Three news stories on Wednesday appeared that reported essentially the same thing:

Board members at Groupn (GRPN) were discussing firing the company's CEO Andrew Mason.

These news stories did not cite each other. Rather, they cited "sources" close to the situation. (Kara Swisher at All Things D broke the story.* Then Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal followed).

Often, when separate news stories contain essentially the same information and don't cite each other, it means that a person or company wants the information out there.

In the case of the Groupon, it was not immediately obvious who stood to gain from the Andrew Mason information.

It didn't help Andrew Mason, certainly.

And it didn't help the company, whose leadership was suddenly thrown into limbo.

And it didn't help the board as a whole, which looked like it was stabbing its CEO in the back.

It seemed unlikely that high-quality publications like All Things D, Bloomberg, and the Wall Street Journal would run with secondhand

European nations struggling to repay loans and requesting bailouts have become fairly common in the past few years, but now it appears that this trend might be crossing the Atlantic. Global markets and U.S. officials are becoming increasingly concerned that Puerto Rico will have to default on its debt.

Puerto Rico is currently crawling out of a five-year recession. The unemployment rate is in the mid-teens, government pensions are only 6% funded and GDP growth is moving at a snail's pace.

"There are aspects of Puerto Rico that are quite similar to [Greece]," says Robert Donahue, managing director at Municipal Market Advisors. He explains that the similarities include "high government employment, the [unregulated] tax system, the pension system, and the weak economy."

So is Puerto Rico the Greece of the Caribbean?

"We hope not," Donahue tells The Daily Ticker. Still, he's warning potential investors that Puerto Rico is a systemic risk.

Pensions for government workers could run dry as

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney vowed he'd do this as president. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has been a public advocate of it. But the White House says it would not label the nation's largest trading partner — China — a currency manipulator.

In its semi-annual report to Congress on international economic and exchange rate policies, the Treasury Department says China has taken steps to appreciate its currency, the renminbi, and "Chinese authorities have substantially reduced the level of official intervention in exchange markets since the third quarter of 2011." According to the report, China's move to a flexible exchange rate regime has caused the renminbi to appreciate 12.6% against the U.S. dollar since June 2010 (adjusting for inflation) but the currency "remains significantly undervalued, and further appreciation of the RMB against the dollar and other major currencies is warranted."

As The Daily Ticker's Aaron Task and Henry Blodget discuss in the attached clip,