Fortune

There's a silver lining to every cloud, even the one made up of volcanic ash. While air carriers are licking their wounds from losing an estimated $200 million a day due to the eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland, many other firms are smacking their chops at the opportunity to attract new customers. So who got rolling as the planes stayed on the ground?

For only the second time in recent history, a large, thriving, privately owned Chinese company has stepped up and stepped out -- buying a big brand known the world over.

Athens is abuzz with a rumor: Greece might leave the euro zone and adopt a new currency -- a Greek euro, so to speak, something of a cross between a drachma and a euro to be used only internally. Some hungry economists have jokingly given the new money a nickname: the "Gyro."

It's time to start paying attention to the financial sinkhole that Iceland is trying to climb out of -- the view from inside of it is eerily similar to our own.

It has become an investing truism of late: If you want stocks with high-octane potential, you're wise to invest in the fast-growing economies of emerging markets. The result has been frenzied demand for such stocks and skyrocketing valuations.

World-renowned short seller Jim Chanos -- the hedge fund manager who called the fall of Enron and the systemic problems cause by subprime mortgages --recently turned his gimlet eye on China. He saw a country whose rapid rise was hiding massive flaws: grossly inflated real estate prices, irresponsible construction lending, massive overbuilding, a banking system larded with bad loans, and unreliable government data. Fitch Ratings weighed in this week saying that China's banks face the greatest "bubble risk" of any Asian country.

Quick: which nation builds the most wind turbines? If you guessed America, with its blustery Great Plains dotted with whirring GE blades, you'd be wrong. In 2009, China became the planet's largest producer.

After months of relative silence, sovereign wealth funds, the huge, state-owned vehicles that export-rich countries use to invest their reserves, are on the prowl again.

The U.S. is helping Eastern Europe connect to the Internet in an effort to spur development.

It happens every weekday: A group of ladies gathers at the cavernous, badly lit stock-brokerage office on Shanghai's Xiangyang Lu in what was once, when China was colonized by European powers last century, known as the French Concession. There are usually at least four, and sometimes as many as eight.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, William Fung, the CEO of Li & Fung Limited, a large Hong Kong-based sourcing company founded by his grandfather, awoke in his Boston hotel room with an inexplicable urge to meet his sister, who lives in San Francisco, for lunch at their favorite sushi restaurant there.

Russia's ballyhooed satellite communications system (and Putin's pet project) suffers technical setbacks and malfunctioning devices.

If Burton Malkiel, author of the famous "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" and Princeton University economist, is right, the majority of U.S. investors aren't profiting enough from China's rapid growth.

In a world still awash in economic worry, China has stood apart as the one country that has come through the global slump with only the briefest of hiccups.

Banks in France, including non-French ones, will no longer be allowed to offer guaranteed bonuses to traders and other staff under new rules announced Nov. 5. The only exception is for signing bonuses for new employees, and they are limited to a maximum of one year.

President Barack Obama's visit to China this week has increased the spotlight on one of the top hot-button issues in U.S.-China relations: revaluing the Chinese currency.

China's announcement on Wednesday that Walt Disney could go ahead with its long-planned theme park in Shanghai raised a few eyebrows in Hong Kong. That's because Disney's first foray into the China market, via Hong Kong in 2005, has been tepid at best -- and embarrassing at worst.

Not even Franz Kafka could have dreamed this one up.

Brazil has a lot of reasons to celebrate these days. It recently won the competition to host the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, as well as the 2014 World Cup.

You wouldn't think the men who run the oil-rich country of Nigeria would have much spring in their step these days. The nation is plagued by a never-ending guerrilla war, one that has trimmed the country's oil production to two-thirds of its potential capacity.

The Secretary of State wants American companies to focus their efforts -- and their cash piles -- on spurring job growth by investing at home and abroad.

Mike Daisey has released the script of his controversial monologue on the Internet

Tableau Software is planning to go public in 2013, Fortune has learned.

MS drug developer nets big money.

Chris Christie's blunt talk crosses the line.

The Greek bailout could keep investors from making additional sovereign debt purchases, further exacerbating the crisis.

When I ask powerful women what made them who they are, they often tell me about their parents and then say, "Oh, my mother...!"

Late last month I made a short cameo on The Daily Show, as part of a larger segment on Bain Capital.Being eminently narcissistic, I watched the clip without bothering to watch Jon Stewart's subsequent Bain-related interview with Yale finance professor Jonathan Macey (who I recently criticized for ignoring dividend recaps in a PE-defending op-ed). But I did get around to it yesterday -- the full, unedited version -- and wanted to note two things for those who also saw it:

FORTUNE -- The iPhone has been, by many measures, one of the most successful products in business history. Nearly 200 million iPhones have been sold in four and a half years, 37 million of them in the last three months of 2011. Apple's market cap has soared from $104 billion in June 2007, when the first iPhone was sold, to $480 billion today.

In an exclusive interview with Fortune, Larry Page, Google's original CEO, who reassumed the position a year ago, speaks with obvious pride about the "family" environment Google tries to encourage, how it differs from his own grandfather's workplace, and how free food encourages people to eat less. And while he doesn't rule out charging for those meals one day, don't count on its happening anytime soon.

Interesting assignments, unfaltering support, stints abroad: No wonder these folks love their workplaces.

Engineers at Devon Energy take home an average $178,305 total compensation annually. See which other Best Companies to Work For offer big paychecks.

These companies go above and beyond the call of duty when it comes to grooming talent.

You can't build a great business without nurturing from within. Meet the firms that are doing it right.