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When John Mullins went to business school, he didn't hear his professors or fellow students talk about entrepreneurship. And he went to Stanford, in the heard of Silicon Valley. Now Mullins teaches at the London Business School, and he spends a lot of his time looking into successful entrepreneurship. In this interview with the Wall Street Journal , Mullins discusses the challenges of getting financing for startups. He says banks are of little help--at least at the early stages.

With Italy's new compromise government making moves to end austerity measures, the austerity backlash in Europe seems to be gathering momentum. Wall Street Journal Europe Editor Simon Nixon takes a look at what might be ahead for the euro zone. But he wants us to note that some European countries are now able to consider dropping austerity measures because, he argues, accepting them before has helped to lower borrowing costs. From the WSJ News Hub :

It is hard to think of an A+ grade as a bad thing, but Fitch 's downgrading of the China's debt rating, and the local currency rating, to an A+ (from AA-) is not exactly welcome news. It points to one factor that could slow growth in China's economy: debt concerns. It appears that the global economy's next superpower is not immune from some of the finance issues that have hit in the West--namely credit buildup and shadow banking . Fitch Ratings ' Andrew Colquhoun spoke with the Wall Street Journal 's Deborah Kan about the downgrade, and his firm's concerns over bad loans in China:

We tend to look away from a lot of reports on rising gas prices. Much like weather, gas prices are low hanging fruit for news media to attract eyeballs without providing any real analysis. But there are exceptions. In the below interview, for example, the Wall Street Journal 's Paul Vigna explains exactly why prices are up again, and it provides a nice case study on how the various parts of a supply chain affect consumer costs. In the case of the most recent rise, it has to do with the gap between what refiners get for the price of crude oil and the price of wholesale--or "the crack spread":

Many Americans need to get some sleep in order to get to work. The Wall Street Journal 's Lauren Weber , citing a Harvard Medical School study, reports that exhaustion is costing the U.S. economy "billions of dollars in lost productivity." Some companies are realizing that the nonstop work culture isn't producing enough work and are training their employees to be better sleepers. Weber: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 40.6 million American workers, or 30% of the civilian workforce, don't get enough rest. And the Harvard scientists estimated in 2011 that sleep deprivation costs U.S. companies $63.2 billion in lost productivity per year, mainly because of "presenteeism," people showing up for work but operating at subpar levels. One example, from a separate team at Singapore Management University: Workers waste an extra 8.4 minutes online—checking email, refreshing the TMZ.com home page, and so on—for every hour of interrupted sleep the previous night. Managers struggle to motivate exhausted workers. During busy holiday periods at the Park Hyatt Beaver Creek resort in Avon, Colo., long hours sometimes lead to short fuses among staff. "You have to try to figure out who's feeling frustrated and help them cut loose to get some rest," said Scott Gubrud, director of sales and marketing at the hotel, which last week began a series of better-sleep initiatives for both employees and guests. "If we treated machinery like we treat the human body, there would be breakdowns all the time," said James Maas, a former Cornell University psychologist and author of "Sleep for Success." Companies have been slow to grasp the effects of sleep deprivation on productivity, but it is now a hot topic even in hard-driving industries, such as finance, where pulling all-nighters is often viewed as crucial to getting ahead. Read Go Ahead, Hit the Snooze Button here . (h/t Boston Innovation )

Social media has become a valuable tool for investors to measure consumer sentiment. Now hedge fund Derwent Capital Markets (DCM Capital) is trying to take the use of Twitter as a stock trading tool to a new level. In this interview with the Wall Street Journal Markets Hub , DCM Capital CEO Paul Hawtin explains the plan to open up Twitter to more people by building a new type of trading platform:

There is no shortage of predictions for what going off the so-called "fiscal cliff" will wreak here in the U.S., but what about the impact on other economies? On the Wall Street Journal 's Asia Today , Eastspring Investment 's Nicholas Ferres said the real concern is whether the U.S. goes back into recession. If it does, economies throughout Asia will suffer. With growth rates in China and elsewhere not as strong as five years ago, the suffering could, in fact, be quite significant:

In what the Wall Street Journal 's Ryan Dezember and Matt Wirz described last week as a "controversial practice ," more private equity firms are using dividend recapitalizations to increase the payoff from investments. In short, this involves firms increasing debt at companies they own to make them higher yield investments. But for a more thorough explanation, we turn to Paddy Hirsch and his Marketplace Whiteboard :