Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom on Tuesday said they wanted to merge their British mobile-phone units T-Mobile UK and Orange UK to create a market leader better able to compete with two remaining big rivals. The two companies said they had started exclusive negotiations about putting their assets into a 50-50 joint venture by the end of October. The combined company would have 28.4 million subscriptions or 37 percent of the UK's mobile-phone user base. Deutsche Telekom would put its ...

Feel like your company has been particularly stingy on the raises this year? You're not imagining it. For 2009, the typical non-hourly worker will see a 1.8% bump in salary, according to a survey by the HR consultancy Hewitt Associates. That increase, the smallest in at least 33 years, doesn't even keep up with inflation. Yes, it's true, we're in a recession, and nearly one in ten workers is unemployed. There are plenty of people willing to work for ...

The expletive-laden rant Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner unleashed during a closed meeting with regulators on Friday, July 31, has players in Washington and on Wall Street wondering one thing: What got the usually mild-mannered Geithner so incensed? Establishing a new regulatory framework for the financial markets is not the kind of politically charged, life-or-death issue that should drive a normally discreet Cabinet member to go on a blue streak in front of dozens of officials. But Geithner and the ...

The Securities & Exchange Commission , concerned about the exponential growth of hyper-frequency trading, announced on Tuesday, Aug. 4, that it was considering a ban on one form of this activity, known as flash trading. But it has said nothing about an even bigger element of high-frequency trading, known as co-location, even as the New York Stock Exchange is building two new facilities to house such traders. High-frequency trading is a catchall description of several ...

For a while there, it looked like the doomsayers would be proved right. On July 29, the Shanghai Composite Index lost as much as 7.7% of its value before ending the day down 5% on record-breaking trading volume of $43.3 billion. The sell-off was the largest one-day decline in Chinese stocks in eight months, and set off panic purging in Hong Kong, where the Hang Seng Index lost 2.4%. Even the U.S. got dinged, with the Dow Jones Industrial ...

The $787 billion stimulus plan is turning out to be far less stimulating than its architects expected. Back in early January, when Obama was still President-elect, two of his chief economic advisers, and leading proponents of a stimulus bill, predicted that the passage of a large economic-aid package would boost the economy and keep the unemployment rate below 8%. It hasn't quite worked out that way. Last month, the jobless rate in America hit 9.5%, the highest level it ...

When Sarah Janosek drove to see her first patient in the early morning of Nov. 5, she knew her husband, a software engineer, could be one of the hundreds of Advanced Micro Devices employees laid off that day. "He called me at approximately 10 a.m. and told me they had not called him in yet," remembers Janosek, a 47-year-old hospice nurse and mother of three teenagers in Austin, Texas. "And then he called me 15 minutes later to say ...

Since the dawn of time, people have found nifty ways to clean up after the bathroom act. The most common solution was simply to grab what was at hand: coconuts, shells, snow, moss, hay, leaves, grass, corncobs, sheep's wool -- and, later, thanks to the printing press -- newspapers, magazines, and pages of books. The ancient Greeks used clay and stone; the Romans, sponges and salt water. But the idea of a commercial product designed solely to wipe one's ...

Heading abroad from the U.S. this summer? Consider packing a few extra dollars. Since early March, the greenback has fallen 11% against the euro and 17% against Britain's pound, as investors who had sought out the dollar as a safe haven during the worst of the crisis now head for riskier assets. Throw in concerns over the U.S.'s spiraling deficit and calls from China for an alternative reserve currency, and "the likelihood is the dollar's going to remain under pressure," says Simon Derrick, head ...

Don't let my politeness fool you," says Elizabeth Warren. The Harvard Law professor and head of the congressional panel monitoring the bank bailout had just finished a hearing in New York City and was nibbling at a dish of pasta with zucchini. "I can't think of anyone I'm afraid of," she adds. "Certainly not someone who may have had a hand in bringing this country to the brink of disaster." Warren, 59, is exceedingly polite. She has strong ...