On Friday, Thailand’s finance minister stood before a meeting of business leaders in Japan, the source of about a third of his country’s foreign investment, and delivered a sober assessment of the convulsions that had racked his beautiful nation.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a ‘Welcome back to the Land of Smiles, let’s go shopping and invest in Thailand’ speech,” said the minister, Korn Chatikavanij.
Health insurance companies are lobbying federal and state officials in an effort to ward off strict regulation of premiums and profits under the new health care law.
The effort is, in some ways, a continuation of the battle over health care that consumed Congress last year.
Insurance lobbyists are trying to shape regulations that will define “unreasonable” premium increases and require them to pay rebates to consumers if the companies do not spend enough on patient care.
In a sign that Europe is taking an increasingly unified line on Internet privacy,
six European countries have joined Germany in asking Google to preserve data it improperly collected from unsecured wireless networks as part of Street View, its photo-mapping service, the company said Friday.
At age 36, Hello Kitty may be running out of product lives.
That is the fear of executives at the Sanrio Corporation, the Japanese company that created the cute, cartoonish white cat in 1974, and groomed her into a global marketing phenomenon worth $5 billion a year.
In Japan and around the world, Hello Kitty has been licensed over the years for products that include dolls, clothes, lunch boxes, stationery, kitchenware, a Macy’s parade balloon and even an Airbus owned by Taiwanese airline EVA Airways.
Consumer prices fell in April for the first time since early last year, and inflation rose at its slowest rate since the 1960s, a new government report said …
The report suggested that government stimulus efforts had not spurred the undesired effect of inflation.
China’s inflation accelerated in April, triggering fears of overheating and a possible credit clampdown by Beijing that might slow the country’s economic recovery.
April consumer prices rose 2.8 percent from a year earlier, below Beijing’s full-year target of 3 percent but up 0.4 percentage points from March, the National Bureau of Statistics said.
The global economic crisis has already shaped up as one of the defining stories at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Its effects are evident both in empty theater seats and on-screen with a movie like “Inside Job,” a documentary about the crisis from Charles Ferguson, a dot-com entrepreneur turned moviemaker.
By global standards, Japanese companies are seen as taking an idiosyncratic approach to corporate governance.
But even by Japanese standards, a several high-level management changes at the technology giant Fujitsu have struck analysts and management specialists as unusual.
By global standards, Japanese companies are seen as taking an idiosyncratic approach to corporate governance.
Founded three seasons ago, the Indian Premier League managed to make the sport of cricket sexy.
India’s corporate titans bought teams, Bollywood stars infused matches with celebrity glamour and fans from Mumbai to Dubai to New Jersey followed the league on television as its value rose to more than $4 billion.
When the currencies of countries like Hungary and Romania plunged last year, thousands of businesses and homeowners there found themselves stuck with some of the most extreme variable-interest-rate loans on the planet.
When the currencies of countries like Hungary and Romania plunged last year, thousands of businesses and homeowners there found themselves stuck with some of the most extreme variable-interest-rate loans on the planet.
