| Market Summary |
Stocks rebounded on Wednesday after the financial sector and another drop in oil prices pushed the market higher. The Dow Jones Industrial Average soared 276 points to 11,239.61. Broader stock indicators also rose. The Standard & Poor's 500 index advanced 30.45 points to 1,245.36 and the Nasdaq composite index rose 69.14 points to 2,284.85. Stocks started the session off volatile as investors mulled over the Consumer Price Index, which soared 5% in the past year. Positive corporate quarterly reports quickly boosted investors’ enthusiasm. Intel (INTC: Charts, News, Offers) reported a 25% surge in profit for its second quarter and predicted more strong sales in the months to come. CSX Corp. (CSX: Charts, News, Offers) reported that its second-quarter earnings rose 19 percent on strong demand for coal, grain and metals. The financial sector also supported today’s rally after Wells Fargo (WFC: Charts, News, Offers) soared 30% and reported a loss that beat estimates. Charles Schwab (SCHW: Charts, News, Offers) and Northern Trust (NTRS: Charts, News, Offers) also reported quarterly results that beat estimates. Oil prices tumbled $4.14 to $134.60 a barrel on a surprise jump in crude supplies. Bond prices declined, raising the yield on the benchmark 10-year note to 3.88% from 3.84%. The dollar was mixed against other major currencies, while gold prices fell.
| More Markets Data
|
| Market News |
Wells Fargo (WFC: Charts, News, Offers) gave anxious investors a pleasant surprise Wednesday, reporting a profit drop that was milder than anticipated and lifting its quarterly dividend by 10 percent. Wells Fargo's second-quarter profit fell 22 percent as more customers at the nation's fifth-largest bank failed to pay back their loans. But it raised its dividend to 34 cents from 31 cents -- at a time when many other financial institutions are slashing theirs to preserve capital. The San Francisco-based company's shares soared $4.63, or 22.5 percent, to $25.14 by midday, after tumbling alongside other financial stocks over the last several days on worries about more U.S. mortgage losses and bank failures. Wells Fargo has now logged three straight quarters of profit declines. But the bank has been weathering one of the nation's worst credit crises much better than most of its competitors, in part because it had less exposure to the subprime mortgages whose failure undermined the financial sector. (Source: Yahoo! Finance) Full Story
|
Gannett Co. (GCI: Charts, News, Offers), the nation's largest newspaper publisher, on Wednesday reported a 36% drop in second-quarter earnings as the newspaper industry's woes caused a sharp decline in revenue. Shares plunged more than 12%. The profit of $233 million, or $1.02 per share, compared with a $366 million, or $1.56 per-share profit in the year-ago quarter. The earnings matched expectations of Wall Street analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial. The company's shares dropped $2.09 to $15.24 in morning trading. Gannett, publisher of USA Today and 84 other U.S. dailies, sold several newspapers in the year-ago quarter that added 32 cents per share to earnings. Excluding the sale, profit fell by 18%. (Source: CNN Money) Full Story
|
Consumer prices shot up in June at the second fastest pace in 26 years with two-thirds of the surge blamed on soaring energy prices. The Labor Department reported that consumer prices jumped 1.1 percent last month, much worse than had been expected. Energy prices rocketed upward by 6.6 percent, reflecting big gains for gasoline, home heating oil and natural gas. The big rise in prices cut deeply into consumers’ earning power with average weekly wages, after adjusting for inflation, falling by 0.9 percent. It was the biggest monthly decline since a 1.1 percent drop in weekly wages in September 2005. The 1.1 percent June price increase was the second largest monthly advance in the past 26 years, surpassed only by a 1.3 percent gain in September 2005 from a jolt to energy costs after Hurricane Katrina. (Source: MSNBC) Full Story
|
|
| Test your business savvy against the BizJumble! | B-School brainiacs, tenacious corporate titans, superior sellers, and masterful managers-put your business knowledge to the ultimate test with the new BizJumble game!
Race against the clock to unscramble the term that matches the featured definition from BusinessDictionary.com.
Think you have the sharpest mind in the conference room?
Put your skills to the test!
|
|
| Featured Article from the InvestorGuide University |
Life Insurance
Includes all you need to know about provisions and types of life insurance policies. Learn about incontestable provisions, suicide provisions, reinstatement clauses, excluded risks, and settlement options. Once you speak the lingo, read up on the different types of life insurance: Term life, cash value, whole life, single premium life, universal life, variable life, and variable universal life.
Read the Full Article |
Browse the InvestorGuide University
|
|
| Market Analysis |
Forget about any near-term rate increases, even if we led you in that direction. That was the essence of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's semi-annual testimony to Congress on the economy and monetary policy. The effect of what he said -- actually, what he didn't say -- was to lower expectations of any rate increases this year. Specifically, Bernanke said the risks of higher inflation and slower growth are balanced, if you can call it that. They just aren't balanced in a way that implies an optimal policy setting that lets policy makers sleep well at night. Recent speeches and testimonies by Fed officials had convinced traders and investors that the benchmark overnight rate, currently at 2 percent, could be at 2.75 percent by year- end. The statement released after the meeting just three weeks ago gave greater weight to inflation concerns. (Source: Bloomberg) Full Story
|
We now know Fannie Mae (FNM: Charts, News, Offers) and Freddie Mac (FRE: Charts, News, Offers) won't be allowed to fail, but the question for the banking system and economy becomes: will they be able to lend? The United States took extraordinary steps on Sunday to ward off a crisis of confidence in the two government sponsored enterprises (GSEs), moving to increase a Treasury department line of credit and make a provision to buy equity in the companies if needed. Both steps require Congressional approval. The Federal Reserve separately moved to open up a borrowing window to the mortgage giants. This wards off the disaster that would have happened if either of the two were unable to fund themselves, and by establishing a solid gold backstop makes it hugely less likely that they will have trouble borrowing in the debt markets. (Source: Reuters) Full Story
|
eBay (EBAY: Charts, News, Offers) is expected to top its second-quarter guidance but probably won't bowl anyone over unless it can show significant growth in the value of products sold on the site. "We believe a beat and modest-raise quarter is anticipated as sentiment has improved over the last couple of weeks, but we continue to believe that gross merchandise volume growth is the most important metric as we look for signs of stabilization and reacceleration in core business and evidence that buyer demand is improving, or at least not worsening," wrote analyst Douglas Anmuth of Lehman Brothers in his most recent note. Anmuth expects the total value of all successfully closed listings between users on eBay's online trading platforms to grow by only 10% in the second quarter, a drop from 12% in the previous quarter. (Source: TheStreet) Full Story
|
| More news and commentary | |
|
|
|
Back to newsletter list
