Above, all of the name brand paper joss items available for this week's Qing Ming Jie or Tomb Sweeping Day when Chinese burn items to send to ancestors in the afterlife. Qing Ming is now big business.

China is the second largest economy in the world and every significant brand's future is impacted by its growth (or collapse)—but who's got the time?! Here's the week's reads that will make you look like a keen China observer in case you find yourself immersed in a cultural conversation.

This week: Apple still in trouble... China's anti-"fixie" rhetoric... infant formula saga... Celebrity China clout... PETA... counterfeit beer... Porsche... Startup Asia 2013... fly home to vote... "Baidu Glass"... W Hotels... McDonald's... Iron Man 3 to World War Z... cheap Bollinger... iPhone joss... "vulgar" Birkin brand... and more.Continue reading...

The elite Yellow Pages. The Who's Who of the rich and famous. A modern take on ye olde Social Register. Call it what you want, but the NYIndex: The Wall Street Journal's Empirical Guide to Power, Fame and Infamy delves deeper into the pockets of NYC's elite than ever before. 

WSJ introduced its NYIndex as so: “Power is the most coveted and volatile currency in New York—and, often, the most misunderstood. It's a city where almost anything can be purchased at any hour, but not power.”  

Attaching “stock” and “value” to people is nothing new. Forbes has been doing it for years, beginning with its old school Social Register, which the New York Times described in 1997 as the, “slightly oblong black book with the orange lettering, which lists addresses, phone numbers, club memberships and yacht names of its approximately 30,000 families. It has been helping blue bloods keep in touch for more than 100 years.”Continue reading...

The one percent is alive, well and being targeted by The Wall Street Journal with a new magazine insert: WSJ Money, a spin-off of WSJ Magazine, which calls itself "the world's largest luxury magazine."

"It's for people who are voyeuristically interested in the high end, and are at the high end," Mike Miller, a Journal senior deputy managing editor overseeing the magazine, told Adweek. 

Scheduled to debut March 9 and publish quarterly, the glossy will focus on personal finance and be distributed in the Journal's weekend edition in the U.S., which has a current circulation of 2.3 million. The edit/ad plan is to publish 50 pages per issue: 30 for editorial and 20 for ads.

The announcement follows the recent launches of Bloomberg Pursuits and Dujour, which joined Departures and ForbesLife in the category.Continue reading...

Bank of America slapped with U.S. lawsuit over billion-dollar "hustle" of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

Elizabeth Taylor is Forbes' new Top-Earning Dead Celeb thanks to Christie's auction.

Apple's iPad mini already has a Chinese knock-off, while US judge says Samsung infringed four Apple patents.

Facebook wins back Wall Street, affirms social dominance and shares soar as looks to rebuild confidence.

AT&T beats estimates in latest quarterly earnings report.

BlackBerry loses grip as go-to phone for US federal government.

Buzzfeed taps Rdio for "social music advertising."

Cisco will fund 12,000 meals for World Food Program via Facebook app.

Tom Cruise sues gossip magazines for defamation of character.Continue reading...

Spanx founder Sara Blakely is now a household name, appearing in People magazine and on the cover of Forbes as the youngest self-made female billionaire in its history of ranking billionaires — all thanks to the stunning success of her cheeky brand of body-contouring shapewear.

Currently sold online and "within bigger department stores and boutiques" in 40 countries, the Atlanta-based Spanx brand that she founded with $5,000 of her life savings is gearing up to expand into standalone branded stores, starting with the U.S., in the fourth quarter.Continue reading...

Bob Lutz is done complaining about the right-wing media conspiracy that he believes has its knives out for the Chevrolet Volt. Really, he is.

The former GM vice chairman vowed in his latest blog post for Forbes.com that he's finally, once and for all, irreversibly, incontrovertibly, done complaining about how Fox News and other conservative media outlets and journalists have conspired to attempt to sink the Volt plug-in hybrid that Lutz championed into existence when he was at General Motors.Continue reading...

Spanx founder Sara Blakely, the youngest "rebel billionaire" to make the Forbes annual uber-rich ranking, shares her business advice in this new video for American Express OPEN.

You may remember Sara Blakely as a contestant on Rebel Billionaire, Richard Branson's 2005 reality competition series on Fox. Now she can claim the title as a rebel billionaire, and just like Branson, she's a self-made branding phenom with a flair for promotion — and she owes it all to Spanx.

Call it shapewear, support wear, body shapers, slimming intimates, "hosiery crack" — Spanx has conquered the worlds of retail, fashion and business school case studies, first by helping firm up women's wobbly bits and then, of course, men's. That's right: move over, mantyhose — Blakely got there first, one of many sparks of inspiration and innovation that have propelled her to become the first self-made female billionaire on Forbes' annual billionaire ranking.

“At 41 she’s the youngest woman to join this year’s World’s Billionaires list without help from a husband or an inheritance. She is part of a tiny, elite club of American women worth ten figures on their own, including Oprah Winfrey and Meg Whitman,” writes Forbes in a cover story on their March 26th billionaires ranking annual issue, which is now on newsstands. “Today Spanx is to slimming undergarments what Kleenex is to tissues: a brand that stands for the category.”Continue reading...