Latin American direct investment—both greenfield and M&A—continues to rise as companies from around the world take a look at the opportunities that the region holds.

The region is not only doing very well from a macro-economic perspective, but it is also experiencing strong domestic growth, strong trade growth, and boasts an experienced corporate executive class who have led the region’s businesses through the crisis with relative ease.

Voters are not the only ones mad as hell and willing to throw out incumbents, no matter the qualifications or smarts of the challenger.

Shareholders are also apparently upset with seemingly entrenched management they deem unresponsive to their interests.

It’s a trend that many may have noticed on some level, but few have actually pointed out. Fewer and fewer start-ups are aiming for an IPO. More and more the goal is to sell out to someone larger, who can move the company to the next level or bolt it onto their existing infrastructure.

However, venture capital available to start-ups and later-stage developments is continuing to grow at a rapid pace. Some of the biggest VC deals in the second quarter this year were in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Sometimes when you lose you can still win.

This is no doubt how shareholders of Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group feel Monday morning after Hertz agreed to up the price it is willing to pay for the rental giant to $50 from $41.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is taking on an M&A afficionado from Goldman Sachs to replace their retiring CFO, as they prep for the next wave of growth through acquisitions.

Simon Dingemans, head of Goldman Sach’s European mergers and acquisitions franchise, will take over the finance helm at the UK pharmaceuticals powerhouse—becoming CFO-designate in January and replacing retiring CFO Julian Heslop, who will end his term in March.

3G Capital's announced deal last week to buy Burger King Holdings for $24 a share is the latest among a growing interest among private equity firms to buy restaurant companies.

Altogether, there have been 13 completed deals this year within the sector and two others in the works-including BK, according to Pitchbook. Last year there were a total of 16 for the entire year.

British Airways (BA) will continue its acquisition streak after the completion of its merger with Iberia Airlines of Spain. Execs at the two companies have apparently been drawing up a shortlist of potential targets, according to Tuesday’s FT.

BA chief Willie Walsh let it be known that there are 12 names on the list—including both full-service carriers from diverse emerging economies and a few budget carriers as well.

Peer-to-peer lending, or community lending, is expected to grow 66 percent over the next three years, according to research by Gartner. Although this still makes it a very small market—at $5 billion in outstanding loans by 2013—it is becoming an increasingly-important funding source for small business and entrepreneurs.

And it may become even more important, as the first partnership between a peer-to-peer lending site and a vendor finance site takes flight.

Few people would have cared—or understood—three weeks ago if someone had said that potash is a hot commodity. But with Australia’s BHP Billiton and Canada’s PotashCorp in a dukes up, all out brawl right now for control of the Canadian fertilizer firm, potash—and the fertilizer industry—have taken on new significance.

On Tuesday they took the battle to fresh heights—or depths as the case may be—when PotashCorp accused the Aussie mining firm of “highly-unethical” behaviour, as the FT reports.

The FDIC and SEC are working hard to enact government-mandated regulatory reform for the US ABS markets as called for in Dodd-Frank. However, the two agencies, along with four other agencies that oversee the ABS markets in some way, each have proposed specific guidelines that interpret how market reform should be implemented.