Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) warns about the economy as it releases earnings. (Reuters)

Regulators may make mortgage lenders charge a flat fee to help home buyers. (WSJ)

Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) will give less marketing support to Lipitor as it moves to a generic form. (WSJ)

The Post Office backs away from a plan to close 3,700 rural offices. (WSJ)

Fannie Mae posts its best results since its bailout and made $2.7 billion. (WSJ)

The European Union delays a bailout payment to Greece as political turmoil there rises. (WSJ)

Spain may get a break on budget deficits from EU partners, who will give it more leeway to recover. (WSJ)

Weak imports raise China’s April trade deficit. (WSJ)

Chrysler will try to improve its battered quality reputation. (WSJ)

Liberty Media (NASDAQ: LMCA) increases its share of Sirius XM Radio (NASDAQ: SIRI) as it tries to gain control. (WSJ)

New Facebook government documents show it is weak in mobile ads. (WSJ)

Corporate borrowing makes the debt crisis in Spain worse. (NYT)

Third Point insists that Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) name an interim CEO. (NYT)

News Corp. (NASDAQ: NWS) doubles its share buyback to $10 billion. (FT)

MetroPCS (NYSE: PCS) may tie up with T-Mobile. (FT)

Sony predicts a profit this year. (Bloomberg)

Douglas A. McIntyre

The unofficial closing bells put the DJIA down more than 76 points to 12,932.01 (-0.59%), the NASDAQ fell more than 11 points (-0.39%) to 2,946.27, and the S&P 500 fell -0.43% or nearly 6 points to 1,363.71.

There were several analyst upgrades and downgrades today, including Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F) maintained as ‘buy’ with a target price of $19 at Argus; Wynn Resorts Ltd. (NASDAQ: WYNN) maintained ‘outperform’ with a target price of $166 at Credit Suisse; Capital One Financial Corp. (NYSE: COF) raised to ‘hold’ at Argus; BP plc (NYSE: BP) cut to ‘underweight’ at Barclays; and Synacor Inc. (NASDAQ: SYNC) cut to ‘underperform’ at BofA/ML.

Earnings reports since markets closed last night have led to some price changes as of the last half hour of trading today: Charter Communications Inc. (NASDAQ: CHTR) is down up 5.5% at $65.24 after posting a new 52-week high of $66.18 earlier today (more coverage here); Hecla Mining Co. (NYSE: HL) is up 4.1% at $4.04 (more coverage here); OfficeMax Inc. (NYSE: OMX) is up 10.5% at $4.85; Tenet Healthcare Corp. (NYSE: THC) is up 1.4% at $5.11; The Wendy’s Co. (NASDAQ: WEN) is down -4.3% at $4.66 (more coverage here); Rosetta Stone Inc. (NYSE: RST) is up 18.4% at $12.64; and Pioneer Drilling Co. (NYSE: PDC) is up 5.5% at $8.03.

On Wednesday we are scheduled to get earnings from AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL), Agrium Inc. (NYSE: AGU), CenturyLink Inc. (NYSE: CTL), Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group Inc. (NYSE: DTG), Macy’s Inc. (NYSE: M), Melco Crown Entertainment Ltd. (NASDAQ: MPEL), News Corp. (NASDAQ: NWS), Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO), Tesla Motors Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA), Toyota Motor Corp. (NYSE: TM), and priceline.com Inc. (NASDAQ: PCLN).

Other standouts from today include the following stocks:

Fossil Inc. (NASDAQ: FOSL) is down -36.8% at $79.50. The fashion accessories company revealed a weak forecast today. More coverage here.

Dendreon Corp. (NASDAQ: DNDN) is down -24.6% at $8.81. The drug maker’s earnings were not as strong as expected. More coverage here.

Avalon Rare Metals Inc. (AMEX: AVL) is down -24% at $1.67 after posting a new 52-week low of $1.58 earlier today. The rare earths miner is delaying a feasibility study. More coverage here.

