Jan 9th 2013, 13:54 by T.E. | NEW YORK
BEFORE imploding at extraordinary cost to the world’s financial system and America’s taxpayers, AIG was considered a financial fortress: it boasted a high stock valuation, an AAA credit rating (heavily used in the firm’s marketing which suggested that it would stand behind its commitments to customers) and was led by a chief executive, Hank Greenberg (pictured), adept at squashing critics.
Jan 8th 2013, 11:08 by D.L. | MILAN
DEATH may be certain in Italy, but taxes are another matter: an estimated €285 billion remained unpaid last year, about 18% of GDP. Yet this will change if a new way of assessing income, called redditometro, is a success. The system, which became law on January 4th, aims to winkle out many of the large number of Italians who cheat on their annual income tax returns.
Jan 7th 2013, 19:28 by Economist.com
OUR correspondents discuss the markets in 2013, America's debt ceiling and the easing of the Basel committee's liquidity requirements
Jan 7th 2013, 14:23 by P.F. | MUMBAI
MARGARET THATCHER said that you cannot buck the market. But if the experience of India’s government over the last few months is anything to go by, you can charm the pants off it. My e-mail inbox is overflowing with missives from the finance ministry that promise a bounce in the economy, assert a step change in investor sentiment, deny there is a bad debt problem in the banking system and promise a stable tax regime.
Jan 5th 2013, 16:48 by A.P.
LATE last year we ran a piece on the bank-shaped hole in Europe, the huge funding gap left by retreating banks that needs to be filled by non-bank lenders. The article committed a couple of sins of omission*, among them a failure to mention Lending Club in the section on peer-to-peer lenders.
Lending Club is American, not European, although its chief executive and founder, Renaud Laplanche, is French by birth. But it is the world's largest peer-to-peer lending platform, and its growth helps to explain why expectations for the potential of this new lending channel are high.
Lending Club was launched in 2007 after Mr Laplanche took a closer-than-normal look at his credit-card bill and saw that the interest charge on unpaid balances was north of 18%. That seemed extortionate, especially given the meagre rates of interest he got on his bank deposits. "A very wide spread is always a signal of opportunity to an entrepreneur," says Mr Laplanche, who had already set up and sold off a software firm before starting this venture.
Jan 3rd 2013, 21:18 by M.G. | SAN FRANCISCO
GOOGLE dodged a particularly large legal bullet on January 3rd, when America’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced the results of a long-running investigation into allegations that the internet behemoth has been abusing its dominant position in online search to promote its own businesses at the expense of rivals. Google’s competitors had hoped the FTC would put a stop to this practice—which they have dubbed “search bias”—a move that would have put a big dent in the web firm’s commercial prospects. But in the event, the commission found no evidence that Google was stifling competition in this way.
Jan 3rd 2013, 11:06 by Economist.com
OUR correspondents reflect on a tough year for the City of London and assess whether the worst is yet to come
Jan 1st 2013, 16:30 by T.F.J. | BANGKOK
THERE are an estimated 120,000 microfinance initiatives worldwide but Thailand’s “Village and Urban Revolving Fund” lends more money to more people than any other. The scheme’s outstanding loan portfolio totalled $4.9 billion in 2011; the number of active borrowers that year stood at 8.5m. Those numbers are swelling. Yingluck Shinawatra, the Thai prime minister (pictured above), announced plans late last year to inject $2.6 billion in additional capital into a network of nearly 80,000 village banks, which her brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, who was prime minister between 2001 and 2006, created with a stroke of a pen ten years ago.
Dec 31st 2012, 11:09 by Economist.com
WHILE 2013 looks set to be another hard year for business, our correspondents predict success for conglomerates and tough new entrepreneurs
Dec 24th 2012, 4:31 by Economist.com
AS the crisis moves from an acute phase to a chronic one, we ask what the pace of recovery will be in 2013
Dec 20th 2012, 23:39 by T.E. | NEW YORK
IT HAS been an unusually long run by the standards of the financial markets. Just over 200 years since traders first met under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street, the institution they created, the New York Stock Exchange, was acquired by an upstart electronic marketplace, the IntercontintalExchange (ICE), nominally based in Atlanta, Georgia, but more accurately located in the electronic stratosphere.
The deal was announced on December 20th, with little advance leakage, possibly because the participants did a particularly good job of keeping it a secret, or possibly because the importance of the exchange, owned by NYSE Euronext, has faded so much that few cared.
Dec 19th 2012, 14:30 by J.R.
FOR any who doubted whether there was honour among thieves, or indeed among investment bankers, solace may be found in the details of a settlement between UBS, a Swiss bank, and regulators around the world over a vast and troubling conspiracy by some of its employees to rig LIBOR and EURIBOR, key market interest rates.
Dec 18th 2012, 18:48 by D.S. | BERLIN
TWO seconds of metallic music may seem a rather trivial basis for spending 12 years battling through the German courts. But that is what lawyers for Kraftwerk (pictured), an electropop band, and Moses Pelham and Martin Haas, two composers, have been doing.
In 1977, Kraftwerk produced a track called “Metall auf Metall” which features a continuous percussive phrase. Twenty years later Pelham & Haas released “Nur Mir”, featuring a rapper called Sabrina Setlur, which samples the same phrase.
Kraftwerk claimed this was an infringement of recording rights. In 2004, the Hamburg lower court agreed, forbidding further distribution of “Nur Mir”.
Dec 18th 2012, 13:55 by B.U.
JEFF BEZOS founded Amazon in 1994. Apostolos Apostolakis and his mates started e-shop.gr, Greece’s biggest online retailer, just four years later. The comparisons end there. The Seattle juggernaut’s annual sales grow at double-digit rates; e-shop’s have been savaged by Greece’s depression. Amazon made its name selling books. E-shop was stymied by regulated book prices and shifted early into electronics. The Americans have indulgent shareholders while the Greeks were nearly undone by skimpy equity.
Economic woes aside, Greece is tough terrain for online shopping. Less than half of Greeks are regular internet users compared with two-thirds of Europeans overall.
Dec 18th 2012, 11:48 by C.S-W.
IN 1999 Associated Newspapers launched Metro, a free tabloid newspaper, in London. Now distributed in 50 cities to a readership of 3.8m, Metro presents news in a package that can be read, cover-to-cover, during a 20 minute commute. An iPhone app by a 17-year old hopes to achieve something similar with online news.
Summly, a news aggregator and summariser, presents users with pithy algorithm-generated summaries of stories taken from news organisations. Though aimed at a broad user base, Summly may particularly interest younger people who “like their news distinct, fast and immediate,” says Nick D’Aloisio, its creator.
Our Schumpeter columnist and his colleagues consider business, finance and management, in a blog named after the economist Joseph Schumpeter
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