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Crude oil advanced Wednesday, extending the previous session’s 4% gain, as investors continued their bid for riskier assets.
What prices are doing: Crude oil for March delivery rose 33 cents, or 0.4%, to settle at $77.33 a barrel Wednesday.
Oil surged 3.8% Tuesday to settle at $77.01 a barrel. Prices tracked rising stocks and were […]

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The top-grossing movie in the world, Avatar, is on screens now, and it clearly identifies the most evil force in the universe. It’s business.
"There’s only one thing the shareholders hate more than bad publicity," says the smarmy manager of an unnamed company’s mining operations on the planet Pandora in Avatar, "and that’s a […]

Financial and energy stocks helped push the Toronto stock market slightly higher Monday.
The rise followed a three-session losing streak brought on by Chinese moves to slow bank lending, proposals to curb risk-taking by U.S. banks and doubt over whether U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke would be appointed to another term.
The S&P/TSX composite index rose […]

St. Louis-area casinos saw their business grow in 2009, but all of the gains were concentrated in two casinos.
Revenue at the region’s six casinos climbed nearly 2 percent for the year to $1.05 billion, despite a tough economy that had gamblers nationwide holding their wallets tighter. In December, casino revenue grew 1.7 percent, […]

A wave of consolidation may sweep through U.S. small business lenders as the beleaguered industry seeks to take advantage of low valuations to combine with rivals or other large companies in a bid to survive.
Once a dominant player in the business development companies (BDC) industry, American Capital Ltd, which recently restructured its debt, may […]

It was part of the corporate lore at Bank of America: Whenever legendary boss Hugh McColl would buy a bank in Florida, Texas, or Georgia in the 1980s and early 1990s, he’d call his trusted lieutenant Ken Lewis to his Charlotte office and order Lewis to fix the new acquisition to fit his revolutionary […]

Ballpark — A mildly pungent jalape

The negotiations over health reform are kicking into high gear. And one of the top issues is whether to make insurance companies pay for some of it.
President Obama in his joint address to Congress Wednesday said that he supports the idea as a way to help fund the cost of reform — which, depending […]

Germany and France enjoyed a shock return to economic growth in the second quarter of the year, data showed on Thursday, ending their recessions earlier than many policymakers and economists had expected.
German gross domestic product rose by 0.3% in the second quarter, bringing an end to the country’s deepest recession since World War Two […]

Mortgage applications fell for the first time in four weeks, driven by a drop in demand for home refinancing loans as interest rates climbed, data from an industry group showed on Wednesday.
Applications for loans to buy a home, an early indicator of sales, were flat. Lack of interest for purchase loans does not bode […]