The Nikkei managed to close higher after a choppy session.

After a bumpy ride, stocks in Japan closed with a small gain on Friday, recovering from a deep plunge the day before.

The Nikkei popped up by over 3% in morning trading, fell by over 3% in the afternoon, but then recovered at the end of the day to close with a 0.9% gain.

In China, the major indexes were mixed. The Hang Seng dipped by 0.2% while the Shanghai composite index closed up by 0.6%.

The steadier tone in Asia was reflected at the start of the trading day in Europe. Germany’s DAX moved up by 0.3% and the FTSE 100 was holding around Thursday’s closing levels.

On Thursday, Tokyo’s Nikkei fell 7.3% — the biggest one-day drop since the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster shook Japan’s economy.

The sharp plunge spooked investors in China and Europe, leading to sizable stock market losses around the globe. In the United States, stocks clawed back from steep losses to close modestly lower.

Thursday’s sell-off was triggered by weak economic data from China that showed manufacturing slowed for the first time in seven months, as well as mixed signals from the Federal Reserve about when it might start dialing down its bond-buying program.

“What we have seen is investors taking profits off the table and reducing some of their exposures to protect their portfolio in case the move we [saw Thursday] is a precursor to a broader market correction,” said Joshua Raymond, chief market strategist at City Index.

Many market analysts had been saying for weeks that the Japanese market was due for a correction after running up more than 70% in less than 12 months.

Central banks, including the Bank of Japan, have been a big driver of the bull market as they continue to promote loose monetary policy.

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Apple fan Dave Kastener wanted to buy some Samsung shares as a hedge. It wasn’t that simple.

With 200 shares of Apple in his portfolio, California resident Dave Kastener was thinking about going rogue. The self-professed “Apple fan” wanted to invest in Samsung.

An Internet marketing professional who invests through an IRA, Kastener was worried he might have too much exposure to the iPhone and iPad maker. He figured a $20,000 to $50,000 investment in Samsung would provide protection should Apple shares sour.

Kastener soon discovered that adding Samsung to his portfolio wasn’t going to be an easy task — and might even prove to be a risky proposition.

It’s easy for Americans to buy Samsung cell phones, and the South Korea-based company enjoys tremendous brand name recognition in the U.S. But the tech firm is also something of an oddity, and one of only a few major international companies that does not provide an easy investment vehicle for Americans that want to buy shares.

Samsung is listed on the Korea Stock Exchange, where its shares have increased 24% over the past year. Over the same period, Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) shares have lost 19% of their value. But unlike many other international corporations listed in their home countries, Samsung isn’t listed on any U.S. exchange.

Further complicating matters, Samsung does not have an official American Depository Receipt (ADR), a securities offering that allows international companies to cross-list their shares, making it easier for Americans to invest.

ADRs are issued by banks and trade in the U.S. with prices that mirror those on foreign exchanges. Dividends are paid in U.S. dollars.

With no official ADR available, determined Samsung (SSNLF) buyers are forced to buy on the Grey Market, a musty corner of the investing world where risks are high and transparency is limited.

Grey market securities are traded over-the-counter, or on the “pink sheets.” They are sometimes issued by banks without the involvement of the company in question.

According to OTC, a marketplace for shares that trade outside of traditional exchanges, only 235 Samsung trades occurred on the Grey Market in the first three months of the year. That means even if you have shares, getting rid of them can be difficult.

Samsung Galaxy S4 review: Gimmicky, but still one of the best

Investors also won’t have an easy time going straight to the Korean market as big brokerages like Charles Schwab (SCHW, Fortune 500) or E*Trade (ETFC) don’t offer direct access to South Korea.

For the truly determined investor, a broker with a seat on the Seoul exchange might be able to procure some stock. But investors will be hit by high fees and the buy would require changing dollars to South Korean won and back again.

Related story: Samsung’s radical plan to bring you faster wireless

Fred Bennett, first vice president for wealth management at Janney Investments, warns that buying shares in a foreign currency adds yet another layer of risk.

“One could conceivably make a profit on their Samsung trade but lose it all — and more — due to adverse currency moves,” Bennett said.

For Kastener, none of these options seemed particularly appealing. He was familiar with ADRs, having used them before to invest in Unilever (UL) and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), but was reluctant to buy on the Grey Market.

So what’s an investor to do? The easiest option is probably to go for a wider Korea fund or ETF available in the U.S. It’s not an ideal approach, but Samsung is such a massive company that it makes up a large chunk of most Korea-focused offerings.

Samsung currently makes up 23% of the iShares MSCI South Korea ETF (EWY) and 25% of the actively-managed Korea Fund (KF), according to Bennett. The funds also include Korean big names like Hyundai and steel-maker Posco.

