Sprint is reportedly considering a takeover offer for T-Mobile, a merger that would combine the third- and fourth-largest telecoms by customers. While a tie-up wouldn’t supplant numbers one and two, Verizon and AT&T, it would hypothetically be more competitive because it would have more customers and bigger networks.
Time is money: Duh. But how much money, exactly?
With the overwhelming approval of a two-year budget by the US House of Representatives, Washington is bowing to the obvious: There is no need for dramatic boycotts of annual spending that end in government shutdowns when public borrowing has stabilized. Is the era of debt panic over?
It seems that another big fine is in the offing for JP Morgan: Leaks abound that the bank will sign a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department, effectively admitting to wrongdoing and paying perhaps $2 billion in penalties and fines. (It agreed to pay $13 billion over its handling of mortgage-backed securities not two months ago.) The charges? Not noticing that its client Bernard Madoff, who paid the bank hundreds of millions of dollars, was running a Ponzi scheme and defrauding investors in his wealth management business.
The World Bank is bullish on immigration in a way that many politicians aren’t right now: Where populist fears may animate the elected, the technocrats see immigration as low-hanging fruit to grow the world economy. In a new survey of migration data up until the year 2000, they find benefits for migrants, host countries and home countries in allowing more labor mobility.
It’s hard to build your country when the money keeps slipping away.
The price of a single bitcoin, now sitting at $899, is derived from many mysterious sources: supply and demand, potential future business value, animal spirits. One factor is less widely understood: The price of bitcoin depends on the price of electricity.
What US regulators have set in motion, let not weather set asunder. Lawyers, however, may get in the way.
Malta has just disrupted the market for citizenship, and boy is the United Kingdom not happy about it.
Government Motors no more: The US Treasury has sold the last of its General Motors common stock, marking the end of the public rescue of the US auto-maker and an unprecedented experiment in US industrial policy.
After last Dec. 6’s World Cup draw, Ben Hoban, a fixed income trader at Oppenheimer & Co., put together a spreadsheet to statistically test a theory many American soccer fans arrived at intuitively: The United States Men’s National Team got hosed.
Tech firms and internet activists are realizing that you have to fight fire with fire.
23andMe, the genetic testing company reprimanded by US health regulators for ignoring them and failing to provide evidence that their service was effective, has announced it will stop offering tests for genetically-linked conditions like heart disease and breast cancer until it gains their approval.
Today’s positive US jobs report—with the unemployment rate edging down to 7%—could mean the Federal Reserve at last starts to wind down its bond-buying stimulus program in the new year. That’s why the real good news in Washington today isn’t in the new jobs data, but in word leaking out that Republicans and Democrats are close to reaching a budget deal that would increase spending and avoid future government shutdowns and debt-ceiling clashes, giving the US economy a path forward free of gratuitous crises.
The world’s largest oil companies are preparing for a future in which putting a price on carbon fights climate change. US politicians say it won’t happen. People who believe in the wisdom of the markets might consider siding with the people answering to shareholders rather than primary voters.
NASA is taking a new approach to spotting potentially threatening space rocks hurtling toward earth: Crowdsourcing.
The international deal to roll back economic sanctions against Iran if it allows inspections of its nuclear facilities has plenty of critics, but one of the biggest losers, Reuters reports, could be an obscure bank in India called UCO Bank.
When SpaceX put a communications satellite into orbit yesterday, it wasn’t a just triumph of technology. It was a victory for cost control.
A year past deadline, three years after the passage of financial reform, and five years since the crisis, the so-called Volcker rule is settled and is expected to be carved into stone—or printed on 950 pages of paper—on December 10.
If someone buys a book in Thailand, should she be able to sell it to a used bookstore—or anyone else—in the US? The US Supreme Court says yes. But US trade negotiators say no, and they’re working to make sure the same prohibition would apply around the world.
Vladimir Putin tried to buy an economic alliance and found out it wasn’t for sale, but not because of his offering price.
Maybe now tourists will think twice about Thailand: Protests against the government there have turned violent and forced the prime minister into hiding.
Tower of Power is a sculpture built out of one hundred one-kilo (thirty-two ounce) bars of pure gold. On the marble surrounding of the tower are several paper matchstick men in various forms of tribute. Like the matchstick men, our lives are relatively transient and consumable in relation to the ascribed and lasting power of gold.
Today, a crane being used to prepare Sao Paolo’s Arena Corinthians for next summer’s World Cup collapsed, killing at least three workers.
