'Decisive two years' for bank reform; Exxon Mobil is most valuable company; Revolution hits universities

1 ‘Decisive two years’ for bank reform (BBC) The incoming governor of the Bank of England has said the next two years will be "decisive" for bank reform. Mark Carney, current governor of the Bank of Canada, said "shadow banking" and the issue of "too big to fail" would be tackled. The 2008 crisis would be repeated if unregulated financial activities - blamed for amplifying the meltdown - went unchallenged, he said.
 

He also warned that central banks alone could not eliminate "tail risks". He said that, contrary to some reports, tail risks - essentially worst-case scenarios - in Europe and the US remained. Shadow banks are companies that operate like banks but fall outside current oversight.

"The next two years will be decisive on ending 'too big to fail' [for banks] and addressing shadow banking and over-the-counter derivatives, that absolutely amplified the last crisis - and will do so again if we don't complete our agenda," he told an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

2 Exxon Mobil is most valuable company (BBC) Apple has lost its crown as the world's most valuable publicly traded company after its shares continued to fall. Oil company Exxon Mobil has regained the top slot after Apple shares fell 2.4%, following a 12% drop on Thursday. Apple, which posted disappointing iPhone sales figures on Wednesday, has seen its shares fall 37% since their record high last September. Exxon became number one in 2005, traded places with Apple during 2011, and had been number two since early 2012.

At the close on Wall Street, Apple had a market value of $413bn, against Exxon's of $418bn. The tech giant has been hit by fears over its future growth, despite record profits. Apple is also facing fierce competition from rivals like Samsung, which accounted for one in four of all mobile phones shipped worldwide last year, according to Strategy Analytics.

Apple's share price rose sharply following a revival under Steve Jobs, who died in 2011, which came about first in computers and then the iPod music player, and was then followed by the iPhone and iPad. Apple's shares were worth as little as $3.19 in 1997 when it faced the possibility of bankruptcy, and reached a record $702.1 on 19 September.

3 Revolution hits universities (Thomas L Friedman in The New York Times) Lord knows there are a lot of bad news in the world today to get you down, but there is one big thing happening that leaves me incredibly hopeful about the future, and that is the budding revolution in global online higher education.

Nothing has more potential to enable us to re-imagine higher education than the massive open online course (MOOC) platforms that are being developed by the likes of Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and companies like Coursera and Udacity. Anant Agarwal, the former director of MIT's artificial intelligence lab, is now president of edX, a nonprofit MOOC that MIT and Harvard are jointly building. Agarwal told me that since May, some 155,000 students from around the world have taken edX's first course: an MIT intro class on circuits. "That is greater than the total number of MIT alumni in its 150-year history," he said.

I can see a day soon where you will create your own college degree by taking the best online courses from the best professors from around the world -- some computing from Stanford, some entrepreneurship from Wharton, some ethics from Brandeis, some literature from Edinburgh -- paying only the nominal fee for the certificates of completion. It will change teaching, learning and the pathway to employment.