The Greek debt crisis and its ripple effects across Europe are crimping credit,
especially for midsize and smaller companies and definitely those in countries perceived as riskier —
starting with Greece but also including Portugal, Spain and others on the periphery.
That means the lending freeze instituted by TBTF banks & speculators posing as investors could be most severe in the countries most in need of economic growth.
Beneath the subarctic forests of western Canada, deep under the peat bogs and herds of wild caribou, lies the tarry rock that is one of America’s top sources of imported oil.
There is no chance of a rig blowout here, or a deepwater oil spill like the one from the BP well that is now fouling the Gulf of Mexico.
But the oil extracted from Canada’s oil sands poses other environmental challenges, like toxic sludge ponds, greenhouse gas emissions and the destruction of boreal forests.
“It is the single most important turnaround that I have seen in Silicon Valley,” said Jim Breyer, a venture capitalist who has invested in some of the most successful technology companies.
That was the reaction yesterday when Apple closed trading on Wednesday ahead of arch-rival Micro-Soft for the first time ever.
This changing of the guard caps one of the most stunning turnarounds in business history, as Apple had been given up for dead only a decade earlier.
Further ratcheting up the stakes in the fast-growing and intensely competitive Indian wireless market,
telecom companies bid nearly $11 billion for spectrum designated for high-speed data services.
The final tally of a frenzied monthlong auction concluded at nearly twice the amount that the government had expected,
a sum that many analysts had previously said might itself be too ambitious.
Superintendents, education professors and people seeking work say teachers are facing the worst job market since the Great Depression.
Amid state and local budget cuts, cash-poor urban districts like New York City and Los Angeles,
which once hired thousands of young people every spring, have taken down the help-wanted signs.
Even upscale suburban districts are preparing for huge levels of layoffs.
It’s been nearly three weeks since the shocking dive of equity markets on May 6,
and no one in the US is even pretending to know what actually happened, let alone why.
This may hardly be surprising in a country where the most likely largest environmental disaster in US history took the President two weeks to say much of anything,
The European Union fined a group of several East Asian and one European computer chip makers 331.3 million euros ($409 million) for price fixing in the first use of a new procedure that allows settlement of cartel cases in Europe.
The European competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia, said that because of the new procedure, he expected to handle some cases in less than six months from the time that a cartel was discovered or reported.
Any way you look at it, extraordinary numbers of people are having trouble paying their mortgage.
What started as a subprime crisis, where borrowers defaulted because they could not handle the payments as their loans reset, has now become a crisis among prime borrowers, who lose the ability to pay their loans when they lose their jobs …
What is less clear is the extent to which the problem is getting worse, better or is simply holding its own.
