Gas And Oil Fall
WTI crude reached a six month low, which is positive for nearly everyone other than the oil and gas industry. the price moved below $92, down from close to $110 less than 90 days…
All Work
Douglas A. McIntyre
Media Digest (5/16/2012) Reuters, WSJ, NYT, FT, Bloomberg
The number of shares Facebook will sell rose 25% and the company could raise as much as $16 billion. (Reuters) Greeks take hundreds of millions of dollars out of banks there and the government…
Big Shareholder Attacks Pepsi
Shareholder activist firm Relational Investors has bought $600 million of PepsiCo (NYSE: PEP) shares according to The Wall Street Journal. Large companies are not immune from the kind of attacks recently experience by AOL…
GM Ad Cancellation Does Not Hurt Facebook IPO
Investors do not seem to care that GM (NYSE: GM) has dropped Facebook as an advertising medium. The press made a great deal of the news, but GM’s investment was only a few million…
Greece Still Pressures Global Markets
It appears more and more likely that concerns about the future of Greece will depress equity markets worldwide. Politicians in the country have not been able to set a coalition government, despite several efforts.…
Asia Stocks Wounded and Europe Falls
Worries about whether Greece will remain in the European Union after its leaders failed to form a coalition caused shares in Asia to fall sharply. The Hang Seng dropped nearly 3.2% to 19,264. The Nikkei…
J.C. Penney Gets Murdered, Kills Dividend
Whatever magic J.C. Penney (NYSE: JCP) CEO Ron Johnson brought with him when he moved to the aged retailer from the top store manager’s job at Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) is gone. Actually, Wall St. figured there…
What’s Important in the Financial World (5/15/2012) New Apple MacBook
Rumors persist, most recently reported by Bloomberg, that Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) will launch a new super-thin line of laptops. The latest version of the MacBook will be powered by Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) chips, a nice coup…
The Day’s Best Market Rumors (5/15/2012) Apple MacBook And iCloud
Updated throughout the day on the 24/7 Wall St. Wire Sony and Panasonic may built OLED TVs (Reuters) Apple will upgrade its iCloud service (WSJ) Apple will launch new MacBooks, thinner than earlier ones,…
Avon: Coty Will Be Back
Coty, which had made a $10.7 billion offer to buy Avon Products (NYSE: AVP), withdrew its bid. It said the the Avon board had failed to react to its offer by a Monday deadline.…
As Board After Board Fails, Governance Takes a Beating
Many Americans, and some politicians, have attacked the boards of major U.S. corporations for paying their CEOs too much, not holding management to tough earnings goals and lining their own pockets with rich payments…
Markets Jump for Joy as German GDP Rises
Most stock markets around the world moved higher as the Federal Statistics Office (Destatis) said gross domestic product in Germany rose 0.5% in the first quarter from the last quarter of 2011. Compared to the…
Media Digest (5/15/2012) Reuters, WSJ, FT, Bloomberg
The president of Greece cannot create a coalition government. (Reuters) Sony (NYSE: SNE) and Panasonic may force a partnership to build OLED TVs. (Reuters) Trouble at Chesapeake Energy (NYSE: CHK) may prompt low-ball bids…
Wireless Customer Satisfaction Improves
Customer satisfaction with wireless subscriber companies steadied last quarter according to the widely followed American Customer Satisfaction Index. On a scale on which 100 is the best score, AT&T (NYSE: T) posted a 69,…
Facebook IPO Range Raised
The price of Facebook’s IPO is likely to be between $34 and $38. That is above the previous forecast level of $28 to $35. Of course, this means that demand for the share has…
Dimon To Lose JP Morgan Chairman’s Job?
The California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) remarked that it will pressure the JP Morgan (NYSE: JPM) board to split the CEO and chairman roles to water down the power of long-time leader Jamie…
Apple To Launch Upgrade MacBook
There are persistent rumors, most recently reported by Bloomberg, that Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) will launch a new super-thin line of laptops–the latest version of the MacBook. The machine will be powered by Intel (NASDAQ:…
German GDP Up in Q1, France Flat
The Federal Statistics Office of Germany said that GDP there rose 0.5% compared to the final quarter of 2011, a rate that was unexpectedly strong. Given the recessionary state of much of the balance…
Thompson Leaves Yahoo! With No Severance
As many lawyers and corporate governance experts expected, Scott Thompson left Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) without any severance benefits. It was widely believed that the misleading parts of his resume and the fact that these…
Airlines Have Best First Quarter Arrival Numbers, Ever
Airlines as a group had their best on time arrival performance in the first quarter since the Transportation Department began to collect data in 1995. The news was particularly good for customers of the…