It was quick, and it was quick by design: After the US announced economic sanctions against Gennady Timchenko, a financier allegedly tied to Russian president Vladimir Putin through the commodity trading firm Gunvor, he announced a “contingency plan” enacted the day before sold his entire stake to his partner, Torbjorn Törnqvist.
The youngest billionaire in the world is 24 years old. Sound too good to be true? Precisely.
Detained Russian opposition activist Alexey Navalny yesterday called on the US government to punish Russian President Vladimir Putin’s cronies:
Last May, China launched a rocket into space, supposedly to release a “cloud of barium” 10,000 km (6,213 miles) in the air to research the magnetosphere. But Brian Weeden, a space analyst at the Secure World Foundation, has rounded up a growing body of evidence to suggest the launch was in fact the test of rocket designed to launch a “kinetic kill vehicle” to destroy enemy satellites.
Online anonymity: Great if you’re revealing secrets, terrible when someone else is revealing yours. And for investors, secrecy is sometimes the key to advantage, whether you’re plowing cash into private start-ups or an activist investor amassing public equities to bully management.
While new US economic sanctions freezing the sanctions Russian leaders didn’t strike fear into the heart of financial markets, they did raise a question: Would the US even know if someone like, say, Russian President Vladimir Putin was keeping some money in its backyard?
The White House has frozen the US assets of seven Russian government officials and will be forbid them from doing business with American firms and persons.
Today Castlight Health went public in a very big way.
America has an unemployment problem, but specifically, it has a long-term unemployment problem.
Why pay taxes when you can just loan that money to the government and get interest back?
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Four days after a Malaysia Airlines 777 jet and the 239 people aboard disappeared over the Gulf of Thailand, authorities haven’t found the plane or the cause of its disappearance.
The enormous hydropower dams springing up across the emerging world may simply be too expensive to ever yield real benefits to their builders, development economists warned today. One key reason why: Dam fans lying to themselves and others about how much the multi-billion dollar projects cost.
The idea of the ground opening without warning and swallowing you up is nightmare fuel. As populations grow and humans invent new ways to plunder underground resources, sinkholes are only becoming more common—just look at the US sinkhole capital, Florida.
There are more than 1.5 million workers making products for Apple, and some of them are children.
While some of us are thrilled at the idea of the Winkelvoss twins departing this earth for a few hours, we have to ask what it will it cost them.
Most Americans are worried about inequality, but especially the Americans in president Barack Obama’s political party—and so Obama has developed a plan to take on the problem.
There’s little love lost between regulated industries and the tech start-ups seeking to disrupt them. The US’s national trade association for taxis just launched a website urging unhappy users of online car services like Uber to report bad experiences to the local authorities.
Nobel economist Robert Shiller thinks bitcoin is a bubble, but he has an idea that might help electronic money solve the problem of price volatility. Think of Shiller’s idea as using big data to make money a more perfect expression of value.
Fortress Financial Group, a publicly-traded asset manager with a market value of $4.26 billion, reported its 2013 results yesterday—and its biggest investment loss was bitcoin.
David Kinitsky controls $50 million in bitcoin. He’s a senior director at Second Market who manages the company’s Bitcoin Investment Trust (BIT), a private vehicle for accredited investors akin to an exchange-traded fund, and is building a new bitcoin exchange for financial institutions. After the collapse of the largest bitocin exchange this week sent prices falling, I wanted to ask him, as a leader among the group of companies who want bitcoin to grow up before it blows up, why bitcoin is a good investment?
The United States’s time as the world’s leader in economic production is likely coming to an end, as countries with far-bigger populations gain access to modern technology.
The failure of the Mt. Gox exchange isn’t the end of bitcoin—but it’s probably the end of amateur hour.
There are almost as many cell-phone subscriptions (6.8 billion) as there are people on this earth (seven billion)—and it took a little more than 20 years for that to happen. In 2013, there were some 96 cell-phone service subscriptions for every 100 people in the world. Shouting is the likely the next-most widespread communications technique:
