The weekly jobless claims just came out at a drop of 21,000 to 509,000. Economists were looking for a roughly 540,000 who applied for benefits. Last week’s initial report of 529,000 was also revised…
After Costco (COST) posted poor numbers for last month and almost every other large retailer in the US said that the early parts of the fourth quarter were bad and the future looked worse,…
These are some of the top pre-market analyst downgrades and cautious calls we have seen this Thursday morning: Accenture (ACN) Cut to Neutral at Goldman Sachs. Adobe Systems (ADBE) Cut to Neutral at Baird.…
These are some of the top pre-market analyst upgrades we have seen this Thursday morning: Amazon.com (AMZN) Raised to Overweight at Barclays. Applied Materials (AMAT) Raised to Buy at Citigroup. Blue Nile (NILE) Raised…
So much fore feeling better in a bad economy. Merck (MRK) offered lackluster guidance for next year and the stock is off before the open. According to Reuters, "Merck said it expected earnings, excluding…
Nokia (NOK) can’t keep up with the falling demand for cellular handsets. It cuts its forecasts for Q4 and 2009 again. That is probably not good new for Motorola (MOT), Samsung, RIM (RIMM), or…
The damage of the recession is beginning to move from the financial sector to other parts of the economy. According to the FT, "The Markit iTraxx Crossover index rose above 1,000 basis points for…
IBM (IBM) has decided to be the next company to pile onto Microsoft (MSFT), which has already been beaten like a red-headed step child for bringing out Vista, a flawed bit of software which…
Despite what executives at Goldman Sachs (GS) and several other large financial firms have done by agreeing to take no bonuses, there has been no such word out of Citigroup (C). It looked like…
The retailers who were supposed to do OK during the recession were the ones with the really, really good goods which were being sold at the really, really low prices. Wal-Mart (WMT) falls into…
The last word from Washington is that Congressional staff and some car company executives understand that pre-packaged bankruptcies of GM (GM) and Chrysler may be the only effective ways of saving the companies. The…
There are a lot of pieces of data about what is happening to the economy, perhaps too many to make any sense of them. In the last day or so, two stand out. One…
According to Reuters, falling interest rates will not offset unemployment and falling prices to save to housing market. Reuters reports that GM (GM) and Chrysler are considering bankruptcy to get US funding. Reuters reports…
Markets in Asia were mixed. The Nikkei was off 1% to 7,924. The Hang Seng rose .2% to 13,611. The Shanghai Composite was up 1.8% to 2,002. In Europe, at the open, the FTSE…
Now that the Fed, Treasury, and Congress have set up plans to bailout everything from banks to car companies to bicycle shops, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has decided to turn his attention to the…