It is not very frequent that you see an English-speaking country take a sovereign credit ratings agency downgrade. That would indicate the government is one step farther away from being able to repay its…
DryShips Inc. (NASDAQ: DRYS) is trading down hard today on a note from the accountants. The company’s auditors have a “going concern” noted in the annual report on the company’s Ocean Rig ASA unit. …
Agrium Inc. (NYSE:AGU) sweetened its cash offer for CF Industries Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:CF) by more than 10% last week. CF Industries has rejected the latest offer, repeating what has become CF’s mantra: “Agrium’s offer…
Chinese oil giant China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., usually called Sinopec, (NYSE:SNP) reported that annual earnings were off 47% for 2008, compared with 2007. The report includes only annual numbers; no quarterly numbers were…
Arena Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: ARNA) is getting shelled this morning. The company released “positive study data” this morning on trials for its obesity treatment Lorcaserin. But the real issue around the results is that…
Citigroup (NYSE: C) and General Motors (NYSE: GM) were removed from the The Global Dow, a relatively new index from Dow Jones Indexes, the same group that puts together the much-more imporant Dow Jones…
Water and energy services firm Layne Christensen Company (NASDAQ:LAYN) missed analysts’ estimates of quarterly EPS of $0.40, coming in at $0.24 excluding an impairment charge of $16.1 million. Including the charge, the company had…
John Tamny of RealClearMarkets For those of us interested in taxes, probably the most important words Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis ever wrote had to do with the essential importance of U.S. states to…
The land of analyst upgrades and positive research calls from Wall Street looks pretty thin early this Monday morning: Church & Dwight (CHD) Raised to Outperform at Oppenheimer. Gap Inc. (GPS) Raised to Conviction…
These are some of the top pre-market analyst downgrades and negative analyst calls we have seen from Wall Street firms this Monday morning: Barclays (BCS) Cut to Sell at Societe Generale. Cadbury (CBY) Cut…
The US car companies still have an ace in the hole. The Administration cannot take Chrysler and GM (GM) into bankruptcy without the probability that it will severely undermine stimulus plans meant to save…
The current word in the news media is that Chrysler chief Robert Nardelli will keep his job, unlike his counterpart at GM (GM). That seems odd since, so far, the heads of Toyota (TM)…
In early March, the financial news began to turn good, Citigroup (C) said it has been profitable for the first two months of the year. There were several M&A deals in which large companies…
IBM (IBM) will fire or is firing 5,000 US workers. The press has several reports describing how the functions of these people will be replaced. Workers in India will probably end up doing much…
The G-20 “crisis summit” looks like it will turn into a crisis all its own. For the weeks leading up to the meeting there has been hope that the nations who will attend would…
One of the largest casino projects in history almost fell apart last week. CitiCenter, an $8.7 billion casino being built in Las Vegas, came close to losing a critical piece of funding from one…
According to Reuters, the Administration has forced GM (GM) CEO Rick Wagoner out of his job. Reuters reports that in an FT interview Obama said the G-20 nations should send a strong message of…
Markets in Asia fell sharply. The Nikkei was off 4.6% to 7,236. The Hang Seng fell 4.1% to 13,538. The Shanghai Composite was off .7% to 2,358. At the open in Europe, the FTSE was…
It may be that GM’s (GM) Rick Wagoner was associated too much with the car company’s failures. To get the concessions necessary to restructure GM, the UAW or the creditors may have said he…