Articles

No relief in sight. That's the prognosis from the December Fed meeting, revealed just yesterday, showing we're in for a longer and nastier recession than first feared. The bleak economic outlook appeared to take even some Fed officials by surprise.

Imagine you're an elderly parent with a couple of deadbeat, middle-aged children. Your kids—who we'll call Germane and Chrys—have their own auto-repair shop, which has recently fallen on hard times of its own making. Their methods were outdated, their service and products were lackluster, and they got pushed out by the competition. But they're too integral personally and financially to your family to let them become poor louts. So you float them a loan and hope they can get back on their feet.

From the groves of Italy to the sounds of the Appalachia, The Big Money asks whether this video of a homemade banjo affects Lio Olive Oil’s brand.

A Japanese bluefin tuna was sold at auction Monday for more than $100,000, which drew predictable "wacky story of the day" treatment in the media.

Late in some (but not all) news accounts of the sale, we learn that bluefin tuna is an endangered species because it is, as the Monterrey Bay Aquarium puts it "severely overfished" and hence "should be avoided."

Google's China unit may be facing some bigger problems, but at least it gets to keep its name. According to Bloomberg, Google named itself Gu Ge, or "harvesting song," when set up operations in the country. This prompted a lawsuit from the firm Guge Science and Technology, which claimed that Google swiped its name.

A good three years before the current financial crisis, some of the smartest thinkers on the economy—people like NYU economist Nouriel Roubini, Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach, and billionaire and all-around economic oracle Warren Buffett—started pointing out to everyone who would listen that things were going very wrong. There were three major things that worried them: the unprecedented housing bubble, the fragility of ever-more-complex Wall Street relationships, and the savings crisis. In 2007, the housing bubble decompressed. In 2008, Wall Street unraveled.

Bill Gates sits down with Charlie Rose to discuss humanity's rapidly evolving relationship with technology and the future of Microsoft.

Looking for a new definition of a hedge fund? How about an organization that takes 20 percent of the profits on your money in the good times, then refuses to let you have it back when the weather turns rough?

The incoming Obama administration and Congress are planning a huge fiscal stimulus package. They hope that such a stimulus will catalyze an economic turnaround and be a cornerstone of a "New New Deal." If the early reports are reliable, the stimulus will include a huge tax cut and will fund projects like road-building and bridge repair, laying the infrastructure foundation for the economy of the future.

A moment of sympathy, please, for newspapers, whose readers and advertisers have been fleeing at a frightening rate.

It would be easy to accuse editors and publishers of being clueless about the coming Internet disruption and to insist that the industry's proper reward for decades of haughty attitude, bad planning, and incompetence is bankruptcy.