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  Phew. Somehow, I survived the uncertainty and anxiety of what economists like me often regard as an inefficient tradition: spending hours looking for the right holiday gifts. Fortunately, this year’s trials and tribulations provided me with a few more anxiety-reducing steps for the next set of birthdays, anniversaries and holidays. This time, it was even more clear that most ...

  Elaine Ou 2016 hasn’t been a brilliant year for Silicon Valley. Lawsuits and regulatory investigations have shed light on the antics of high-profile companies such as Theranos, Zenefits, Hampton Creek and Hyperloop One. Even outside of public scandal, dubious tactics abound. A recent Fortune column asks whether Silicon Valley pushes ethical boundaries too far. Has cutthroat competition led the ...

  Bloomberg Italy’s rescue of troubled lender Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA will cost the government about 6.6 billion euros ($7 billion), the country’s central bank says, providing the first official estimate of public funding. About 4.6 billion euros are needed to meet capital requirements and 2 billion euros would be required to compensate the lender’s retail bondholders, ...

  Bloomberg The code name chosen for Nomura Holdings Inc.’s latest cost-cutting drive indicates how strongly its chief executive sees the need for savings at Japan’s largest brokerage. After slashing hundreds of overseas jobs since April, CEO Koji Nagai has unveiled his so-called “Waterline Project,” which will attempt to combat waste and improve the cost-effectiveness of the bank’s daily operations ...

  Reuters India’s benchmark sovereign bonds are set to cap their best performance since the global financial crisis amid record debt purchases by banks, the biggest holders of government securities. Lenders gorged on debt this year as the central bank boosted cash availability in the financial system and deposits surged following the government’s recall of high-value currency notes. That, along ...

  DUBAI / Reuters Commercial Bank of Qatar (CBQ) will open subscriptions for a 1.5 billion riyals ($412 million) rights issue on January 8, the Gulf state’s third-largest lender by assets said. The subscription period for shareholders and holders of subscription rights will run until 1 p.m. Doha time (1000 GMT) on Jan. 22, the bank said in a statement. ...

  Bloomberg While merrily chirping, dancing and posing for selfies, a robot named Pepper looks like another expensive toy at a San Francisco mall. But don’t dismiss it as mere child’s play. Pepper embodies the ambitions of SoftBank Robotics, an Asian joint venture formed by a trio of major technology companies that’s aiming to put its personable robots in businesses ...

  Bloomberg Jack Dorsey wants Twitter Inc.’s users to know he’s listening to them. His tweet soliciting product feedback from users drew hundreds of responses, highlighting concerns with everything from abuse on the site to users’ inability to fix errors after they publish tweets. “We’ll consider everything we heard from you,” Dorsey said Friday on Twitter. “Not going to ship ...

  Relaxnews Like it or not, it will be increasingly difficult for users of the Galaxy Note 7 to use their smartphones. In the wake of limits imposed on the phablet’s recharging capacity, the South Korean manufacturer has now issued a further software update, for the moment confined to the United States and Malaysia, that will definitively prevent the Galaxy ...

  RIDDLE / AP John Redfield watches with pride as his son moves a laser-guided precision saw the size of a semi-truck wheel into place over a massive panel of wood. Redfield’s fingers are scarred from a lifetime of cutting wood and now, after decades of decline in the logging business, he has new hope that his son, too, can ...