Citigroup’s (C) board does not even get to decide who should run the bank. This is the same board of “blue chip bankers” recruited by Chairman Richard Parsons. Regulators have decided to humiliate the…
The Small Business Administration runs a stimulus program for the government that provides up to $225 million for modest American enterprises. According to The New York Times, this pool is meant to make about…
The US got what it described as a victory in a WTO case against China. The system set up in the world’s most populous nation forced US companies to sell books, DVDs, and movies…
Reuters: Wal-Mart (WMT) will report results with Wall St. looking for sales growth. Reuters: US home foreclosures set a record in July. Reuters: Citigroup (C) hired outsiders to help with a management review. Reuters: …
Markets in Asia were mostly higher. The Nikkei rose .8% to 10.517. Honda (HMC) and Toyota (TM) both rose over 1%. The Hang Seng was up 2.1% to 20,864. The Shanghai Composite was up…
John Paulson has been well known as a hedge fund manager because of the profits he made from short selling many of the key financial stocks. Yet his new filing shows a large long…
The Blackstone Group L.P. (NYSE: BX) had a fairly busy day. It seems that reports of the death of private equity may have been exaggerated. The company had two key announcements today: it brought…
Several companies run annual brand valuations. It is a good business for advertising and marketing firms to be viewed as experts on brands. Brand values are based on the cash flow they create, and…
The announcement from the FOMC on the decision on interest rates is out. As most suspected, it was not the rate decision that mattered as much. It was the language around the potential exit…
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) was supposed to be the big winner of the Great Recession as the giant trade-down retail play for America. Interestingly enough, the peak of the stock was almost 9-months…
With all the stimulus money in the U.S. supposedly heading toward alternative energy…. with all the boost from Chinese credits for solar…. with all the greenhouse gases and carbon emission regulation coming…. and with…
The Twitter outage introduces the concept of whether anyone would really miss the service if it went away. Financial experts have argued that Twitter is not worth much even with its 30 million or…
Emdeon Inc. (NYSE: EM) is today’s ‘other’ initial public offering. The company priced 23,700,000 shares of its common stock at a price of $15.50 per share. Not all proceeds are going back into the…
These are this morning’s top day trader alerts and most active in price and volume. We have more detailed analysis and data on price and volume with links through to each at VSInvestor.com: JA…
The Trade Balance, a.k.a. the trade deficit, for June has just come out at $27.01 billion, from a revised $25.97 billion. This comes in versus consensus estimates from economists at $28.7 billion. The exports…
It is somewhat light in analyst coverage this morning as reports are dribbling in. These are the top analyst upgrades, downgrades, and initiations we have seen from Wall Street early this Wednesday morning: Citrix…
Starwood Property Trust, Inc. (NYSE: STWD) has priced its initial public offering of 40,500,000 shares of common stock at a price of $20.00 per share. This is an externally managed company and the underwriting…
Apple’s (AAPL) market cap is now$148 billion. Google’s (GOOG) is only $143 billion. The disparity between the two numbers does not make sense. Google has been the faster-growing company, at least historically. Hardware companies…
Economic growth in China and a very modest recovery in the West will not be enough to drive up oil demand next year, according to the International Energy Agency. The world will only need…
Twitter had another hacker attack yesterday. Several media outlets reported that the micro-blogging system was down periodically though the early morning and afternoon. The service had more severe problems last week. There have been…