Archive for March, 2009

Stocks should do good again today, as long as Bernanke and Greenspan keep their mouths shut.

U.S. stocks posted their best day in four months on Tuesday after Citigroup said it was profitable in the first two months of 2009.

Major indexes jumped off 12-year lows in heavy trading after a key lawmaker said he expected the reinstatement of a rule that makes it harder to bet that a stock will fall.

McDonald’s Corp., the world’s largest restaurant company, said global sales rose 1.4 percent in February as diners sought cheaper food.

Sales at U.S. restaurants open at least 13 months climbed 2.8 percent, while European orders fell 0.2 percent, Oak Brook, Illinois-based McDonald’s said today in a statement. Sales in Asia, the Middle East and Africa gained 0.7 percent.

When times get tough, people head to the golden arches.

Uh oh, even Capital One can’t keep the Vikings at bay.

Capital One Financial Corp (COF.N) said on Monday it trimmed its quarterly dividend 87 percent to save $500 million annually as credit card losses increase.

The bank and credit card company cut its dividend to 5 cents a share from 37.5 cents a share.

The key point to remember is they are still paying a dividend. A little something is better than nothing any day. Right?

I can’t help but wonder… If all of these bailouts and stimulus packages hadn’t been passed, and so much money wasted, where would we be right now?

The nation is losing jobs so quickly that the government, racing to deal with the crisis, is having trouble keeping up.

The U.S. unemployment rate last month leapt half a percentage point, to 8.1 percent, the highest level since 1983, according to data released yesterday. The stunning pace of job losses raises the possibility that, perhaps as early as this summer, one in 10 Americans will be out of a job even though they are actively looking for work. It also means that the government faces even more pressure to take further action to stabilize the economy and the financial system.

I guess it’s too late to wonder about the what ifs, huh?

Being part of that 8.1% I have to say, at this point, it’s all relative, isn’t it?

The U.S. unemployment rate hit a 25-year high of 8.1 percent in February as employers buckling under the strain of a recession that shows no sign of ending axed 651,000 jobs, government data showed on Friday.

Adding to the gloom, a combined 161,000 more jobs were lost in January and December than previously believed. February’s decline in non-farm payrolls was close to economists’ forecast for a 648,000 drop.

Foreclosures are spreading by epidemic proportions, expanding beyond a handful of problem states and now affecting almost 1 in every 8 American homeowners.

It’s an economic role-reversal: The economy, driven down by the collapse of the housing bubble, is causing the housing crisis to spread.

Figures released Thursday show that nearly 12 percent of all Americans with a mortgage — a record 5.4 million homeowners — were at least one month late or in foreclosure at the end of last year.

And it’s just going to get worse.

I thought yesterday was busy. It was nothing compared to today.

You can read all of the developments over on my personal blog.

Holding Those Accountable

An Optimistic Outlook

I was finally contacted by someone outside the store, at the corporate level, so hopefully this entire situation will be resolved very, very soon.

I spent the day monitoring the server. Thanks to the Consumerist, my mother-in-law’s Best Buy incident has picked up a lot of traction.

When my father-in-law stood in the store with the camera in hand, Nathaniel informed him there were no longer any images on the camera. Well, duh, my mother-in-law already told him they had been deleted to make room for my son’s photographic masterpieces. Nathaniel also said that the photos I deleted were only “demo” photos placed on the camera by the nice folks at Casio.

You know it and I know it. Casio does not put demo photos on their cameras. If they did, I doubt they would use photos of a black woman sitting seductively on a bed with the camera box at the corner of the bed. Fuzzy photos of white shutters in the same bedroom won’t exactly sell any cameras either.

Anyway, have you ever heard of “PhotoRescue Expert”? It’s a really nice application that allows you to recover images you may have accidently deleted. Wouldn’t it be awesome if I was able to run that application and scan the camera to see if I could recover any of those “demo” photos?

Oh but wait, I did. Due to the fact we had taken a couple photos before we realized the camera wasn’t working right, the first couple images were not recoverable.

Read the rest at 101 Dead Armadillos.

Bank of America’s request for $20bn of government money to prop up its acquisition of Merrill Lynch was a “tactical mistake” that made the bank appear as weak as Citigroup, Ken Lewis, BofA’s chief executive told the Financial Times on Monday.

Mr Lewis vowed to stay on as chief executive of the North Carolina-based bank until it paid back the $45bn of government money it received under the US Treasury’s bank recapitalisation programme, possibly within two to three years. This is the first time he has signalled his plans to leave the company.

If Ken Lewis thinks taking $20 billion of government money was a mistake, we, the American people, will be more than happy to take our money back.

The U.S. government will commit another $30 billion to prop up American International Group Inc as the embattled insurer prepares to report the biggest loss in history and struggles to sell assets.

AIG’s board on Sunday approved a new rescue package that also includes more lenient terms on an existing government investment in its preferred shares and a lower interest rate on a government credit line, two sources familiar with the matter said.

How much more do we need to invest before someone just admits that AIG is a money suck?