Add the nation's largest accounting firms to the list of watchdogs and regulators that didn't catch the multibillion-dollar Madoff investment scam. KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers, BDO Seidman and McGladrey & Pullen all gave clean bills of health to the numerous funds that invested with Bernard Madoff and his asset-management firm. Clients say the large accounting firms signed off on statements that said the Madoff investment vehicles had billions of dollars in assets as well as an unlikely track record showing ...

Tis the season to be selfish. Right after the global financial crisis exploded in 2008, many economists fretted that countries looking to hold on to their share of a shrinking pie would become more self-interested and protectionist, plunging the planet into an even sharper downturn, just as happened in the 1930s after the Great Depression. Thanks to panic-fueled crisis management by policymakers, it didn't happen. But after three years of pain and very little economic gain, it may be happening ...

You'd expect the headquarters of Telenor, Norway's biggest telecom company, to reflect at least some of its Scandinavian side. Sure enough, meeting rooms are furnished with wooden floors, sleek tables and angular armchairs; there's even a breathtaking view of the Oslo Fjord. But look closer. The small silver plates and golden sculpted boats in one such room are from Bangladesh; the green-and-gold tea set, with its five matching cups, from Thailand. And the black-and-gold rug hanging on a wall is ...

HOW can we capitalize on the inherent desire of people all over the world that things should be done, wherever they can be done, by private enterprise?" This fundamental question was raised by David Lilienthal, onetime chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, now a consultant to foreign governments on their own development programs. Along with such far-reaching solutions as the Magna Carta of investment capital's rights proposed by Germany's Hermann Abs and the world-investment-guarantee plan proposed by Vice President Richard Nixon, the delegates had some ideas of their ...

Like some malefactor being grilled by Mike Wallace in his 60 Minutes prime, Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia Business School, gets hot under the third-degree light of Charles Ferguson's questioning in Inside Job. Hubbard, who helped design George W. Bush's tax cuts on investment gains and stock dividends, finally snaps, "You have three more minutes. Give it your best shot." But he has already shot himself in the foot. Frederic Mishkin, a former Federal Reserve Board governor and for now ...

The intensity with which the spiffily attired investment brokers of the African Banking Corp. stare at their computer screens is misleading. A closer look reveals that they're either fiddling with iTunes or playing solitaire. Still, their boss, Seti Shumba, who moonlights as chairman of the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange, offers them smiles and pats on the back — he's just glad they showed up to work. These men would have once spent their days barking out orders for shares ...

One of the best ways to make money and reduce risk in today's choppy market is through a classic hedge fund: one that bets on some stocks to go up and others to go down. Since January 2000, when the Dow peaked, hedge funds have risen 13% on average, while the typical stock has fallen 20%, reports Hennessee Group, a hedge-fund tracker. Over the past three years, assets in the 6,000 U.S. hedge funds have more than doubled, to $563 ...

In the midst of a steaming-hot Malaysian jungle, sweat-stained factory workers bend over their looms, threading copper into bales of cable wire that gets so hot, it must snake through culverts of water before it can be touched. The factory floor is awash in tea-colored light from windows smeared with soot. The grinding of machines creates a constant, earsplitting din. There is no air-conditioning. "It would cost too much," says Alvin Mui, president of P.I.E. Industrial, which operates the factory. ...

The economy may be troubled, but one area is thriving: social media. They begin with Facebook and extend through a dizzying array of companies that barely existed five years ago: Twitter, LinkedIn, Groupon, Yammer, Yelp, Flickr, Ning, Digg--and the list goes on. These companies are mostly private but have attracted the ardent attention of Wall Street and investors, with Facebook now worth a purported $75 billion and Groupon valued at close to $25 billion. There can be little doubt that ...

Sometime in the next few weeks, Facebook will officially log its 500 millionth active citizen. If the website were granted terra firma, it would be the world's third largest country by population, two-thirds bigger than the U.S. More than 1 in 4 people who browse the Internet not only have a Facebook account but have returned to the site within the past 30 days. Just six years after Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg helped found Facebook in his ...