Business Finance & Economy - latest

Heavy-equipment manufacturer Caterpillar Inc. said Friday it will build a parts plant for large mining machines and it expects to employ about 510 full-time and contract workers in five years.

As the engine of U.S. economic growth slows, two of its main cylinders - job growth and consumer spending - still aren't firing.

Until they kick in, the  weak recovery is in jeopardy.

Chrysler says it will add nearly 900 jobs early next year at a factory in suburban Detroit that makes midsize cars.

As if Google Earth wasn't cool and useful enough -- like helping find a new apartment in a faraway city or taking a little tour of a foreign place -- Google's latest version of the program just upped the ante.Now you can view live weather patterns of rain and snow.

So far the precipitation data covers parts of North America and Europe, according to a Thursday Google Earth blog post by software engineer Quarup Barreirinhas.

The banking industry, long accused of consumer abuse, now finds itself in the cross-hairs of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

Signed into law by President Obama on July 21, the Act takes aim at a number of long-standing bank practices that many deem harmful to consumers.

Gainers

• iShares MSCI Brazil Index (NYSE: EWZ) up 1.02% to $70.54. After opening lower, Brazilian shares shaking off GDP data in the U.S. and continuing higher today after their central bank said that it would be curbing their cycle of interest rate hikes.
• SPDR Gold Shares (NYSE: GLD) up 0.61% to $114.99.
  
  Gaining today from sour GDP data. A sagging U.S, dollar, and attractive prices, is having investors make a push for gold today, after GDP data came in short of views.

That somewhat pithy statement above is one of the tidbits gleaned at a daylong Microsoft meeting with analysts on Thursday.

The federal government and almost all these United States are broke, and so they're considering something we've all at least thought about from time to time: making money off the Internet.

There's a fight brewing in Washington, D.C. over an attempt to collect sales tax from online purchases... yet again.

Individuals who want to invest in Facebook probably won't have an opportunity to do so for well over a year.  A new, somewhat credible report indicates that the company won't go public until sometime in 2012.