Can Spain and Italy Avoid Bailouts?
The Financial Times reports that European Union officials have started to work with Spain on a bailout and European Central Bank purchases of its bonds. The paper reports: According to officials involved in the…
All Work
Douglas A. McIntyre
Distrust of Media Soars
Tens of millions of Americans continue to read, watch or listen to the news. Many must consider this news no better than entertainment, as their distrust of the media has reached an all-time high during the…
Another Car Company Plans to Double Sales
The management of one more car company says it expects huge sales improvements over the next few years. There is hardly a large manufacturer that has not forecast double-digit growth or better in roughly that time frame.…
What’s Important in the Financial World (9/20/2012)
Nike Buys Back Shares Nike Inc. (NYSE: NKE) became the latest company to return money to shareholders as the economy falters. It joins a raft of firms from AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL) to Microsoft…
How Safe Are Bank Deposits? No One Knows
People who wanted to log on to Chase.com to check personal or corporate accounts found the site could not be reached, or ran very slowly yesterday. According to media reports, customers had similar problems…
YouTube May Rule Online Video World Forever
Premium content website Hulu, owned by several large multimedia companies, claims it will revolutionize how people get high-end video online and make a great deal of money in the process. VEVO claims the same thing.…
Bank of America Layoffs and National Unemployment
The math is very crude. The Wall Street Journal reports that Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC), still desperate to turn itself around, will fire 16,000 people this year. Compare that to the 100,000 jobs…
Media Digest (9/20/2012) Reuters, WSJ, NYT, FT, Bloomberg
Nike Inc. (NYSE: NKE) will buy back $8 billion in shares. (Reuters) More than 5 million Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) members are children who have been banned from the social network. (Reuters) Banks are…
Asia Markets Off Badly, China PMI Weak
In an odd reversal of fortune, shares of stocks in what was the hyper-hot growth market of China have sold off sharply recently while the recession-plagued markets of the developed world are up. As…
Ten Troubled Housing Markets
NEW YORK (24/7 Wall St./MarketWatch) — Since the peak in early 2006, the median price of a U.S. home is down by a third. And though the market has begun to show signs of…
Today’s Best Market Rumors (9/19/2012) Nokia CEO Trouble
Updated throughout the day on the 24/7 Wall St. Wire: Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK) CEO Stephen Elop has until early next year to turn the company around or face pressure from his board. (Reuters)…
What’s Important in the Financial World (9/19/2012)
Bundesbank Chief Expresses His Displeasure Bundesbank leader Jens Weidmann has been unhappy with the European Central Bank’s plan to buy sovereign debt in financially weak nations since the idea was first floated. Now, he…
AMR Layoffs: The Airline Industry Nose Dives Again
American Airlines, whose parent AMR is in Chapter 11, will use that status, a staple of the industry, to send layoff notices to 11,000 workers. The people who receive the notices can take comfort…
Media Digest (9/19/2012) Reuters, WSJ, NY Times, FT
Alibaba buys back half of the stake owned by Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) for $7.6 billion, of which $6.3 billion is cash. Yahoo! will return most of the money to shareholders. (Reuters) James Bullard…
The Fattening of America
Everyone knows that many Americans are fat — among the fattest people in world. And nearly everyone knows that Americans are getting fatter. It is an epidemic that ruins the health of many overweight people…
Manchester United Follows Facebook
courtesy Facebook Inc.For the most part, Manchester United PLC (NYSE: MANU) and Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) are nothing alike. What could be further apart than a social network with one billion members and a…
Bank of Japan Bank Eases
Faced with the reality that it could enter the recession which threatens to pull under the economies of the developed nations, Japan’s central bank set up an easing program of its own, joining the…
What’s Important in the Financial World (9/18/2012)
July Air Travel Report U.S. Department of Transportation’s Air Travel Consumer Report for July is out. It grades, among other things, which airlines are most likely to have on-time arrivals. The data always gets…
Car Sales Crater in Europe
Car and light truck sales represent a large enough part of the consumer economy to be a reasonable proxy for optimism, pessimism, the desire of people to hold what money they have, or to…
Great Employment Divide
Gallup released a poll that shows what almost everyone already knows. More than 60% of people with college educations and who are between 25 and 52 years old have jobs — specifically “full-time jobs…