Kastener decided to invest in a more diversified fund that held a broad range of international stocks. It provided exposure to other international shares that interest him, and Samsung is one of the top 10 holdings.

Kastener hasn’t bought as much of the funds as he originally planned to invest, but it “kind of got my toe in the water with Samsung,” he says. It also kept him out of much riskier waters.

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Global stocks have been edging higher after Thursday’s market mayhem that saw Japan’s Nikkei drop by 7.3%.

Investors are facing a quiet Friday ahead of the holiday weekend as stock markets regain their poise after a fright the previous session.

With few major corporate or economic reports on the agenda, U.S. stock futures were moving sideways and global markets were recovering from Thursday’s market mayhem that saw Japan’s Nikkei drop by 7.3%.

The Nikkei had a rocky Friday but managed to edge up by 0.9% at the close.

“In Tokyo we’ve seen an attempt at a recovery,” said Nick Beecroft, senior market analyst at Saxo Capital Markets. “That’s a pretty normal profile for market action in a correction such as this.”

U.S. stocks closed slightly lower Thursday having recovered from declines of nearly 1% earlier in the day.

Retailers Foot Locker (FL, Fortune 500) and Abercrombie Fitch (ANF) are set to report quarterly results before the opening bell Friday, while the U.S. Census Bureau will release data on durable goods orders at 8:30 a.m. ET.

Related: Fear Greed Index

Sears Holdings (SHLD, Fortune 500) shares plunged in after-hours trading after the ailing retail company posted a wider-than-expected loss.

Shares in Salesforce.com (CRM) sank after-hours as the company offered a weak 2014 outlook. Gap (GPS, Fortune 500) shares also fell on weak guidance.

European markets were staging a mild recovery in morning trading, after markets fell by roughly 2% Thursday.

Meanwhile, Chinese markets ended with mixed results. The Shanghai composite index rose by 0.6% while the Hang Seng dropped by 0.2%.

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As the sequester continues, the poor, sick and elderly are taking a deeper hit from federal spending cuts with less money going to programs like Meals on Wheels.

Forced federal spending cuts intended to be equal and across-the-board have lately fallen harder on the nation’s poor, sick and elderly.

At the other end, the top brass of federal employees are on track to receive bonuses. And workers who impact the food and airline businesses, like meat inspectors and air traffic controllers, have managed to get a break from Congress.

But underprivileged children waiting to attend preschool, low-income seniors who rely on regular breakfasts from the government and elderly cancer patients seeking chemotherapy are among the first to really feel the impact of $85 billion in forced spending cuts that kicked in on March 1.

The cuts are affecting the poor on other fronts:

* In Michigan, 21,000 children won’t get new clothes when they go back to school this fall. The state slashed a $137 clothing allowance for each child being cared for by relatives, according to MLive media group.

*In Kansas City, Kansas, 33 families that had been homeless are slated to lose housing at the Waterstone Apartments, because of cuts to the federal housing voucher programs, according to KCTV news.

* Poor people who wind up in federal court and need legal representation are waiting longer for trials, because so many public defenders are being forced to stay home, unpaid, said Federal Public Defender Lisa Peebles of Syracuse, N.Y. Her staff is taking 20 days off, some of the longest furloughs among federal employees.

“These are the things low income people need: Legal representation, health care, child care,” said Professor Tim Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “The more inequality grows, the more they’ll need the exact programs we’re cutting,”

Giant safety net programs like Medicaid and food stamps, as well as aid programs funded by the Veterans Administration have been protected from cuts.

But agencies and programs that are thinly funded or have no ability to shuffle money around have been hit particularly hard in the first round, said Steve Bell, senior economic policy director at the Bipartisan Policy Center. That includes those that spend most of their budget allocation on programs for the sick and poor and labor.

Related: Four federal agencies to shut down on Friday

“As time goes, you will see more of a cumulative impact,” Bell said. “We call it a slow-motion train wreck.”

Some programs are working hard to cushion the effect on the people. Obama administration officials had predicted the early childhood education program Head Start would cut 70,000 children from rolls. However, some of the centers that administer the program have found ways to adjust their smaller funds.

For instance, Kids Central of Norton, Va. trimmed the number of school days by 10, and cut back on school supplies and property maintenance, rather than whittling down the class size, said Darrell Edwards, executive director of that program.

Budget cuts have led to unexpected consequences for cancer-stricken seniors undergoing chemotherapy treatment. Hundreds of independent cancer clinics have either cut back, or are in the process of determining whether to treat Medicare patients because federal spending cuts trimmed reimbursement rates for pricey chemotherapy drugs.