Stay tuned for Wednesday. Cleveland Fed President Sandra Pianalto and Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser are giving speeches. We have noted the following events on the schedule (all times Eastern):

• 10:00 a.m. – Wholesale trade report
• 10:30 a.m. – EIA weekly petroleum status report
• 1:00 p.m. – 10-year note auction

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Paul Ausick

Yahoo! cannot take months to find someone to become its fifth chief executive in five years. This makes it much more likely it will turn to one of its board members or someone already in senior management. That leaves Yahoo! only two logical candidates. They are board member Thomas J. McInerney, the former chief financial officer of internet firm IAC/Interactive (NASDAQ: IACI), or Ross Levinsohn, the firm’s executive vice president and head of global media. Levinsohn is a former president of News Corporation’s (NASDAQ: NWS) Fox Interactive Media.

McInerney’s time as CFO of IAC/Interactive made him a high-level executive at a company very similar to Yahoo!. He also has served as CEO of the retailing division of IAC/Interactive, which includes HSN.com. Thompson’s plans for Yahoo! are to transform it into an e-commerce company. McInerney’s experience at HSN.com would allow him to spearhead such an initiative. Yahoo! also needs a deal-maker to handle its negotiations to sell all or part of its ownership in Ablibaba and Yahoo! Japan. Many investors believe that these positions are worth more than Yahoo!’s core business. McInerney worked at Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) early in his career.

Levinsohn ran one of the largest online divisions at any major media company while at News Corp. Before he recently became head of global media at Yahoo!, he was executive vice president of Yahoo!’s Americas region and oversaw the company’s North, Central and South American business, including advertising sales, partnerships and content. Advertising remains Yahoo!’s major source of revenue. In Levinsohn’s current position, he supervises products, partnerships, engineering and content creation around the world. That means he plays a part in almost every important operation at Yahoo!. Levinsohn has been at Yahoo! long enough to understand the entire company. It is a wonder he was not made CEO ahead of Thompson.

Yahoo!’s board is out of time, if it plans to swiftly replace Thompson. And the list of candidates who can take over quickly is a very short one.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Read The American Companies With the Most Customers

The customer bases of many of these companies are in the tens of millions. Each company operates in an industry that provides a product or a service to an extremely wide spectrum of American consumers. The leader in each sector reached its position through innovation, longevity or some combination of the two.

Each of the industries on this list serves a very large base of customers. For example, there are thousands of retailers, serving pretty much the entire population, but only Costco is the leader in membership with over 65 million members. Founded in 1983, Costco (NASDAQ: COST) is a relatively new company. It became a success largely because it charges customers a membership fee for access to its stores and in exchange offers extremely low prices that are never marked up more than 15% above the price Costco pays.

Some industries are huge, but only have a small number of competitors. While there are only a handful of national wireless carriers, there are over 330 million wireless subscriptions in the U.S. — more than the population itself. But there are only four competitors of any size — AT&T (NYSE: T), Verizon Wireless, Sprint-Nextel (NYSE: S) and T-Mobile. Each company has to battle for a share of a market that is no longer growing. The weapons the companies use to gain market share are products, customer service and price. AT&T is the leader. Its share of the market is based to some extent on history. It is a descendant from the original AT&T phone monopoly. But without strong products and intelligent pricing there is no assurance it can stay ahead of number two competitor Verizon Wireless.

24/7 Wall St. examined 10 of America’s largest consumer industries and the customer counts for the biggest two or three companies in each sector. We then reviewed the history of each industry in an attempt to find how the top company in each reached its leadership position. To rank the companies, 24/7 Wall St. took each leader and compared it in size to the leaders in the other industries chosen. We used company and industry data to confirm customer counts. Each company in this ranking is the largest company in its industry, based on customer count.

These are the American Companies with the Most Customers.

