Macro chatter: Using fried chicken to beat McDonald’s in India

Need to know:
Another one could be close to biting the dust in Europe.

Cyprus is getting closer to becoming the next euro-zone country to tap a European bailout fund, the Wall Street Journal said.

The idyllic vacation island in the Mediterranean could be forced to ask for a financial rescue as early as this month as it works to stave off the spread of Greece’s financial crisis and its worsening credit reputation, the paper said.

Cyprus is already being forced to contend with paying double-digit yields for what two major ratings agencies already classify as junk.

Want to know:
American International Group CEO Robert Benmosche won’t have to work until he’s 80, but he thinks you might have to.

In an interview with Bloomberg from his villa in the Croatian seaside resort town Dubrovnik, the AIG CEO said Europe’s debt crisis demonstrates that people aren’t working long enough to make their pensions and medical services affordable to their governments.

People around the world could need to work until they’re 70 or 80, he told Bloomberg.

Benmosche is 68, but since he earned more than $10 million in 2011 alone, he can probably retire whenever he wants. 

Dull but important:
Billionaire investor George Soros is giving the euro zone three months to figure out how to keep the euro alive.

He describes the euro zone as a political bubble on the verge of popping. Speaking at the Festival of Economics in Italy, a country that's struggling with its own economics, Soros said he expects that market demands of European governments will exceed their ability to pay in three months.

The euro as you know has been on the verge of collapsing for a while now.

Just because:
Yum! Brands, the corporation behind KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell wants to do in India what it has done in China. 

The company wants to give McDonald’s a little more run for its rupee and is trying to figure out how to copy its Chinese dominance in India, Financial Times reported. 

China is one of the few countries in the world where Yum stores outnumber McDonald’s locations. Yum has around 4,000 KFC and Pizza Huts in China, where McDonald's has only about 1,400 golden arches. 

By 2015, Yum expects Indians will be spending more than $1 billion a year on KFC fried chicken.

Strange but true:
The Securities and Exchange Commission may be a more dangerous place to work than you think, at least according to the SEC’s lead internal investigator.

David Weber had been wanting permission to carry a gun to work but his colleagues didn’t like the idea and managed to get him placed on leave, Reuters reported. Weber had said he wanted to carry a gun because he felt threatened while working on a case with links to big-time organized crime, but Reuters said he could have called in the FBI or US Marshals if he felt he was in danger.

Weber had another request to carry a gun to work shot down a couple of years ago when he was working for another government financial regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. He’s also got a “propensity for domestic violence,” and Reuters said he denies and been investigated for abusing his powers to get out of a traffic violation.