DealBook: Buffett’s Annual Letter Plays Up Newspapers’ Value

Over the last half-century, Warren E. Buffett has built a reputation as a contrarian investor, betting against the crowd to amass a fortune estimated at $54 billion.Mr. Buffett underscored that contrarian instinct in his annual letter to shareholders published on Friday. In a year when Mr. Buffett did not make any large acquisitions, he bought dozens of newspapers, a business others have shunned....

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A Volatile Week Ends With Modest Gains

Stocks advanced modestly on Friday, leaving the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index with slight gains after a volatile week, as strong economic data overshadowed growth concerns in China and Europe and let investors discount the impact of federal spending cuts. Data reported early in the day showed that Asian factories were slowing and European output was falling, setting off a sharp...

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Advertising: A Shared History in Detroit Is an Ad Inspiration

THE Chrysler Group is bringing to life the advertising theme for its Chrysler brand, “Imported from Detroit,” through an innovative partnership with a coming Broadway show that bears the Detroit-inspired name of one of the most famous brands in music. The partnership unites Chrysler and “Motown: the Musical,” about the musical legacy of Berry Gordy and Motown, the record label he founded...

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Groupon Shares Crumple After Dismal Outlook, Take-Rate Cut

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Groupon Inc lost a quarter of its market value on Wednesday after the company revealed it began to take a smaller cut of revenue on daily deals during the holidays, sacrificing revenue and profits to attract and keep merchants. The cut in its "take rate", which some analysts had said was needed to revive flagging interest among merchants in its Internet offers, was...

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DealBook: Wall Street Pay Rises, for Those Who Still Have a Job

7:39 p.m. | Updated Wall Street may be shrinking — cutting thousands of jobs over the last year — but for those who remain, the pay is still very lucrative.The average cash bonus for those employed in the financial industry in New York last year rose roughly 9 percent, to $121,900, Thomas P. DiNapoli, New York State’s comptroller, said on Tuesday.Cash bonuses in total are forecast to increase by roughly...

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Lowe’s Fourth-Quarter Earnings Beat Expectations

Richard Drew/Associated PressRobert Niblock, chief executive of Lowe’s, said consumer spending was increasing. The results are a sign that people are beginning to feel better about spending money on their homes as the housing market slowly recovers. Lowe’s chief executive, Robert A. Niblock, said the company was seeing a pickup in spending even in areas...

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Barnes & Noble Weighs Its Nook Losses

Elise Amendola/Associated PressBarnes & Noble has committed heavily to making and selling its own e-readers, and despite an upswing in tablet sales over the Christmas season, the Nook was not a beneficiary. Even for a company with a lot of bad news lately, the bulletin from Barnes & Noble this month had an ominous feel. Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest book chain, warned that...

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Major Banks Aid in Payday Loans Banned by States

Major banks have quickly become behind-the-scenes allies of Internet-based payday lenders that offer short-term loans with interest rates sometimes exceeding 500 percent. With 15 states banning payday loans, a growing number of the lenders have set up online operations in more hospitable states or far-flung locales like Belize, Malta and the West Indies to more easily evade statewide...

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Alcatel-Lucent Names Chief to Lead a Major Downsizing

BERLIN — Alcatel-Lucent, the struggling French telecommunications equipment maker, on Friday hired a former Vodafone and France Télécom executive, Michel Combes, to lead the company through what might be a major downsizing. Mr. Combes, 51, will take over for Ben Verwaayen, who had failed in four years to bring the equipment maker, created by the 2006 merger of Alcatel of France and Lucent...

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Citi Changes Terms of Executive Bonuses

Citigroup responded to anger about the size of its executive pay packages on Thursday by changing the way it calculates the bonuses given to top executives. Starting with last year’s compensation, a portion of the bonuses paid out to Citi’s executives will now be linked to the company’s performance relative to that of other big banks. Citi has been a prominent symbol in the debate...

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Sony Unveils PlayStation 4, Aiming for Return to Glory

For the Sony Corporation, a tech industry also-ran, the moment of reckoning is here. The first three generations of PlayStation sold more than 300 million units, pioneered a new style of serious gaming and produced hefty profits. PlayStation 4, introduced by Sony on Wednesday evening, is a bold bid to recapture those glory days of innovation and success. The first new PlayStation in...

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Dell’s Revenue Falls 11 Percent

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Dell Inc on Tuesday reported a 31 percent drop in profit, hurt by a shrinking consumer business, as investors weighed founder Michael Dell's offer to buy out the world's No.3 maker of personal computers. Michael Dell, teaming up with private equity firm Silver Lake and software maker Microsoft, is offering $13.65 a share to buy out the company, but at least four...

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DealBook: Reader's Digest Files for Bankruptcy, Again

Executives at Reader’s Digest must be hoping that the magazine’s second trip to bankruptcy court in under four years will be its last.The magazine’s parent, RDA Holding, filed for Chapter 11 protection late on Sunday in another effort to cut down the debt that has plagued the pocket-size publication for years. The company is hoping to convert about $465 million of its debt into equity held by its...

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Rem Vyakhirev, Former Chief of Gazprom, Dies at 78

MOSCOW — Rem I. Vyakhirev, who as chief executive of the huge Russian energy company Gazprom during the 1990s resisted efforts by reformers to break up and privatize it, only to end his tenure a billionaire owning valuable pieces of the company himself, died on Feb. 11. He was 78. His death was confirmed by a Gazprom spokesman, who did not provide the cause or place of death. Early...

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The Education Revolution: In China, Families Bet It All on a Child in College

Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesWu Caoying studied English under her father’s watchful eye in 2006. She is now a sophomore in college. More Photos »HANJING, China — Wu Yiebing has been going down coal shafts practically every workday of his life, wrestling an electric drill for $500 a month in the choking dust of claustrophobic tunnels, with one goal in mind: paying for his daughter’s education. ...

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Income Gains After Recession Went Mostly to Top 1%

WASHINGTON — Incomes rose more than 11 percent for the top 1 percent of earners during the economic recovery, but barely at all for everybody else, according to new data. The numbers, produced by Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, show overall income growing by just 1.7 percent over the period. But there was a wide gap between the top 1 percent, whose...

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DealBook: Blackstone Keeps Most of Its Money With SAC

The Blackstone Group, the largest outside investor in the hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, said it would keep most of its $550 million with the hedge fund for three more months while it monitors developments in the government’s insider trading investigation.The move by Blackstone comes as SAC’s clients faced a regularly scheduled quarterly deadline on Thursday to decide whether to continue investing...

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Hearings Begin on Treasury Nominee

Doug Mills/The New York TimesRepublicans have promised to grill Jacob J. Lew, center, President Obama’s nominee for Treasury secretary, over the government’s trillion-dollar deficits. WASHINGTON — Jacob J. Lew, President Obama’s nominee for Treasury secretary, faced some fierce questioning on Wednesday from the Senate Finance Committee on his tenure at the bailed-out Citigroup and on an...

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