Related: Meals on Wheels budget cuts: ‘Slowly developing crisis’

The American Society of Clinical Oncology found in a recent survey of doctors and facilities that half of its members had to stop treating patients and send them to hospitals for chemotherapy.

“Having to travel just an additional 10 miles and be treated in a larger system can be a traumatic experience for these (cancer) patients,” said the oncology group’s president Sandra Swain, in a statement.

In coming months, forced federal spending cuts will carve a more equal, painful path, say budget experts.

Meanwhile, senior executives at the very top of the federal pay scale still may get bonuses this year, according a report released last week by Senator for Missouri Claire McCaskill.

“The idea that some of the highest paid federal government employees could be getting bonuses while others are being furloughed is outrageous,” said McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, who has crafted a bill to end such bonuses while sequester is on.

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Wang, photographed outside a Wanda Plaza in Beijing, has amassed a fortune of about $8.3 billion.

Wang Jianlin , founder and chairman of closely held Wanda Group and one of the richest men in China, knows how to pack a visitor’s itinerary. One day in April, he flies Hawk Koch, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, from Beijing to Dalian, a port city on the Yellow Sea, in his Gulfstream G550. Wang is launching an international film festival in Dalian, and he’s hoping to co-brand it with the Oscars. He shows Koch the futuristic new waterfront convention center he built, the new five-star Hilton next door, and some of the many Wanda office buildings, retail complexes, and apartment towers he owns all over town — Monopoly tokens in a real estate empire that stretches from northeast China to the Himalayas, and Inner Mongolia to the South China Sea. That evening the men join Dalian party officials for a dozen-course dinner, and later still, when they finally get back to Beijing, Wang insists that everyone, including me, accompany him to a private club.

Wang is just a member here, by the way; his wife, Lin Ning, owns it. In the VIP lounge are a dance floor and a giant videoscreen and comfortable couches. Coffee tables sag under platters of pineapple, watermelon, dried beef, and almonds, and goblets of red wine. Karaoke microphones await, charging in their stands.

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Polman in a shop for employees at Unilever House, the company’s London headquarters

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In late 2007, Meredith Whitney, then a rising analyst at Oppenheimer Co., started warning that a looming meltdown in mortgages spelled disaster for many of America’s big banks. Whitney’s contrarian calls proved prescient and made her a celebrity on Wall Street. In her new book, Fate of the States, Whitney, 43, offers another daring prediction. She views America’s future as the tale of two economies so wildly divergent they could exist as separate countries. The housing boom temporarily masked the weakness of such states as California, New York, and Arizona and encouraged their governments to spend recklessly. For Whitney, the future belongs to the unglamorous “flyover” states of the central corridor — Nebraska, Iowa, Indiana, South Dakota — places that never had a housing boom or bust, that benefit from low taxes and low debt, and that maintain the resources to fix their roads and nurture their schools. These are America’s new emerging markets, and they will thrive by pulling jobs and businesses from the old-economy states destined, barring a revolution in leadership, to keep spiraling into decline. Our excerpt from Fate of the States:

It sounded like yet another corporate cutback story.

In March 2009, Tampa Bay-based Sykes Enterprises told city officials in Minot, N.D., that the company was going to have to lay off 200 workers and shutter the call center Sykes had been operating there since 1996. A sign of the bleak economic times — right?

Well, there’s a wrinkle to this particular story. Sykes’s problem, according to the Tampa Bay Times, was not a lack of business. In fact, business was booming. The problem was that Sykes just couldn’t find enough employees in Minot to handle all the demand. The company had originally hoped to expand its Minot call center to 450 workers. But in North Dakota’s booming economy — one in which fast-food joints are paying high school kids $20 an hour and young oil workers are pulling in $100,000 a year — hiring has become a huge challenge for employers like Sykes. “They’d been advertising all the time for employees but just couldn’t find them,” said Minot mayor Curt Zimbelman, noting that true unemployment in North Dakota oil country “probably doesn’t exist.”

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Sean Parker, the billionaire technology investor and onetime president of Facebook, will never forget being on the receiving end of an Ari Emanuel onslaught. It was 2009. Emanuel, the famous Hollywood agent, had been e-mailing Parker because a friend had suggested they connect. “I knew who he was,” says Parker, who, like so many others, conflated Emanuel with Ari Gold, his alter ego on the HBO series Entourage.

“He needed to meet me,” is how Parker describes Emanuel’s persistent entreaties. “But I was preoccupied with other things, so I didn’t respond. Then one day I was sitting at a meeting at the SpaceX factory with Elon Musk and Larry Page, and somebody comes up from behind, puts his hands on my shoulders, and starts shaking me violently. I was startled. ‘It’s Ari Fucking Emanuel!’ the person shouted. ‘Read your e-mail!’ ” Parker was shaken — literally and figuratively — and he apologized for having ignored Emanuel. “Well, I want to have a meeting,” responded Emanuel. “Let’s do it as soon as this is over.”

