Current Business News

While the themes in this year's Super Bowl ads ran the gamut from poking fun of emasculated males to take-offs on popular TV shows, experts agreed that a simple appeal to motherly love seemed to speak strongest to viewers.

John Thain, the ousted chief of Merrill Lynch & Co., was named to lead CIT Group Inc., the commercial lender that emerged from bankruptcy in December, after almost a four-month search for a replacement.

Well before the federal government bailed out A.I.G. in September 2008, Goldman's demands for billions of dollars from the insurer helped put it in a precarious financial position by bleeding much-needed cash. That ultimately provoked the government to step in.

Stort Chemicals Ltd. Chairman Ken Gilkes joined 62 executives who endorsed former Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Party in a letter to the Financial Times before the 2005 election. Now he doesn't know who to vote for.

Asian stocks fell, dragging the MSCI Asia Pacific Index 10 percent below its January peak, as electronics makers posted losses and European finance ministers failed to announce detailed plans to tackle budget deficits.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - SAP AG Chief Executive Leo Apotheker, who has been with the company for more than 20 years, resigned with immediate effect just seven months after taking over as sole chief executive.

A potential mega-merger in the food and beverage sector fell apart Monday after Kirin Holdings of Japan said it had ended talks with its smaller rival Suntory Holdings about a deal to create company on a par with Kraft Foods.

These are desperate times for many job seekers. But you can avoid desperate-looking and time-wasting measures when it comes to putting together and marketing your résumé.

Funds and property valued at about $370 million traced to accused Ponzi schemer Allen Stanford have been located, but disputes over control of the assets are holding up disbursement, liquidators for Mr. Stanford's offshore bank said on Friday.

FriendFinder Networks, the publisher of Penthouse magazine that operates adult-oriented Web sites like AdultFriendFinder.com and Cams.com, said Friday that it had indefinitely shelved its planned $220 million initial public offering, citing market conditions.

Several members of Bernard L. Madoff's family have agreed to a freeze of their assets pending the outcome of a $200 million lawsuit filed by the court-appointed trustee in charge of recovering money for the victims of Mr. Madoff's enormous Ponzi scheme.

The Securities and Exchange Commission will consider adopting short-selling curbs in coming weeks as well as ways to improve market surveillance, Mary L. Schapiro, the S.E.C. chairwoman, said on Friday.

Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, received a bonus of stock currently valued at $9 million, the firm disclosed in a regulatory filing on Friday afternoon.

For the 16 countries that use the euro, a question about whether a single central bank can manage the divergent economic and financial conditions of its members is being raised.

The financial writer Burton G. Malkiel sees index funds as a way for the wealthy to avoid much of the volatility and high fees of other investments.

Less than 24 hours after Air Products said it was making an unsolicited $5.1 billion takeover offer for its smaller rival, Airgas, the lawsuits started flying.

Huatai Securities plans to raise as much as $2.5 billion in an initial share sale in Shanghai, where two companies that went public in the past month fell on their first trading day.

Barclays Wealth, the private banking arm of Barclays, has hired another three bankers from UBS, adding to the 10 who were recruited in August last year.

If the Democratic Party has a stronghold on Wall Street, it is JPMorgan Chase, but this year Chase's political action committee is sending the Democrats a pointed message.

Contagion is a fact of life in our interconnected global economy and financial markets. And that means investors must strap in as the great and painful deleveraging that began in 2007 continues around the world, and especially in Europe's most indebted nations.

Credit card usage is slowing. Revolving credit fell by nearly 20% in November, reflecting less borrowing and tighter lending ...

State Farm told USA TODAY it notified NHTSA in late 2007 that it was seeing an increase in sudden acceleration with Toyota and ...

Controversial uniforms for U.S. Olympic snowboarding team are no surprise coming from the man credited with making the sport ...

Q: Steve I saw you on TV discussing how a woman who owned a cookie business reinvented it by tapping the wholesale market. In ...

Three years after getting hammered by gay activists for what many felt was an anti-gay Super Bowl commercial, the Mars candy ...

UBS AG, the European bank with the biggest losses from the credit crisis, is poised for an earnings rebound that may help it catch up to Credit Suisse Group AG.

TORONTO/HONG KONG (Reuters) - The euro and growth-linked currencies fell on Monday as investors unwound risky trades amid growing worries about eurozone's debt problems, dismissing assurances from European finance ministers at the weekend.

IBM is beginning a long-awaited upgrade to a range of servers and other hardware to make them more energy-efficient and competitive than rival products by Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems Inc.

ATHENS (Reuters) - Greece will lower the current 75,000 euro income threshold that is subject to a 40 percent tax rate as part of reforms to urgently boost government revenues, the country's finance minister said on Monday.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - The abrupt resignation of SAP AG's chief executive Leo Apotheker put pressure on the group's stock on Monday as the market sought direction on where the world's largest business-software company is headed.

Mining group Xstrata reinstated dividends on Monday citing an encouraging outlook for commodities demand in the medium term after posting an expected 41 percent fall in 2009 profit on weaker metals prices.

India can't afford to be lax about fighting inflation as the nation seeks to slow price gains to 5 percent or less, central bank Deputy Governor K.C. Chakrabarty said yesterday.

Huatai Securities Co. set the price range for its initial public offering at 20 yuan to 22 yuan a share, according to a filing to Shanghai's stock exchange. The company plans to sell as many as 784.6 million shares, according to the statement.

The Swiss are shocked again, this time over the German decision to buy a list of some 1,500 possible tax cheats saved on a disc lifted from a Swiss bank. It's stolen property, say the Swiss bankers. It's bank robbery, cry the lawyers. It is behavior unfitting of a "civilized...