The U.S. economy slows as inventories fall. (Reuters)

The Bank of Japan increases yen purchases to 10 trillion. (Reuters)

U.S. companies worry more about a slowdown in China. (Reuters)

Galaxy smartphone sales push Samsung’s earnings up. (Reuters)

The SEC to examine the well ownership of Chesapeake Energy’s (NYSE: CHK) CEO. (Reuters)

The Kindle Fire drives Amazon.com’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) earnings higher. (Reuters)

The United States hires a well-known prosecutor as it moves closer to antitrust action against Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). (Reuters)

U.S. regulators will more closely examine possible insider trading relationships between Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) and Galleon. (WSJ)

Many of the jobs U.S. companies have added recently are outside the U.S. (WSJ)

Bidding wars for homes in some areas return. (WSJ)

The yuan hits a new record high. (WSJ)

The new health bill may cause insurers to issue more than $1 billion in refunds. (WSJ)

Zynga (NASDAQ: ZNGA) says it lost money last quarter. (WSJ)

Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) earnings are helped by overseas and grocery sales. (WSJ)

News Corp. (NASDAQ: NWS) and Walt Disney (NYSE: DIS) buy out part owner of Hulu — Providence Equity Partners — for $200 million. (WSJ)

The Attorney General of Mexico will investigate bribery charges against Walmart (NYSE: WMT). (NYT)

The number of wealthy people in Brazil to double in the next 11 years. (FT)

Spanish Economy Minister Luis de Guindos says the European Union has not approached it about a bailout and that its banks have adequate capital. (Bloomberg)

Daimler earnings rise on Mercedes sales. (Bloomberg)

Spain’s unemployment rate reaches 24.4%. (Bloomberg)

Douglas A. McIntyre

TV advertising totaled nearly $61 billion in 2011, while online video advertising totaled $2 billion, double 2010 ad revenues.

Paul Ausick

Even if the differences are reasonable due to a wide variety of interpretations of proxy data, the gulf between two of the top sets of analysts are huge.

Take the spread between Forbes and CNBC. Many CEOs appear on only one list. In the case where chief executives appear on both, there is a disagreement about compensation:

Forbes:

The top earner in our report is McKesson‘s  John H. Hammergren, with $131 million in total pay. Hammergren drew $6.3 million in salary and bonus, but also realized $112 million from the exercise of vested stock options. The next four top-paid chief executives, also earning most of their pay from exercised stock options or vested stock awards:  Ralph Lauren of Ralph Lauren ($67 million); Michael D. Fascitelli of  Vornado Realty ($64 million);  Richard Kinder of Kinder Morgan ($61 million) and David M. Cote of Honeywell International ($56 million).

And CNBC picked Rupert Murdoch (News Corp) (NYSE:NWS)–$33 million, Robert Iger (Disney–33.4 million) (NYSE: DIS), David Cote (Honeywell)–$35.8 million, Philippe Dauman (Viacom) (NYSE: VIA)–$43.1 million, John Hammergren (McKesson)–$46.1 million, David Zaslav (Discovery Communications)–$52.4 million, Ronald B. Johnson (JC Penney) (NYSE: JCP) $53.2 million, Larry Ellison (Oracle) (NASDAQ: ORCL)–$77.5 million, David Simon (Simon Property Group)–$137.17 million, Timothy Cook (Apple) (NASDAQ: AAPL)–$377.99 million

The difference also raise the issue of whether some boards overpay CEOs or not. That is hard to determine if there is disagreement on the fundamentals of pay packages

The search company reported:

Today we announced plans to create a new class of non-voting capital stock, which will be listed on NASDAQ. These shares will be distributed via a stock dividend to all existing stockholders: the owner of each existing share will receive one new share of the non-voting stock, giving investors twice the number of shares they had before. It’s effectively a two-for-one stock split — something many of our investors have long asked us for. These non-voting shares will be available for corporate uses, like equity-based employee compensation, that might otherwise dilute our governance structure.

Larry Page and cofounder Sergey Brin admitted the structure is unusual and perhaps even objectionable to some stockholders: “We recognize that some people, particularly those who opposed this structure at the start, won’t support this change — and we understand that other companies have been very successful with more traditional governance models.” The plan, the two believe, shields Google from short-term pressure because of decisions that might take away some of the firm’s independence. The other side of that argument is that the two men are essentially dictators.

There is nothing new about a dual-share structure, particularly at media companies. Family controlled firms, including the New York Times (NYSE: NYT), Viacom (NASDAQ: VIA) and News Corp. (NASDAQ: NWS), have used such measures to keep family or founder control. There is no evidence that the structure has hurt shareholders. As a matter of fact, public corporations controlled by Sumner Redstone, Rupert Murdoch and Warren Buffett have done relatively well.

