Planet Business

Image of the week: Brussels blues
Britain has been threatening to leave the European Union more or less since it joined it and this week the anti-Brussels rhetoric found an outlet in the EU's planned tax on financial transactions. UK chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne, who looks like he's just endured Belgium's Eurovision entry, is seen here reacting as he arrived at an EU meeting of finance ministers on Tuesday.

He didn't look much happier when he left it, by which point he was threatening to issue a fresh legal challenge to the tax, even though Britain is not actually going to implement it. "It is up to member states to decide whether they want to damage jobs and investment in their own economies," he sniffed. But if it hurts the rest of Europe, "then we're entitled to challenge that".
Photograph: Reuters/Francois Lenoir

In numbers: Trillionaire's club
25
Number of years until the world gets its first trillionaire, according to a forecast by Bob Lord, a US tax lawyer who writes for Inequality.org.
11
Number of trillionaires there will be within two generations, according a prediction contained in the last Credit Suisse global wealth report.
$76bn
Estimated wealth of Bill Gates (right) at the last count by Forbes magazine. Gates (58), the world's richest man, is expected to be the first billionaire to make the jump to trillionaire status.

The lexicon: The 'winter pause'
The effects of an "unusually cold and snowy" winter prompted a "pause" in the US economy in the first quarter, according to Federal Reserve chairman Janet Yellen. "We have heard many different pieces of evidence as well as what we see in broader statistics that suggest that the weather played a role," she said of the US big freeze in real gross domestic product (GDP).

Yellen insisted this week that warmer economic fronts – including a decline in unemployment – were on the way now that summer is coming. But like any seasoned weather forecaster, she wasn't going to make any 100 per cent definitive statements. "As always, considerable uncertainty surrounds this baseline economic outlook."

Getting to know: Jack Ma
Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba has filed for a mammoth initial public offering in the US, but chairman Jack Ma, a former English teacher, doesn't want stock-owning employees to get carried away.

“This is a pleasant thing,” he said of the IPO in a letter to staff translated by Bloomberg News. “Please handle your wealth properly. While taking care of yourself and your family, please do something within your capacity to repay society and make some charitable contributions. Thank you.” (It’s the “thank you” that makes all the difference here.)

Ma's journey to internet "disrupter" began when he set up a web page offering translation services in 1995. "I had always wished that I was born in a period of war . . . I thought about what I could have achieved in war," he once said. The military's loss is online retail's gain.

The list: Twitter slide
After another bad week, social media company Twitter has lost 50 per cent of its share price so far this year. It can't all be the fault of its last redesign, can it? Of course not. But there is no shortage of reasons as to why its stock might be under pressure.

1 End of the lock-up: The six-month restriction on early Twitter investors selling their shares expired on Tuesday, and it turned out to be a dump-fest.

2 It's an overpriced "cool-kid stock": This is not a scientific valuation analysis, but the words "tech" and "bubble" just seem to go together so easily.

3 New user drought: The rate at which Twitter is signing up new users slowed again in the last quarter, which may be because of . . .

4 The competition: The "growing number of Twitter alternatives" has not gone unnoticed by analysts.

5 The sellers are wrong: Twitter's stock trades at about 19 times its estimated sales in 2014, compared to less than 14 times for Facebook. Still, though, it could all come good.