Market News - NASDAQ

LONDON (ShareCast) - Google (NASDAQ: GOOG - news) is about to give beleaguered record companies a potentially powerful boost by offering people who search for information about musicians the tools to listen to songs — and buy them.

The new capabilities will be unveiled next week as part of a service tentatively called Google OneBox, according to five executives who have been briefed on the matter but declined to be identified because they are not authorized to disclose the information, USA Today reports.

The Chinese government is ratcheting up its cyberspying operations against the US, a congressional advisory panel found, citing an example of a carefully orchestrated campaign against one US company that appears to have been sponsored by Beijing.

The unnamed company was just one of several successfully penetrated by a campaign of cyberespionage, according to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report to be released Thursday. Chinese espionage operations are "straining the U.S. capacity to respond," the report concludes, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The new chief executive of MySpace has told the Financial Times that the company is no longer interested in competing with Facebook, in effect conceding defeat in the race to become the largest online social network. wen Van Natta, a former Facebook executive who replaced Chris DeWolfe as chief executive of MySpace six months ago, said the company instead aimed to become an online hub for music and entertainment. "Facebook is not our competition," he said. "We're very focused on a different space," the FT US reports.

Ebay (NASDAQ: EBAY - news) 's third-quarter results showed improvements in the company's struggling online marketplace, but its cautious guidance took some of the fervor out of Wall Street's recent optimism. The e-commerce company's profit dropped 29% from a year earlier to $349.7m, or 27 cents a share. Revenue rose 5.7% to $2.24bn, ending a streak of three year-on-year declines, the Wall Street Journal reports.

A US House of Representatives committee voted on Wednesday to strip health insurers of their exemption to federal antitrust rules, as Democratic leaders in the Senate moved to overturn the same exemption as part of a broader healthcare reform package. The twin moves came as Democrats redoubled their efforts to crack down on the health insurance industry, which has opposed the establishment of a government-backed insurance plan that would compete with private providers, the FT US reports.

The Obama administration plans to order companies that have received exceptionally large amounts of bailout money from the government to slash compensation for their highest-paid executives by about half on average, according to people familiar with the long-awaited decision. The cuts will affect 25 of the most highly paid executives at each of five major financial companies and two automakers, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plan has not been made public. Cash salaries will be cut by about 90 % compared with last year, they said, the Washington Post (NYSE: WPO - news) reports.

President Obama, looking to boost lending to small business, will start using some of the leftover federal bailout funds to shore up smaller community banks and induce them to offer credit to firms he called the "backbone of the American economy," the Los Angeles Times reports.

Wal-Mart, which has ridden low prices to dominate the U.S. retail scene, has stepped up its game in price cutting further. The world's largest retailer said it will cut prices this holiday season for a week at a time on thousands of items, from bananas to board games. The first group of cuts hit Wednesday. Wal-Mart, also the largest US grocery seller and overall retailer, hopes shoppers will see a widening gap between prices at its stores and those of its rivals, the Chicago Tribune reports.

Roomy Khan, the central witness who brought down the Galleon hedge fund, is a former Galleon employee with a history of financial trouble who agreed to cooperate with prosecutors after she was caught making trades using inside information.

Ms. Khan, previously identified only as "Tipper A" or a cooperating witness, provided much of the evidence that prosecutors are using to bring insider trading charges against the billionaire Raj Rajaratnam, who is shutting down his Galleon fund in the wake of the charges, the New York Times (NYSE: NYT - news) reports.