Business News

Shutterstock I hate debt. Owing money feels terrible and dirty. I’ve been there. Coming out of college, I had $60,000 in loans and it was suffocating. I can clearly remember the day... that I made the final payment, 15 years later. I still have the letter that from Sallie Mae congratulating me on paying off my loans. Good riddance. However, I willingly have mortgage debt. My current home set me back $176,000 and I had the money to pay cash. I briefly considered it, but instead took out a mortgage. I kept the money invested, mostly in an S&P 500 index fund. Let’s take a look at how the experiment is coming along. DEBT RULES! (SOMETIMES) Back in June of 2013, I took out a mortgage for $140,800. I put down 20% to avoid PMI. The terms were 15 years...

Clinton's plan would allow regulators to punish companies that routine slow-walk -- or never send -- the check.

Clinton will hold a conference call with small business owners on Tuesday afternoon

Investors feel Valeant Pharmaceutical's new CFO Paul Herendeen is the right prescription. Shares of the troubled Canadian drugmaker soared 8.8 percent, to $31.27, after the company announced that... Herendeen replaced Robert Rosiello as chief financial officer. Rosiello will be staying on as head of corporate development and strategy. Herendeen may find familiar faces at Valeant....

Uber boss Travis Kalanick may have a new nemesis: Apple boss Tim Cook. Apple was recently in talks to take a stake in Lyft, the No. 2 ride-hailing app in the US, as part of a "strategic partnership"... that could pose a fresh domestic threat to Uber, sources told The Post. The size of Apple's...

A multibillion-dollar payday for Wall Street lawyers has gotten off to a rocky start. A highly anticipated class-action antitrust case accusing 22 banks of rigging the very bedrock of the US financial... system was criticized by a judge on Monday for lacking specifics, but gave lawyers plenty of time to find them. Manhattan federal Judge...

Activity levels across Japan’s massive manufacturing sector continued to decline in August, albeit at the slowest pace seen in six months. The latest Nikkei-Markit “flash”... manufacturing purchasing mangers index (PMI) came in at 49.6 for the month, a slight improvement on the 49.3 final reading offered for July. The PMI measures changes in activity levels from one month to the next. A reading above 50 signals that activity levels are expanding while a reading below this level signals a contraction. In other words, the higher the number the better. The “flash” reading captures responses from around 85-90% of surveyed firms, and is released one week before the final reading is produced.  Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images Like the headline index, most of the...

Global steel production fell for third consecutive month in June, although remained above levels seen in the latter parts of 2015. According to World Steel Association, which represents around 85% of... the world’s steel production, global production slipped to 133.7 million tonnes in July, down 1.7% on the 136 million produced in June. Despite the monthly slide, production levels were 1.4% higher than the levels of a year earlier. In the first seven months of the year, production totaled 929.6 million tonnes, down 1.2% from the same period in 2015.  China, the largest producer globally, saw production levels slip to 66.8 million tonnes in July, down from 69.5 million tonnes in June. From a year earlier it grew by 2.6%. Excluding China, production levels worldwide came in at 66.94...

Lyft President John Zimmer is dispelling rumors that Lyft is looking for a buyer. The acquisition offers it is reviewing are all part of the 'normal course of business.'

Viacom's new board members will be cracking the whip like a chariot rider racing around Circus Maximus this week as they seek to get up to speed on the broken business and some very pressing... decisions. Viacom B shares sank 4 percent in Monday trading, closing at $41.74, as the Street chewed on Paramount's latest...

This is about blank checks and bounced checks -- and why supermarkets are closing in Manhattan. Red Apple is one of the few locally owned supermarkets left in Manhattan, the others having been driven... away by high rents. It's owned by John Catsimatidis, a Greek-American tycoon who also owns a second supermarket brand, Gristedes. The...

Most entrepreneurs I know are so passionate about their new idea that they are surprised when family and friends don’t line up to invest in their new venture. Yet they tend to ignore this... problem, and move on quickly to professional investors. They don’t realize that most Angel investors and venture capitalists will also decline to be first, if you have no commitment from friends and family.

New Yorkers now have a luxury dog-food option -- and the monthly tab can top what it costs to park a Tesla in a Manhattan garage. A startup called Malibu Dog Kitchen has just opened its first store in... Greenwich Village -- and has a slick, new delivery app that's designed by an Uber co-founder....

