Ford bought into Mazda. And now, DaimlerChrysler gets veto power over board decisions at Mitsubishi. Over the last decade, the car market in Japan has slumped. And, according to Jim Hall of consulting company AutoPacific, it's the Japanese car companies that invested heavily overseas, like Honda, that now stand the best chance of making it alone. That allowed them to weather the storm in Japan because the economy turned around faster here than it did in Japan.
Japan is still arguably in a recession.
I'm Bill Poorman for Marketplace. Yahoo, one of the most popular spots on the World Wide Web, has so much stock market wealth that investment analysts have been speculating like mad about what the company will do with its money. Yahoo's share price has also been spiking upward on unconfirmed reports the company might be partnering with or buying the online auction company Ebay. A published report in the New Yorker magazine also suggested some broad linkage between Yahoo and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., a radical scenario given encouragement by America On Line's purchase of media giant Time Warner earlier this year. Marketplace's David Johnson spoke with Yahoo's co-founder Jerry Yang about the rumors.