White House Press secretary Jay Carney neither ruled out nor encouraged the idea of minting $1 trillion platinum coin to avoid default on the US debt.

When asked would President Obama mint $1 trillion platinum coin to avoid default on the US debt in case Republicans decline to hike the debt limit, Carney "Look, there is no plan B. There is no backup plan. There is no alternative to Congress raising the debt ceiling. Congress has to pay the bills of the United States."

Morgan Stanley, the sixth-largest U. S. bank by assets, is reportedly planning to cut as many as 1,600 jobs or 3 per cent of its entire workforce, at its investment banking unit in the coming weeks.

As per media reports on Wednesday, Morgan Stanley has plans to cut jobs at its institutional securities group, which includes the banking giant's investment banking and trading divisions.

American International Group (AIG) has announced that its board of directors would weigh if to the insurer should participate in a shareholder lawsuit against the government over its $182 billion bailout.

Former AIG Chief Executive Maurice Greenberg's investment firm Starr International Co. had filed the lawsuit in the U. S. Court of Federal Claims and District Court for the Southern District of New York in November 2011.

Daily oil production in the United States will reach the country's highest level next year since 1988, according to the U. S. Energy Information Administration's prediction.

According to the federal agency's prediction, the U. S. daily oil production will rise to average 7.9 million barrels per day in 2014. The figure represents an increase of 23 per cent from averaged 6.4 million barrels per day in 2012.

A total of ten lending giants, including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, on Monday hit an $8.5 billion mortgage foreclosure settlement deal with federal banking regulators.

The settlement, which concluded weeks of negotiations between the federal regulators and lenders, is intended to put an end to a troubled foreclosure review of several thousand of loan files that was directed by the regulators.

As had long been expected, Google largely emerged from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation unharmed.

The FTC had been investigating Google's business practices since mid-2011 to determine whether the company was abusing its dominance in search results to keep ahead of rivals. The FTC did uncover some questionable practices on the part of Google, but let it walked away without any major penalties.

However, Google suffered a considerable setback related to Motorola, which the Internet search giant had acquired in the midst of the investigation.

South Korean electronics giant Samsung continues to dominate the U. S. mobile phone market, the latest figures compiled by ComScore revealed.

In the three months ending November, Samsung grabbed 26.9 per cent of the U. S. mobile phone market. The figure represents a gain of 1.2 points from the preceding three-month period.

Cupertino, California-based tech giant Apple Inc. emerged at the second spot with 18.5 per cent share of the market. Apple also gained 1.4 points from the prior three-month period.

After having earlier announced its plans to dump Research in Motion (RIM)'s BlackBerry handsets, one of the US governmental agencies - the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) - recently revealed that it intends trying out the BlackBerry handsets running RIM's forthcoming BlackBerry 10 OS.

According to a Reuters report, the ICE - which is a unit of the Department of Homeland Security - has disclosed that it will commence a pilot program in early 2013, for testing the new BlackBerry smartphones which are scheduled to be announced at a January 30 event.

Facebook is apparently set to implement the new versions of its Statement Of Rights And Responsibilities (SRR) and Data Use Policy; after its Tuesday announcement of the official, audited results of the company's last voting on `site governance' policies.

With less than 1 percent of the Facebook users participating in the site governance vote - 589,141 users opposing the changes, and 79,731 users supporting them -, Facebook said that the outcome of the vote gives it the ability to remove the voting mechanism from its governance structure.

In a move which marked Google's early step in the direction of a bigger project related to showing Google Now notifications in Chrome, the Google Chrome team has recently made the addition of a "skeleton for Google Now for Chrome" to Google's browser.

After having launched its social networking site `So. cl' to a few individuals for testing in May, software giant Microsoft announced on Tuesday that `So. cl' had now been opened to the general public.

Though So. cl - which is an offshoot of Microsoft's FuSE (Future Social Experiences) Labs, and is essentially the company's "experiment in open search" - has been opened to the public with some additional new features, users should bear in mind the fact that the network is still in beta.

According to the Savannah Morning News, which first highlighted the story of Facebook user Nolan Daniels who recently posted a photo of his fake Powerball `winning' lottery ticket, the Facebook Powerball hoaxer is a software engineer who co-owns Arizona-based medical software firm N2 Technologies.

Daniels - whose full name, as per the report, is Nolan Ryan Daniels - generated a lot of excitement last week when he posted a picture which showed him holding what he claimed was the `winning' Powerball lottery ticket.

According to an AppleInsider report, Apple has recently filed a patent application for what can be describes as true wireless charging technology, which underscores a mechanism whereby charging of devices will be possible from nearly a meter away from the charging source.

With the present-day wireless charging options not being `truly wireless' or `cord-free' as the label suggests, Apple's filing of the patent comes after the company's research in the direction of a "realistic and practical" method for providing wireless charging to devices.

In a move which clearly underscores Amazon Web Services' (AWS) ability to add economies of scale to its IT infrastructure, the cloud provider said in a recent announcement that it will be offering its customers a reduced price for its storage options.

According to the AWS announcement, made at the cloud provider's re: Invent conference in Las Vegas, its 24th price reduction will bring down the prices of the Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3) and Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS).

During the course of a Wednesday meeting at Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that a "seam" has been created between software and hardware with the amalgamation between the company's latest Windows 8 OS and its own branded Surface tablet.

About the company's strategy pertaining to the creation of the Surface tablet and the new Windows 8 OS version powering the device, Ballmer said that the mentioned strategic move underscored a decision which Microsoft should have taken much earlier.