Latin America has traditionally been the world’s most unequal region, but it has recently shown signs of change. Through the 2000s, high international prices for exports have brought inequality... levels down. Governments have made more concerted efforts to tackle poverty, mounting schemes such as conditional cash transfer, where recipients must meet certain criteria to access welfare benefits. But despite all of this, levels of inequality remain high – and all the while, violence and insecurity have increased across much of the region. This comes in part from the growth of drug-related organized crime, as well as the youth gangs that have proliferated in much of the region – but extreme inequality is a big part of the problem too. The nature of violence and insecurity in...

Microsoft announced that it signed an agreement to acquire smart scheduling service Genee. Both Genee founders expressed their interest in working for Microsoft.

Photo by Mark Tipple / Barcroft Media / Getty Images Whether in developed or emerging markets, investors continue to pile into bond funds at present. This is no better demonstrated than in the chart... below from Citibank. It tracks cumulative fund flows into bond, equity and money market funds going back to 2007, using data supplied by EPFR Global. The solid blue line, indicating flows into developed bond market funds, currently sits at a fresh post-GFC high, the exact opposite to the move seen in developed market equity funds in recent months. Photo by Mark Tipple / Barcroft Media / Getty Images While hard to distinguish on the chart, Citi also note that flows into emerging market bond funds have now increased for the past seven weeks. “Within bond funds, the main inflows as a...

If you want to play video games while driving your car, Nvidia has a chip for you. Just kidding. The graphics chip maker announced today its newest mobile processor, code-named Parker, which serves as... the brains of a platform that could be used in self-driving cars. Andi Skende, distinguished engineer at Nvidia, spoke about Parker […]

The latest lending figures show just how prodigious banks' shift from construction to C&I loans has been since the crisis. Yet a hard look at C&I credits, especially their loss rates, raises questions... about whether they are safer.

Many of us dream of striking out on our own in search of a more fulfilling career or to pursue a passion, but making that massive leap comes with guaranteed risks that few are willing to take. Five... leaders weigh in on the mistakes not to make when leaving their corporate gig.

Chances are good you think you're more or less the same person you were last week. But the lining of your gut is totally different, and the hairs on your head are 2.5 millimeters longer. The... human body's ability to replace worn out cells with shiny new ones is key to the long lifespans we're so used to. There are a couple things we keep all our lives, like the visual cortex, but almost everything wears out and gets replaced, at least for part of our lives. And some things, like our hair and nails, just grow and grow and grow. We've gathered together scientists' estimates scientists of how quickly we go through different types of cells. Many of these ages have been established using a technique called bomb-pulse dating, which uses the traces of atomic radiation we each...

Instant ramen has overtaken cigarettes as the go-to currency in U.S. prisons, according to a study.

BII This story was delivered to BI Intelligence "Payments Briefing" subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here. Walgreens, the U.S. pharmacy chain with more than 8,000 stores, will... become the first merchant to integrate its loyalty program into Android Pay, the company announced.  Users will be able to tap to earn and redeem loyalty points at the checkout ahead of making a payment. This is a significant development because loyalty is the top desired service among mobile wallet users, and Apple Pay already offers this capability. Twenty-two percent of US adults noted that they would like to use their mobile phones to organize, track, and store gift cards, memberships, loyalty, and rewards points as of the end of last year, according to the Federal Reserve. That...

Walmart bought Jet.com for $3.3B a little over a year after the site was officially launched. We used CB Insights data to analyze what some of the other quick turnarounds there were for startups.... Specifically we looked at companies that exited for more than $1B+ and the number of days from their first institutional financing. Q2 VC Report: Big drops in deals and funding Airwatch represents the fastest acquisition post-investment, selling the company to VMWare about a year after raising a gigantic $200M growth equity round (Airwatch was bootstrapped for the decade prior to the fundraise so the company was definitely more mature than a company like Jet.com). Biotech company Flexus Biosciences sold to Bristol-Myers Squibb for a total of $1.25B after raising an initial $15M from Kleiner...

Courtesy of the Mad Fientist. On August 1, 2016, Brandon officially retired. The 34-year-old software developer and blogger behind the Mad Fientist -- who doesn't use his last name online for... privacy reasons -- had been planning and saving to retire early for years.  While he doesn't disclose exact numbers, he says the hardest part of saving enough money to retire decades early was the opposite of what you'd expect: It was being tempted to save too much. "I'd never been a spender," Brandon told Business Insider. "For the first 5 to 7 years of my career, I wasn't saving for anything in particular. I was just saving because I wanted a portfolio. Then I learned about financial independence, and I was like, 'This is perfect. This is what I'm saving for.'" Brandon, who is married but...

South Carolina-based Southern First Bank plans to make its first foray into North Carolina by opening a full-service branch in Raleigh. The bank, which is headquartered in Greenville, S.C., already... …