Cook. No.2 At Apple, Earns $22 Million Bonus
Timothy Cook, Apple’s (AAPL) COO, who sat in while Steve Jobs was away ill, made a bonus valued at $22 million for his work. The bonus was awarded on March 10 and is discretionary, which means…
All Work
Douglas A. McIntyre
Citigroup (C) Proxy: TARP Never Paid So Well
Citigroup (C) CEO Vikram Pandit, recently hailed for turning the bank around after over a year of being blamed for its demise, only made $128,751 last year in total compensation, down from $38.2 million…
Critical American Express Card Stolen By Employee, Little Info Available
American Express (AXP) has informed a number of its card members that their account numbers, names, the date on which their cards became effective, and the expiration dates have been stolen. The firm also said…
A Superbowl Retail Sales Recovery
The market was overly impressed with the rebound in February retail sales. The Commerce Department says that the figure for the month was $355.5 billion excluding autos, an increase of 0.3 percent from January. The number was 3.9 percent…
Video Game Business Hurt In February, Nintendo Crushed
The video game industry had another rough outing in February as revenue fell 15% from last year. Total sales of games and consoles totaled $1.26 billion in the US. Microsoft (MSFT) and Sony (SNE)…
Today Best Market Rumors (3/12/2010)
Updated throughout the day. Janet Yellen will be nominated to be vice chair of the Fed (various) Meg Whitman’s former CEO of Ebay (EBAY) run for governor of California may be hurt by her investments…
Toyota (TM) Plans To Regain All Of US Market Share
Toyota’s US sales are recovering in March, as improbable as that may seem. Industry research group Edmunds.com said the Japanese company’s zero percent incentive plan has brought Toyota’s market share in the US back up…
Another Clever Plan To Further Ruin The Housing Market
Mortgage research firm RealtyTrac reported that the rate of mortgage defaults slowed to a four-year low in February, but the trend of foreclosures was still up by 6% compared with the same month last…
The Google War With China Escalates
Google (GOOG) seems ready to extend its plan not to censor the results of its search engine results in China, which would anger the local government. The People’s Republic expects tech companies based abroad to…
Pfizer: More Big Pharma R&D Work Fails
Pfizer (PFE) and other big pharma companies have been under assault for several years as some of their most profitable drugs lose patent protection which creates low-priced generic competition. Pfizer has not been able to…
The Disposable CEO
It is proxy season and as public companies put out the lists of compensations for their CEOs it is plain that the recession did not damage chief executive pay packages in most cases. New…
Media Digest 3/12/2010 Reuters, WSJ, NYTimes, FT, Bloomberg
Reuters. Obama will nominate Yellen to be Fed vice chair. Reuters: China told Obama to leave yuan policy to its government. Reuters: A Chinese minister said the nation could not keep up fast industrial…
Asia Markets And Europe Open (3/12/2010)
Markets in Asia were mixed. The Nikkei rose .8% to 10,751. The Hang Seng was down .1% to 21,208. The Shanghai Composite was down to 3,013 At the open in Europe, the FTSE rose…
The Below Average CEO: Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo Of Nokia (NOK)
Average: “an estimation of or approximation to an arithmetic mean”–Webster Among the public companies in the handset business which trade on US exchanges, Nokia (NOK) has performed the most poorly over the last year. The…
Google’s Vain Advice to Save Newspapers
By John Hudson, The Atlantic Wire On Tuesday, Hal Varian, Google’s top economist, delivered a keynote address on the economics of the newspaper industry. He’s a notable expert on the subject, in part because…
6 New Leveraged Direxion ETFs (BRIL, INDL, SOXL, BRIS, INDZ, SOXS)
Direxion is launching six new Direxion Shares Daily ETFs, making the leveraged ETF trading instruments now at 34 ETFs. These will seek 200% of the daily performance or 200% of the inverse of the…
Today’s Best Market Rumors (3/11/2010)
Updated throughout the day. Citigroup (C) may earn $20 billion in 2012 (FT) Macquarie Group, Australia’s largest investment bank, is on the hunt for more U.S. assets. (Bloomberg) Regulators have told Bank of America…
Top Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades (AMLN, NLY, ARMH, BBBY, CO, DPS, LVLT, SANM, YHOO)
These are this Thursday’s top analyst upgrades, downgrades, and initiations seen from Wall Street morning research calls: Amylin Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AMLN) Started as Buy at Merriman Curhan Ford. Annaly Mortgage (NYSE: NLY) Cut to…
China’s Economic Rise Is Truly Glorious
By John Tamny of Forbes It’s very difficult to pick up any kind of financial publication these days without reading about China’s growing economy, and what this means for the economic health of the…
No Signs Of Intelligent Life At VW
Like GM and Toyota (TM) before it, VW aims to be the largest car company in the world within a few years with a huge lead over its competition. In the meantime, VW said that…