One of the first things I noticed during my ride today in one of Google's driverless cars was the big red kill button between the two front seats. During my 20-minute demo, we never needed the button. In fact, the ride was so smooth that I soon forgot it was there. Safety will be a selling point for driverless cars. Human error accounts for the vast majority of traffic accidents, research has shown. But if you remove the human, is the technology good enough to make the roads safer?
Updated 6 Years ago

Some investors may have gotten early word of changes to Federal Reserve policy between 1997 and 2013 and profited by trading before the policy shifts were publicly announced, according to Singapore-based researchers. Trading records show abnormally large price movements and imbalances in buy and sell orders that are “statistically significant and in the direction of the subsequent policy surprise,” according to a paper by Gennaro Bernile, Jianfeng Hu and Yuehua Tang at Singapore Management University.
Updated 6 Years ago

Bank of China Ltd. is seeking 100 billion yuan($16 billion) from selling preferred stock in the largest fundraising by a Chinese bank in almost four years to comply with stricter capital requirements. The board of the nation’s fourth-biggest bank by market value approved a plan to sell as many as 600 million of the shares through private transactions on the mainland, becoming the latest Chinese company to issue the securities domestically since the government began allowing them to two months ago. The Beijing-based company plans to sell no more than 400 million preferred shares offshore, it said in a filing yesterday.
Updated 6 Years ago

Nations from Colombia to Indonesia are taking advantage of the longest emerging-market-currencies rally since 2009 to pile up record reserves, bolstering their ability to fend off the next foreign-exchange market crisis. The 12 developing nations with the biggestforeign reserves outside of China added $34 billion in the past three months, lifting their combined holdings to $2.98 trillion on April 30, the most since Bloomberg began compiling the data in 2008. A gauge of 20 major emerging-market currencies is recovering after a 12-month plunge of 11 percent sent it to a four-year low in February.
Updated 6 Years ago

Chinese police on Wednesday said they had charged the British former China head of drugmaker GlaxoSmithKlinePLC and other colleagues with corruption, after a probe found the firm made billions of yuan from bribing doctors and hospitals. Mark Reilly and two Chinese executives, Zhang Guowei and Zhao Hongyan, were also suspected of bribing officials in the industry and commerce departments of Beijing and Shanghai, the official Xinhua news agency reported, quoting police in Hunan province.
Updated 6 Years ago

As World Cup fever heats up, a note of caution: the world's most widely viewed sporting event could spell trouble for markets. "For many, the soccer World Cup is a time of anxiousness and suffering, followed by chaotic collapse (usually on penalties to Germany). England fans have come to expect this but, as a client recently pointed out, the pain doesn't always stop there. Markets also suffer around World Cup time," Dario Perkins, an economist at Lombard Street Research wrote in a note.
Updated 6 Years ago

Delays by the U.S. in reviewing Keystone XL are helping build momentum for an oil pipeline to Canada’s East Coast. TransCanada Corp. (TRP), the company proposing the $5.4 billion conduit to connect Alberta’s oil sands with U.S. Gulf Coast refiners, may have an easier path to approval with its alternative to the nation’s Atlantic Coast. The C$12 billion ($11 billion) Energy East would be North America’s largest oil line, with capacity to ship 1.1 million barrels a day.
Updated 6 Years ago

A mine explosion in western Turkey has killed 201, according to Energy Minister Taner Yildiz, and the toll could rise with many more still trapped. Yildiz told reporters 787 workers were in the Soma mine when the explosion hit a power unit, Reuters reported.
Updated 6 Years ago

A record number of Americans are renouncing their citizenship as they seek to remove the burden of filing complicated and costly tax returns simply for living in another country. According to Bloomberg News, just over 1,000 Americans gave up their nationality in the three months from January to March. That’s a significant increase from the 670 who did so in the same time span last year, and it’s already one third of the way to matching the total number of Americans who renounced their citizenship in 2013.
Updated 6 Years ago

Twitter announced that it's introducing a "muting" feature, which lets users "edit" their Twitter experience and hide certain users and their tweets from view. Now might be the time to improve your tweeting skills.--Twitter
Updated 6 Years ago