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When the New York Hilton Midtown said it was dispensing with room service starting in August, it caught the attention of frequent travelers who, after getting in from a long flight, have come to count on being able to order a burger at 2 a.m. The news was particularly significant since room service itself was popularized about a half mile away in the 1930s at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, which is now also part of the Hilton chain.   Plenty of hotels, however, are going the opposite way - trying to turn room service into a bigger draw. The number of hotels offering room service actually increased by 8 percent between 2011 and 2012, says Ned Barker, president of Grill Ventures Consulting Inc and spokesman on the issue for the American Hotel & Lodging Association. "I don't see room service going away any time in the near future," says David Morgan, vice president of food and beverage for Omni Hotels & Resorts. "We would lose customers if we did not have in-ro...

Wall Street's Financial Industry Regulatory Authority is looking at how brokerage firms supervise their use of communication outlets such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, the industry-funded regulator said. FINRA, which conducts periodic "sweeps," or targeted checks on Wall Street brokerages, sent out letters to firms earlier this month requesting information about their use and monitoring of social media communications for the companies and individual employees. The letter, which FINRA posted to its website on Monday, included requests for information such as how firms monitor whether their use of social media complies with industry rules. FINRA also asked for specific data such as the URLs for each social media site used by firms and the identity of all individuals who post or update content of those sites. "Everyone is looking at social media these days," said Francis Curran, a New York-based lawyer with McCormick & O'Brien LLP, adding that FI...

When the New York Hilton Midtown said it was dispensing with room service starting in August, it caught the attention of frequent travelers who, after getting in from a long flight, have come to count on being able to order a burger at 2 a.m. The news was particularly significant since room service itself was popularized about a half mile away in the 1930s at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, which is now also part of the Hilton chain.   Plenty of hotels, however, are going the opposite way - trying to turn room service into a bigger draw. The number of hotels offering room service actually increased by 8 percent between 2011 and 2012, says Ned Barker, president of Grill Ventures Consulting Inc and spokesman on the issue for the American Hotel & Lodging Association. "I don't see room service going away any time in the near future," says David Morgan, vice president of food and beverage for Omni Hotels & Resorts. "We would lose customers if we did not have in-ro...

European and Asian hedge fund firms are finding the potentially lucrative U.S. market impossible to ignore, but as tough as ever to negotiate. Delegates at the annual GAIM conference in Monaco this week talked about the difficulties, particularly for small funds, in attracting new money to an industry once at the top of investors' wish lists. With its pension funds, endowments and other investors now accounting for perhaps three quarters of new money flows into a funds sector increasingly desperate for new capital, breaking into the United States is seen as the holy grail for many foreign hedge fund managers.   But a mountain of regulation and local competition have made it hard going for some European managers, prompting some to wonder if it is worth the effort. "(In terms of regulation) the worst is the U.S." said one high-profile European hedge fund executive, who declined to be named. European industry insiders point to requirements to register with the Securit...

Former chess grandmaster-turned hedge fund manager Patrick Wolff is betting on a stock market crash in China , where he says corruption and bad debts have spiraled to dangerous levels. Speaking to Reuters on the sidelines of the GAIM conference in Monaco this week, Wolff said investors were too focused on trying to work out when easy money policies will taper off in the United States and ignoring a looming correction in China.   "People are talking way too much about the Federal Reserve and not enough about China," he said. "We've been saying that the U.S. is the safest place to invest, while China is a crash waiting to happen." He is short on Chinese stocks and generally long on U.S. equities. Financial markets have sold off heavily in recent weeks on fears that U.S. quantitative easing - money printing to fund asset purchases - will end off sooner rather than later. However, Wolff, who is managing member of San Francisco-based Grandmaster Capital, said ...

The Swiss government is expected to make a last-ditch attempt to protect its banks from criminal charges in the United States by issuing an executive order allowing them to pass data to U.S. authorities. _0"> After parliament blocked a bill that would have allowed the banks to sidestep strict secrecy laws, the government's seven-strong Federal Council will on Friday look for another way to facilitate the release of data. Swiss privacy laws have helped to make the Alpine country the world's biggest offshore financial center, but they have also drawn the ire of countries seeking to clamp down on tax evasion. Swiss banks have been the subject of investigations in Germany, France and the United States. The refusal by parliament's lower house to debate the bill passed the buck back to the government, with lawmakers calling on ministers to find a solution to the long-running tax dispute. Finance Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf said on Wednesday that the government...

Home resales hit a 3-1/2-year high in May and factory activity in the Mid-Atlantic region rebounded this month, backing the Federal Reserve's view that risks to the economy have diminished. While other data on Thursday showed more Americans than expected filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week, the increase was not big enough to signal a material shift from the recent pace of moderate job growth.   Higher taxes and deep government spending cuts that took effect this year had raised fears that the economy could slow abruptly, but the recovery appears to moving to firmer ground. "The drag from tighter fiscal policy is starting to dissipate. We have passed the worst of the fiscal-induced slowdown," said Millan Mulraine, a senior economist at TD Securities in New York. The data came a day after the Fed painted a fairly upbeat picture of the economy and said it expected to slow the pace of its bond-buying stimulus later this year, bringing it to a halt aroun...