Who Really Owns the Roads?

Pennsylvanians had been clamoring for a new road between Philadelphia and Lancaster for years, but the government just couldn’t afford it. So in 1792 the state chartered a company that would build the nation’s first private turnpike–62 miles of stone and gravel–in exchange for the right to collect tolls

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Schapiro, Bair, Warren: Female Sheriffs of Wall Street

A few weeks back, at an event to celebrate the role of women in finance, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner tried to get things started with a joke. He said he had recently come across a headline that asked, “What If Women Ran Wall Street?” “Now that’s an excellent question, but it’s kind of a low bar,” Geithner continued, deadpan amid rising laughter

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The Rage over Goldman Sachs

Lloyd Blankfein, the 54-year-old chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, is powerfully perplexed. In the past six months, his investment-banking and securities-trading firm has roared ahead in profitability by taking risks — that other firms would not — for itself and its clients in an edgy market. It has paid back the billions of dollars, and then some, of taxpayer money the government forced it to take last October; raised billions of dollars in capital from private investors, including $5 billion from Warren Buffett; and urged its cadre of well-paid and high-performing executives to show some restraint on the conspicuous-consumption front.

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Brazilian judge suspends order to reunite American boy and father

A Brazilian supreme court judge on Tuesday suspended a lower court’s order that would have given custody of a 9-year-old boy to the U.S. consulate in Rio de Janeiro, where he was to be reunited with his American father. Judge Marco Aurelio argued against taking Sean Richard Goldman from what has been his home for almost five years to the United States “in an abrupt manner.” Doing so, he wrote in his order published on the supreme court’s Web site, could subject the boy to psychological harm.

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Citigroup’s Surprising Profit: Are Banks Really Out of the Woods?

Citigroup chief financial officer Ned Kelly was trying to explain an aspect of the bank’s better-than-expected first-quarter results on Friday morning when star analyst Meredith Whitney interrupted him. “Could you dumb that down for me?” she asked. It was the question of the week.

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