Bloomberg News

The hedge fund billionaires who took over the remains of imploded IndyMac Bank after the mortgage meltdown and converted it into OneWest Bank are exploring the possibility of selling the big Pasadena savings and loan, according to people informed about the process. Discussions have been held with several banks, these people said, although the talks are at only a preliminary stage - "the kick of a tire or two," as one said. OneWest Chairman Steven Mnuchin, the former Goldman Sachs mortgage executive who led the group that bought IndyMac from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

The decade of the tech stock? Now there's an understatement. The hottest stocks of the 1990s are virtually an all-tech affair, as a list of the top performers compiled for The Times by Ned Davis Research shows. Just look at Dell Computer Corp.'s decade-leading 91,863% rise, as measured from its closing stock price on the last trading day of 1989 through Thursday. That means a $5,000 investment in the personal computer maker at the start of the '90s would be worth more than $4.5 million today.

Netflix Inc. has acquired exclusive U.S. rights to movies from Walt Disney Studios in a deal that catapults the Internet video-on-demand service into direct competition with pay TV giants such as HBO and Showtime. The three-year agreement takes effect in 2016 and is a blow to the pay channel Starz, which currently has the rights to broadcast Disney movies, including its Pixar animated films and Marvel superhero pictures, about eight months after they are released in theaters. Starz's sole remaining movie provider is now Sony Pictures.

Air pollution caused by hydraulic fracturing, a controversial oil and gas drilling method, may contribute to “acute and chronic health problems for those living near natural gas drilling sites,” according to a new study from the  Colorado School of Public Health . The study , based on three years of monitoring at Colorado sites, found a number of “potentially toxic petroleum hydrocarbons in the air near the wells including benzene, ethylbenzene,...

Herman Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan sounds simple enough: Eliminate the existing tax code and replace it with a 9% tax on personal income, a 9% business tax and a 9% national sales tax. But could it work? That question has been posed to a number of tax policy experts since Cain unveiled the plan last month. And it was a topic that dominated Tuesday's Washington Post-Bloomberg debate. Cain insists that the plan would immediately jump-start the economy by putting more money into people's pockets.

Tuesday's question: Of the 15 best-performing initial public stock offerings during the first quarter, how many were from Internet companies? And the answer is . . . 15, according to Bloomberg News. Today's question: Which was the worst-performing U.S. stock mutual fund during the first quarter? The answer will appear Thursday.