Article source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/money_latest/~3/HqNNGYIL-tE/index.html

I can pretty much tell you the precise moment I realized Fun had died. It was like one of those movies where people walk into a darkened room to check on a friend they haven’t seen for a while. They think the body in bed is sleeping — until they take a closer look. “Hold on,” says one. “He’s not asleep … He’s … dead.” Then there is a dramatic silence as people consider what they have lost.

At any rate, Fun is clearly dead. It happened about 10 a.m. last Thursday. I got an e-mail from a guy just back from the annual boondoggle in Sanibel Island. “Terrible time,” he said. “Meetings around the clock. Lots of whiteboards. Nobody disgraced themselves.”

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How big is Bitcoin?

The power of all the computers networked together to maintain the digital currency’s system far exceeds the combined processing strength of the top 500 most powerful supercomputers.

Easily. The matchup isn’t even close.

There have been lots of stories about Bitcoin in the past few months thanks to its rapid price rise — from $5 a year ago for 1 bitcoin to a record high of $266 in April, before falling back to around $122 today.

Bitcoin’s price moves attract the most interest, but the system’s infrastructure is its most fascinating aspect. The crypto currency dreamed up in 2009 by a still-anonymous hacker is now one of the world’s most expansive large-scale computing pioneers.

At any given moment, Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer network contains thousands of computers linked together to generate more than 1,000 petaflops of raw computing power. To put that in perspective, the world’s fastest supercomputer, Titan, runs at less than 18 petaflops. The Bitcoin network is sucking down nearly $200,000 a day in electricity costs, according to one tracking site’s estimate.

That’s stunning for an “economy” that sprang into being just four years ago, when an inventor using the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto” released the system’s source code on a cryptography mailing list.

Related story: You can spend bitcoins at your local mall

Nakamoto built in an ingenious lure to draw in computing power. Bitcoins are “created” in batches every 10 minutes by an algorithm designed to eventually release a finite total of 21 million bitcoins. So far, 11 million have been released. The final coin won’t be minted until 2140.

Computers compete to get hold of those new bitcoins by solving mathematical problems of increasing complexity. Whoever does it first gets the coins.

Those same computers maintain Bitcoin’s “blockchain,” the public ledger that stores and verifies all of Bitcoin’s transaction records. As the network grows more powerful, so do the safeguards that prevent Bitcoin’s economy from being manipulated — or erased.

Related story: Strategist predicts end of Bitcoin

In the early days, a standard PC could successfully “mine” for coins and occasionally snag a handful. Today, mining is dominated by pros running custom-built computers with stunning amounts of power. It’s essentially an arms race, and the weapons have escalated fast.

So have the stakes they’re playing for. At $122 per coin, the 3,600 coins “minted” each day are collectively worth more than $430,000. The entire Bitcoin “economy” has a market cap of nearly $1.4 billion.

That kind of cash has drawn new players into the fold.

Two venture capital firms announced dedicated Bitcoin funds last week, and several others unveiled multimillion-dollar investments in buzzed-about startups like BitPay ($2 million from Founders Fund) and BitInstant ($1.5 million, led by the Winklevoss twins of Facebook (FB) fame).

“This isn’t a bubble or tulip mania,” said Tyler Winklevoss in a keynote talk at last weekend’s Bitcoin 2013, a conference that brought together more than 1,000 Bitcoin developers, speculators, entrepreneurs and enthusiasts. “This is rapid adoption. This is a rush.”

Keeping up with the rush will be the big challenge this year. Bitcoin’s growth is stress-testing the system in unprecedented ways. A key concern? The volume of bitcoin transactions — currently hovering around 60,000 per day — is doubling roughly every four months. If it doubles a few more times, the system will run up against a built-in technical limit that requires significant changes to overcome.

Related story: Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox lands in feds’ crosshairs

Gavin Andersen, the Bitcoin system’s lead developer, estimates that point is only a year or so away.

He’s also confident that the Bitcoin ecosystem is resilient enough to handle it. The Bitcoin project has been full of “chaos and drama” ever since he’s been involved, but it hasn’t yet derailed the experiment, Andersen said in a “state of the union” talk at the Bitcoin conference.

He said he’s excited to see what Bitcoin will become with the fresh infusion of entrepreneurs and developers that the currency’s rising visibility has drawn into the community.

“We’ve been on a roller coaster ride,” Andersen said. “I expect, at least for the next few years, we’re going to remain on a roller coaster ride.”

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