Credit Suisse pleads guilty. In the first plea of its kind in decades, the second-largest Swiss bank will pay about $2.5 billion to the federal government and New York financial regulators to settle a lengthy investigation. Credit Suisse will not have to divulge the names of any of its US clients, as that would violate Swiss law. Pfizer hears “no.” UK pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca rejected the US pharmaceutical giant’s latest  offer to purchase it. Reuters reports that AstraZeneca chairman Leif Johansson stated, “Pfizer's approach throughout its pursuit of AstraZeneca appears to have been fundamentally driven by the corporate financial benefits to its shareholders of cost savings and tax minimization.” Pfizer says this was its “final” offer. And so do inversions. Pfizer’s takeover bid has prompted policymakers to try and stop “inversions,” also known as changing a mailing address for a lower corporate tax rate. Senator Carl Levin and his brother, Representative Sandy Levin, will introduce identical bills today aimed at curbing the practice. How low can a gas tax go? Pretty low, apparently: After adjusting for inflation, New Jersey’s gasoline tax, at 14.5 cents per gallon, is just over half its 1927 rate of 27.3 cents per gallon. The state’s gasoline tax has held steady since 1990, but state legislators are currently trying to raise the tax by 15 cents over three years to support the state’s Transportation Trust Fund. New Jersey isn’t the only state with a historically low gas tax. The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy notes the top (or low) ten: Alabama, Alaska, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Nebraska, New Jersey, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia. How might one country compete with another country’s drug dealers? If you’re Uruguay, you exempt marijuana production and sales from taxes. The country hopes that its marijuana prices will remain low enough to beat black market pot smuggled in from Paraguay.

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