The decision by investors to keep Google’s shares is one that weighs corporate control against remarkable results and share performance. Google reported revenues of $10.65 billion for the quarter ended March 31, 2012, an increase of 24% compared to the first quarter of 2011. GAAP net income in the first quarter of 2012 was $2.89 billion, compared to $1.80 billion in the first quarter of 2011. Google still relies too much on its search advertising business, but it claims its diversification into mobile platforms will change that.

Brin and Page can argue that shareholders have done well despite the firm’s share structure. Google’s stock is up almost 40% in the past five years while the S&P 500 is down slightly. Peeved investors can give up those kind of results. Then they have to figure out where else to put their money to get similar returns.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Tom Glocer, the departing head of Thomson Reuters (NYSE: TRI), makes $20 million. (Reuters)

China’s premier, Wen Jiabao, says the monopoly of large Chinese banks should end. (Reuters)

Facebook files patent claims against Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO). (Reuters)

Roche presses its bid to takeover Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN). (Reuters)

Citing sufficient strength in the economy, the Fed says it will stand by and add no stimulus. (WSJ)

Moody’s cuts the credit rating of General Electric (NYSE: GE). (WSJ)

Yahoo! to cut 2,000 jobs. (WSJ)

AT&T (NYSE: T) faces a walkout of 40,000 wireline workers. (WSJ)

Samsung takes a more active role in the mobile ad market. (WSJ)

Eurozone nations continue to cut costs despite concerns this will cause a deeper recession. (WSJ)

U.S. auto sales surge in March as people turn to more fuel-efficient cars. (WSJ)

US Airways (NYSE: LCC) increases its efforts to buy American Airlines parent AMR, which is in Chapter 11. (WSJ)

Burger King to go public again (WSJ)

A study published in the Administrative Science Quarterly says that workers hired from outside a company make more than current workers but perform worse. (WSJ)

Regulators finalize how they will oversee nonbank financial firms. (WSJ)

Regulators are set to fine JP Morgan (NYSE: JPM) for its role in the collapse of Lehman Bros. (NYT)

China moves its cap on foreign investments to $80 billion from $30 billion. (FT)

The departure of James Murdoch from the chairman’s job at BSkyB may allow News Corp. (NASDAQ: NWS) to make a bid for the part of the company its does not own. (Bloomberg)

One million paid TV customers move to the web in 2011. (Bloomberg)

BMW and Mercedes first-quarter sales in the U.S. are almost the same. (Bloomberg)

Douglas A. McIntyre

CEO pay jumps for last year as stock options rise. (Reuters)

Avon (NYSE: AVP) turns down a $10 billion offer from Coty. (Reuters)

Strong U.S. economic data push Brent crude above $125. (Reuters)

Christian Brothers Investment Services, a News Corp. (NASDAQ: NWS) shareholder, wants an independent chairman. (Reuters)

Fund Third Point presses its proxy war against Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO). (Reuters)

The Securities and Exchange Commission probes a Groupon (NASDAQ: GRPN) restatement of financials prior to last year’s IPO. (WSJ)

Avon becomes a target for takeover by several companies. (WSJ)

Express Scripts (NASDAQ: ESRX) and Medco (NYSE: MHS) get government approval for their merger. (WSJ)

People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan says the global recession has not ended. (WSJ)

Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN) rejects a new offer from Roche. (WSJ)

Vehicle sales rise 78% in Japan in March, compared to in the month of last year’s earthquake. (WSJ)

U.S. consumer demand helps the fortunes of U.S. factories. (WSJ)

China eases a ban on Twitter-like messages. (WSJ)

Poor manufacturing and employment data show a deepening eurozone recession. (WSJ)

Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) will buy Wyse Technology, a cloud tools company. (WSJ)

NYSE Euronext (NYSE: NYX) cuts a cost reduction plan after a failed merger with Deutsche Borse. (WSJ)

Some large investors may buy homes by the thousands. (NYT)

Several Germany towns would suffer greatly if Opel closes plants. (NYT)

Total (NYSE: TOT) says natural gas leaks in the North Sea cost it $2.5 million a day. (NYT)

The SEC wants boards of banks to be more accountable for risk. (FT)

Douglas A. McIntyre