Privately-held Toys R Us has agreed to pay a $1.3 million penalty for violating a 1998 order that barred it from pushing suppliers to refuse to sell to competitors or from urging limits to those sales, the Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday.
The FTC said in a complaint that Toys R Us subsidiary Babies R Us had asked suppliers what they were charging discounters and complained to them about discounts that other retailers were giving consumers, the FTC said. Get the full story »
BATS Global Markets plans to list U.S. public stocks by year end, opening the door for companies to float shares somewhere other than the Big Board or Nasdaq for the first time in years. Get the full story »
A home for sale in Elgin, Aug. 24, 2010. (Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune)
January home prices fell for the sixth month in a row, approaching lows reached in the depths of the recession in 2009.
The Chicago area fared worse than the national average, with the local index reaching its lowest level since 2001. The index for Chicago-area single-family home prices fell 7.5 percent from the year-ago period, and dropped 1.8 percent in January from December. Get the full story »
Rating agency Standard & Poor’s delivered a damning verdict of the euro zone’s new plans for resolving sovereign debt crises, downgrading two of the euro zone’s most troubled member states on Tuesday. Get the full story »
The Federal Reserve plans to release documents on Thursday identifying financial companies that received Fed loans to survive the financial crisis. Get the full story »
From Bloomberg News | Peoria-based manufacturing giant Caterpillar Inc. paid more than $9 million to settle a paralyzed worker’s lawsuit over a tractor accident that generated one of last year’s largest produc-liability verdicts, according to people familiar with the accord.
Nokia on Tuesday filed another complaint with the U.S. trade panel (ITC) alleging that rival Apple infringes its patents in iPhones, iPads and other products. Get the full story »
U.S. consumer confidence fell in March after hitting a three-year high in the prior month as expectations about jobs and income growth worsened, according to a private sector report released on Tuesday. Get the full story »
Americans are more likely to pay their credit card bills than their mortgages, according to a study from TransUnion LLC. The trend, which began during the Great Recession, reflects the lingering affects of the housing crisis.
Many experts expected the payment behavior to revert by now to the old dynamic of consumers paying their mortgages first, but that has yet to happen, the Chicago-based credit score agency said. Get the full story »
Amazon.com Inc. is planning to start a service that would let people store music and video online and access it from various digital devices, people familiar with the matter said. The company could announce the effort as early as Tuesday, the people said. Get the full story »
Elite Street | By Bob Goldsborough | Former Chicago Blackhawks right winger and defenseman Dustin Byfuglien on Monday sold his five-bedroom, 4,200-square-foot stucco and stone house in Chicago’s Roscoe Village for $1.08 million. Get the full story »
Audits of millionaires, especially those making more than $10 million, surged 73 percent last year, hitting more than 18 percent of taxpayers in the highest income bracket, according to recently released statistics from the IRS. Get the full story »
Rosie O’Donnell, a multiple Emmy winner for “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” and former co-host of “The View,” is going to help fill the void at Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Studios when Winfrey retires her nationally syndicated TV program after 25 seasons in May.
Chicago Harpo employees were told Monday that O’Donnell’s new one-hour daytime talk show, set to launch this fall on cable’s OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, will tape on Winfrey’s soon-to-be-vacated stage in the studio space at West Washington Boulevard and North Carpenter Street.
Aurelius Capital Management, the largest junior creditor in the Tribune Co. bankruptcy case, on Monday amended its proposed plan for restructuring the media company in an attempt to make the plan more palatable to senior creditors and the judge presiding over the Chapter 11 proceedings. Get the full story »
From Crain’s Chicago Business | Four Chicago-area hospitals were included in a Thomson Reuters study of the top 100 hospitals in the U.S. The hospitals included were Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove, Central DuPage Hospital in Winfield, Edward Hospital in Naperville and Silver Cross Hospital in southwest suburban Joliet.
