Business Blog

Last month, one of the biggest financial scandals in history came to light, involving many of the most pre-eminent banks in the world. But public reaction has been so muted that a Los Angeles Times columnist was compelled to ask, “Why aren’t more people furious about the Libor scandal?” In fact, people are. The news [...]

Once belittled as an insubstantial electronic scrapbook with narrow appeal, the 2-year-old website Pinterest is maturing into a marketing monster. Visits to the site have increased more than 4,000 percent in less than a year, vaulting it to the No. 3 spot in social-media popularity behind only Facebook and Twitter. Some big-name retailers are taking [...]

The explosive growth of the U.S. Hispanic population should be making consumer-products companies rich, but instead, it is leaving them confused. The U.S. Latino community, already a $1 trillion annual consumer market comprising 52 million people (out of a total U.S. population of 311 million), is on course to grow by another 50 percent in [...]

Apple created and marketed the iPad mobile tablet as a media player for the family, and it is that. But its versatility, coupled with the imaginations of its users, has launched mini-revolutions within some business sectors, as entrepreneurs discover the iPad is a readymade platform for cloud computing. An illustration: App-makers and entrepreneurs are taking [...]

The Export-Import Bank, a legacy of the New Deal that helps thousands of small businesses and some very large ones compete in foreign markets, teeters on the brink of extinction because it has become a symbol of big government largesse and corporate cronyism. For the bank’s allies, it is a distressing sign of the extreme [...]

In a possible foreshadowing of long-awaited findings by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin has found “no direct link to reports of groundwater contamination” from the controversial natural gas extraction method known as fracking. According to project leader Charles Groat, “From what we’ve seen so far, many [...]

U.S. business leaders are losing faith in the ability of higher education to train the work force of the future. That’s the takeaway from a report entitled “Hiring and Higher Education,” released Feb. 13 by two think tanks, The Committee for Economic Development (CED) in Washington and Public Agenda in New York. The report compiles [...]

With the residential real estate industry shell-shocked from years of a moribund market, its spokespeople can be forgiven for taking a cautious attitude toward this week’s announcement of a $25 billion settlement with five of the nation’s biggest mortgage lenders over flawed and fraudulent foreclosure practices. The money in the settlement will mostly go to [...]