony Podesta met with one of the lawmakers to go over some final language and discuss the effect it could have on his many corporate clients.
Once that was over, Mr. Podesta pivoted back to another client, BP, to help the company navigate Congressional waters and, in short, try to prevent an ugly situation from getting even uglier.
Standard & Poor’s said recently it was likely to cut its credit ratings for Moody’s, its biggest competitor,
warning that the sweeping financial regulatory bill in Congress would increase the risk that Moody’s — and itself — could be sued.
Both S.&P. and Moody’s, along with Fitch Ratings, have been sharply criticized for giving their top ratings to securities that turned out to be junk when the financial crisis hit.
Even as Asian demand for Australia’s resources keeps surging, the fate of a small town
has become a catalyst for pent-up anger over the coal industry’s push into populated and farming areas.
It has also set off a larger debate in Australia, the world’s biggest exporter of coal,
about mining’s costs and benefits to the country.
