The press is abuzz this morning over the news that Google (GOOG) could pull out of China over a hacking attempt. The Wall Street Journal explains that the large-scale cyber attack “has been under way for weeks.” The paper continues, “Google said it suffered a ‘highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China’ in mid-December, which it said resulted in ‘the theft of intellectual property.’
The company said it found evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human-rights activists.” The attack may be the last straw for Google in China, since the search engine has begrudgingly put up with Chinese censorship policies for a while. The Times notes, “Since arriving here in 2006 under an arrangement with the government that purged its Chinese search results of banned topics, Google has come under fire for abetting a system that increasingly restricts what citizens can read online.”
Conan O’Brien has publicly announced that if The Tonight Show gets pushed back until after midnight, he won’t be the host. The New York Times explains, “Less than a week after NBC told him it intended to move his ‘Tonight Show’ to a new time, 12:05 a.m., Mr. O’Brien said he would not agree to what he considered a demotion for the institution of ‘The Tonight Show’—and his own career—by going along with the network’s plan to push him back a half-hour to make room for his most recent predecessor, Jay Leno.”
The Washington Post reports that President Obama will announce “a plan to impose a new fee on the nation's biggest financial firms” tomorrow. The fee, which has been under consideration since the summer, is a means of more quickly recovering federal bailout money. The paper says that, according to officials, “The fee could return as much as $120 billion worth of losses to the U.S. Treasury from the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, which was designed to rescue the firms during the economic crisis.” However, critics have already spoken out against the fee, which they argue could ultimately get passed along to bank customers.
The Post also reports that the FDIC is moving forward with a proposal to punish banks that engage in what it considers perilous pay practices. The paper explains, “The FDIC, which collects fees from all banks to repay depositors in failed banks, is considering a plan to reduce the fees paid by companies that take specified steps such as paying bonuses in the form of stock that cannot be sold immediately. Banks that don't comply would face higher fees, on the theory that bankers paid solely for short-term results will take greater risks, increasing the chances of a bank failure.”
The New York Times reports that in an e-mail sent out to a few Goldman Sachs (GS) clients yesterday, an executive confessed that the firm doesn’t always give its clients complete trading information. The paper says, “In an e-mail message to select clients, Thomas C. Mazarakis, the head of Goldman’s fundamental strategies group, acknowledged that his unit often provided investment ideas that the firm had already traded on. Sometimes Goldman has even taken the opposite approach, betting against particular instruments that the group has recommended.”
GM is betting that truck sales are going to pick up once again. The Wall Street Journal reports that the auto company is planning “a major update of its full-size pickups” that could cost up to $1 billion. The business decision could be considered an affront to the government administration that bailed out GM and has been promoting the national adoption of smaller, less fuel-dependent vehicles. Still, the paper says, “administration officials said Tuesday that any decision by GM to move more heavily into trucks was the company's own business, and that neither the Treasury nor the White House was involved.”
And finally, the New York Times reports that Nintendo (NTDOY) and Netflix (NFLX) are teaming up. The paper says, “Nintendo is bringing Netflix’s online streaming video service to its Wii gaming console, the most popular in the industry, the companies plan to announce Wednesday. The service lets subscribers choose from a catalog of generally older movies and television shows and watch them instantly.”
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