Wall Street Journal

Gold fell for the seventh straight trading day Friday, notching its longest losing streak since the financial crisis as the metal approached a fresh low.

DirecTV, the second largest U.S. pay-TV provider, is weighing a potential bid for Hulu, the latest company to show interest in the six-year-old video site.

The Financial Times said its Tech Blog and various Twitter accounts were hacked Friday by a group identifying itself as the Syrian Electronic Army.

Bloomberg appointed former IBM chief Samuel Palmisano to review the company's compliance measures, in response to concerns about subscriber information that had been available to Bloomberg journalists.

J.C. Penney plans to beef up its audits of factories in Bangladesh by requiring them for the first time to undergo structural and engineering inspections.

The Thomson-Reuters/University of Michigan early-May consumer-sentiment index jumped to 83.7 from 76.4 at the end of April and a preliminary April reading of 72.3.

The prime minister pledged action to encourage businesses to increase their spending as he seeks to turn recent improvements in the economy into sustainable growth.

Financial regulators are taking a harder line on exchanges amid concerns over their ability to police the markets they operate.

J.P. Morgan Chase sent a formal demand letter to Bloomberg this week, asking the company to show logs of all staff members who searched activities of J.P. Morgan subscribers since 2008.

European stocks slipped, with insurers pacing the decline following downbeat results from a major player in the sector, while the euro dipped against the dollar, which gained back some ground against the yen.

R.P. Martin fired a broker and suspended two top executives amid continuing scrutiny of the securities firm's role in alleged interest-rate manipulation, according to a person familiar with the move.

The pricing firm that was investigated as part of a probe into alleged oil-benchmark fixing has resisted efforts at regulation in the past.

The euro-zone debt crisis has mutated into Europe's longest slump of the postwar era, with no recovery in sight for a broad swath of the continent.

Richemont said Chairman Johann Rupert will take a 12-month sabbatical from the luxury company as it posted better-than-expected full-year earnings and a good start to the year.

Foreign direct investment in China sputtered in the first four months of the year, despite renewed signs of strength from the U.S. and the European Union, showing only a modest 1.21% rise from a year ago.

Asian markets were mixed Thursday, with a stronger yen weighing on Japan's Nikkei. The Nikkei fell 1.1%.

Corporate directors kept CEO pay largely flat in 2012, for a second consecutive year. The compensation of CEOs at 300 big U.S. companies rose a median 3.6% to $10.1 million, a Hay Group/WSJ analysis found.

Russian police detained the head of Société Générale's local unit while he was allegedly accepting a kickback, a potential blow to the French bank's expansion plans in Russia.

Fifteen years ago, Thailand and other Asian countries let their currencies slide, using cheap exports to help lift them out of a devastating economic slump. Today, Thailand's currency is soaring, and some of its tycoons are going on a buying spree.

Japan's gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced across the economy, grew at an annualized pace of 3.5% in the first three months of the year, the government reported Thursday.