In its first full quarter under the direction of new chief executive officer Jerry Yang, Internet media titan Yahoo! reported that sales and profits for the third quarter beat analysts' expectations.
Wall Street investors struggled to find any encouraging news Tuesday amid record oil prices and more woes from the already troubled housing sector, leaving major gauges lower for the second straight session.
Here I go. I am about to walk into one of the biggest sucker's games in the whole world of economics: declaring that the U.S. consumer is tapped out, so desperately in hock and troubled about the future that he finally just can't spend like it's 1999 anymore. And to be clear, that is what I'm declaring. Unless I can talk myself out of it by the end of the column.
Intel Corp., citing a strong market for personal computers, reported big increases in third quarter revenue and profit exceeding analysts' projections.
In a speech to the New York Economic Club Monday night, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said the central bank's rate cut in September has shown signs of success, but cautioned that lenders and investors must bear responsibility for financial decisions that caused the subprime mortgage meltdown.
The nation's home builders' confidence in the battered market for new homes fell further in October, and a measure of their outlook remained at a record low level, according to the latest industry survey.
It's getting hard to wrap your brain around subprime mortgages, Wall Street's fancy name for junk home loans. There's so much subprime stuff floating around - more than $1.5 trillion of loans, maybe $200 billion of losses, thousands of families facing foreclosure, umpteen politicians yapping - that it's like the federal budget: It's just too big to be understandable.
Oil prices settled at a fresh record high Tuesday on rising demand, a weak dollar and tensions between Turkey and Kurdish separatists in northern Iraq.
