Big Man In Brazil
IN BRAZIL, PERHAPS THE ONLY THING THAT'S BIGGER than Eike Fuhrken Batista is Pão de Açúcar, the peak that dominates Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro. "Sugarloaf" mountain stares across to his tenth-floor office in the Praia do Flamengo building. Six years ago Batista swore he'd become Brazil's richest man. Now he is: With a net worth of $27 billion, two-thirds of that gained over the last 12 months, he's.....

Ponzi in Peking
AS DEVELOPED NATIONS struggle to eke out a bit of growth and to get unemployment rates out of double digits, Chinese output gallops ahead at an 8% annual rate. This $4.7 trillion economy, it seems, is the world's dynamoand the prototype for the future.
Take a close look, however, and you may come away thinking .....

Riches in the near abroad
DURING his first visit to Kazakhstan in 1996. Jiang Zemin was reportedly amused to learn that his Central Asian neighbour, the ninth-largest country in world by land mass, had a population of only around 15m. “You probably all know each other,” China’s then president is said to have equipped to his hosts. With its population of 1.3 billion, China naturally thinks

Adding Fizz
THE BHANU GENERAL STORE ON the busy Faizabad highway outside Lucknow city in North India is a minimarket crammed into 1,700 square feet of space and open from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m, seven days a week. Owned and run by 40-year-old Sanjay Singh, Bhanu is one of 7.7 million kirana (grocery) stores that form the backbone of India's retail distribution network: 95% of.....

Can China Save GM?
ON THE CONGESTED streets of Shanghai, where drivers pay no heed to painted lane stripes, Buicks jockey for position with Toyotas, Audis and Volkswagens, honking as they maneuver through traffic made.....

How to Really Fix Wall Street
THE FIRST THING YOU LEARN when you start looking at Wall Street, which I've been doing for 40 years, is to never trust the salesmen. What they promise you isn't necessarily what you get. You need to use common sense, watch out for your own interests and.....

Road to Riches
THE TAJ MAHAL IS INDIA'S BIGGEST tourist attraction, drawing upward of 3 million visitors a year. But getting there can be a slog, though it's located just 125 miles southeast of New Delhi. Between the potholes, bullock carts and.....

Can you learn to be an entrepreneur?
GREGG FAIRBROTHERS WASN'T born to business. He grew up in an academic household. "I didn't know a debit from a credit," he admits. Fairbrothers studied earth sciences at Dartmouth in the '70s, got his master's at Rutgers.....