The Week’s Top Issues

Next week we have earnings out of John Chambers & Co., here is the preliminary preview. There were some major developments this last week ended November 2, 2007:

FINANCIALS: Citigroup’s (C) Chuck Prince may finally be out. AIG (AIG) is now a target of former CEO Hank Greenberg, acting as an activist investor. Someone please tell Warren Buffett to just go make his whale of acquisition in his lifetime (or in ours). Woes at Merrill Lynch (MER) continue. Watching financial stocks, you’d n
ever know Bernanke & Co. lowered both the Fed Funds and Discount rates.
ALTERNATIVE ENERGY: Want to know what happened with global warming and business this week? Here’s Friday’s report and here’s the Oct. 31 report.
BUYBACKS: There was a turbo-charged week of stock buybacks in the news (DELL, CROX, XOM, UNH, HNT, IMMR, ACXM, HAR, ATI, AYI, EPIC).
M&A: Many mergers look in trouble (ACS, TRB, CMLS, GCO, PPH, FINL, BX, COMS). TheStreet.com (TSCM) is diversifying here via an interesting acquisition, and it may have a new platform to sell services and bump up its investor content readership. What if Clearwire (CLWR) were to be acquired by Sprint (S)?. Sirius Satellite Radio (SIRI) and XM Satellite Radio (XMSR) got merger backing recommendations from Glass Lewis and from ISS. Unfortunately, proxy firms don’t have any regulatory influence.
OIL & GAS: Despite high oil prices, a weak dollar, and more, Goldman Sachs cut its oil ratings or at least said take some profits. As we feared, ExxonMobil (XOM) did miss its earnings estimates based on the chart review ahead of time. Our story "The West Begs OPEC" was a huge draw this week.
EARNINGS: Warren Buffett, Friday’s earnings gappers, Sumner Redstone and Viacom, Getty Images may survive, Electronic Arts, United Therapeutics a big winner, Sprint becomes Stink, Exxon’s poor numbers, ugly shoes finally caught up with CROCS, Diller’s IAC/Interactive looks back on track. If you want, you can see the rest of our earnings index.