Profitshop

Missing the Austin ditch in which he’d slept most nights for the last two years, Mike Wille curled up on the front lawn of the large house his mother had just left him via her suicide note. Her death meant that Mike – known to fans of his street music and his homelessness blog,  The Ground Score , as Mad Mike the Hippy Bum – would soon be a millionaire. Mad Mike worried that, given his love of drink and drugs, he could not survive such a lifestyle shift. At birth, Mike’s left leg was shorter than his right by an inch, with no defined calf muscle and an under-formed foot  sans  big toe. When I visited his mother’s former home near  New Orleans  recently, he showed me a box of family papers he’d unearthed regarding the lengthening of his leg by the famous doctor Gavriil Ilizarov ,  who invented the procedure. Still, the bum leg helped Mike nurture a negative outlook that, once he became teenager, fractured his relationship with his already volatile parents. “My mother was a

Some Wall Street stars are decamping for Silicon Valley, corralled by tech giants and tech start-ups looking for financial expertise, marquee talent and bragging rights. Morgan Stanley announced Tuesday that Ruth Porat, its chief financial officer and a 28-year veteran of the firm, will become the CFO of Google  at the end of April. (She replaces CFO Patrick Pichette, who  quit this month  before his successor had been chosen.) Porat is a big get for Google, which has had issues with analysts and regulators over  slowing growth  and concerns that it  bullies competitors  on the Web. Porat has a sterling reputation on Wall Street and in Washington, where's she's regarded as an executive who has a deft hand with regulators and investors. During the financial crisis that began in 2008, Porat  advised the Treasury Department  on the bailout of the foundering government-sponsored lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. She helped rebuild Morgan Stanley’s reputation with inv

As former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell famously advised, China favors " overwhelming force " in its campaigns, military or otherwise. Most recently, in a direct challenge to the global economic architecture established by the U.S. and its allies after World War II, Beijing has pledged nearly $200 billion to various new lending institutions and funds -- to bolster trade with Europe, establish a footprint in the Indian Ocean, build infrastructure across Asia and generally increase the mainland's influence worldwide. A new push to establish the renminbi as one of the world's reserve currencies adds to this campaign. The move would confer prestige, take America down a peg and attract more investment. Viewed that way, Washington should fear the yuan joining the ranks of the dollar, euro, yen and British pound, right? Wrong. Increased use of the yuan internationally will force China to restructure more radically than its leaders may realize. It also could st

President Barack Obama has yet to meet with the new head of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and won't see Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg this week, even though he is in Washington for three days.  Stoltenberg’s office requested a meeting with Obama well in advance of the visit, but never heard anything from the White House, two sources close to the NATO chief told me.  The leaders of almost all the other 28 NATO member countries have made time for Stoltenberg since he took over the world's largest military alliance in October. Stoltenberg, twice the prime minister of Norway,  met Monday  with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa to discuss the threat of the Islamic State and the crisis in Ukraine, two issues near the top of Obama's agenda. Kurt Volker, who served as the U.S. permanent representative to NATO under both President George W. Bush and Obama, said the president broke a long tradition.  “The Bush administration held a firm line tha

Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers was selected as the National Football League’s Most Valuable Player for the second time in his career following a season in which he led the league’s top-scoring offense while throwing 38 touchdown passes and only five interceptions. Rodgers, 31, had the NFL’s second-highest quarterback rating this season, completing almost 66 percent of his passes for 4,381 yards. He became just the second quarterback in NFL history to throw more than 35 touchdown passes with five interceptions or fewer. Rodgers was selected over Houston Texans end J.J. Watt, who was seeking to become the first defensive player to win the MVP award since Lawrence Taylor in 1986. Watt had 20 1/2 sacks, four forced fumbles, five fumble recoveries, one interception and scored five touchdowns, including three receiving. He was named the NFL’s Defensive Player of the Year. Rodgers, who also was voted the Associated Press NFL MVP after the 2011 season, led a Packers’ off

 U.S. drillers pulled 94 oil rigs out of fields in a single week, the biggest retreat to date, as crude prices capped the longest stretch of monthly declines since 2009. The oil rig count dropped to a three-year low of 1,223, Baker Hughes Inc. said on its website Friday. It was the biggest weekly decline since the Houston-based oil-field services company began collecting the data in 1987. The Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico, the country’s biggest oil field, was hit hardest, losing 25 rigs. Drillers are parking rigs as a global collapse in oil prices prompts producers to curb spending, service contractors to fire thousands and at least one oil-rich county in California to declare a fiscal emergency. Banks including Societe Generale SA have said prices may fall below $40 a barrel as global supplies surge and OPEC resists calls to curb output. “The risk is that we go into a $30- to $40-a-barrel range if the market is too impatient and doesn’t want to wait for lower rig cou

Citigroup Inc.’s loss on a surge in the Swiss franc this month was exacerbated by the bank’s decision to let protections against currency swings lapse a week earlier, according to people with knowledge of the situation. The bank didn’t renew derivatives trades that would have blunted the impact from Switzerland’s surprise move to let the franc rise, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing the strategy. The company’s losses exceeded $200 million in the hours after the announcement, before traders pared the deficit to closer to $150 million, the people said. The loss at Citigroup, which dethroned Deutsche Bank AG last year as the world’s biggest foreign-exchange dealer, illustrates the perils of unhedged trading in the currency markets. Citigroup has faced particular scrutiny of its ability to manage risks after soured mortgage holdings forced it to draw more taxpayer support than any U.S. bank during the financial crisis. Citigroup was exposed after selling