Panagiotis Tsiriotakis, Brittany Decoste, 11, and Barry Decoste dance while they work in front of the Acropolis Organics olive oil stand in St. Lawerence Market in Toronto on April 24, 2010.JENNIFER ROBERTS
Each week, Report on Business editors choose five stories that shouldn't be missed. Here are the 'must reads' for the week of April 26, 2010.
Politicians weighing a bailout of the hugely indebted Greek government face a grim choice that looks ominously like the one that U.S. policy makers confronted in the days before Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. failed. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and others who hold the keys to the rescue funds can either help Greece and accept the fact that a bailout creates a so-called moral hazard that encourages other nations such as Portugal, Spain and Italy to ask for handouts of their own. Or they can cut Athens loose to default on its debt, and risk a freezing of credit markets like the one that followed Lehman's collapse, causing damage that spreads into the banking system and other key financial markets.
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Panagiotis Tsiriotakis landed in Canada seven years ago from the sun-drenched, hilly isle of Crete, with no more than $200 and two drums of olive oil produced from his family's groves. He figured he would try to bottle the oil and sell it. His village in the Kolymvari Chania region is, after all, home to the oldest olive tree in the world, estimated to be more than 3,500 years of age. The olive oil, he says, is the "best in the world," with its greenish hue and "kiss of fragrant Mediterranean air." Problem was, no one would give him a start-up loan. Then he heard about microfinance, a concept more commonly associated with the developing world.
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This is Wall Street, raw and uncensored. In a trove of documents provided to lawmakers, the portrait that emerges of Goldman Sachs is that of a firm often putting its interests ahead of those of its clients as it raced to insulate itself from the collapse of the housing market.
The airy, exposed-brick Toronto offices of fledgling e-reader company are so new, they still don't have a receptionist. But the people behind Indigo's little challenger to the Kindle are already seeing it in very big terms: as the Apple of the digital book world. What's behind that ambition isn't just the e-reader device that launches Saturday - a lightweight gadget the size of a small paperback, with the Kindle-like imitation ink screen and a $150 price, set to undercut competitors - but the software that launches alongside it. It's a hub that lives on a computer desktop, and Kobo chief executive officer Mike Serbinis hopes readers will use it as their digital bookshelf.
The oil slick spreading across the Gulf of Mexico is pushing Canada's energy regulator to take a harder look at a bid by several major oil companies to relax safety regulations for offshore drilling in the Arctic. The National Energy Board sent a letter Wednesday telling the oil industry that it "is aware of the recent fire and sinking of Transocean Ltd.'s Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico" and "intends to ask questions during the proceeding about this incident." Similar questions are being asked across Canada and the U.S., where President Barack Obama recently moved to give industry access to new ground for offshore drilling.
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