Apple awards executive Tim Cook 75,000 stock options for navigating without Jobs

The Chief Operating Officer of Apple Inc. received a $5 million dollar bonus in cash and 75,000 in stock options for leading the company while the chief executive was on medical leave. The 75,000 in stock options is worth just under $17 million at today's prices. This is quiet a nice perk for a person for doing their job.

A Consumer Bill Gives Exemption on Payday Loans

This article focuses on legislation being proposed in an effort of "bipartisanship" that would call for more regulation on nonbank fincial companies such as payday lenders. However, Senators such as the Senate Banking Committee's chairman Christopher Dodd and Republican Senator Bob Corker (Tennessee) have been advocating to remove a provision that allows government to "crack down" on payday lenders. Consumer advocates say the proposal would leave the agency unable to enforce their policies, this may be caused by a failure of markets because of corruption. Because the companies that this policy would effect are the same ones that have given substantial contributions to both Dodd and Corker.

AIG sells Alico unit to MetLife for $15.5 billion

This article talks about the sale of AIG's major global insurance units to Metlife for $15.5 billion. With this this sale being made, Metlife will pay $6.8billion in cash and the rest will be paid in a mix of common and preferred stock to the American Life Insurance Co.
Both boards of directors have approved the sale and expect to close it by the end of the year. According to AIG this sale together with their March 1 sale of American International Insurance to Prudential of Britain would put the company on a track that will generate nearly $51 billion which will go towards reducing its outstanding debt.
This article explains how AIG is doing its best to regain stability and repay taxpayers. The AIG company has made quite a loss over the past year and view these two sales as a positive one that will ultimately help it get back to stable.

Banking Battleground

The article discusses Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post and Rob Johnson, director of the Economic Policy Initiative at the Roosevelt Institute. This initiative is for people to move their assets from large mega banks to smaller local banks in order to force reform to large banks. While this may seem like a good idea but I could forsee this causing an issue with the lending of large sums of money.

Iraqis defy intimidation to vote, attacks kill 36

We've spent nearly $1 trillion in Iraq, lost 4,000 lives...let's hope these elections work.