Story By: by The Associated Press Alan Shull attends a job fair in Portland, Ore. The number of people applying for unemployment benefits was unchanged last week. The number of people seeking unemployment benefits was unchanged last week, suggesting steady gains in the job market. The Labor Department said Thursday that weekly unemployment aid applications [...]
In the shadow of Japan’s nuclear disaster, shares of electricity producer Entergy have lost their charge. Based in New Orleans, Entergy (ticker: ETR) is the second-largest nuclear-fueled power provider in North America. It owns 11 plants including controversial Indian Point, which is just up the Hudson River from the watchful eye of Wall Street. Opponents [...]
Paris: Vivendi has confirmed that it is willing to review "the perimeter" of its media and telecoms businesses and said it was planning "drastic" cost cuts at its domestic mobile phone division, SFR. Shares in the French company have fallen sharply this year because of a fierce price war in its home mobile phone market, [...]
Even in a tough job market, 23% of recent college graduates wouldn’t take a post where they couldn’t make or take personal phone calls, and 20% would reject a place that didn’t let them check personal email, according to a new study from staffing firm Adecco Group North America. The study, which surveyed more than [...]
By ROSS KELLY And NEIL SANDS SYDNEY—Lend Lease Group, Australia’s largest property developer, swung to a full-year net profit on the absence of heavy writedowns that marred its previous result. Lend Lease didn’t provide much guidance Monday, apart from saying that it expects construction volumes in Australia to decline as government stimulus wanes. Offshore construction [...]
By EMILY MALTBY Business owners could face a new credit squeeze as early as next month, in what amounts to a gap period between the expiration of two popular stimulus provisions and the ramp-up of President Barack Obama’s plan to boost loans for small companies. To be sure, the stimulus provisions – which lured hundreds [...]
Washington: Consumer confidence rose in May to the highest level in four years, led by gains among upper-income Americans that may contribute to a pickup in spending on expensive items like furniture and appliances. The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan preliminary sentiment index for May climbed to 77.8, the highest since January 2008, from 76.4 the [...]
Sun May 13, 2012 10:04pm EDT (Corrects analyst name to Alan Lam in paragraphs 7, 8 and 11) * HSI slips 1.3 pct, skids 5.3 pct this week * CSI300 down 0.8 pct, slips 2.9 pct this week * China growth proxies weak, data signals steeper slowdown * Big market correction not likely: Julius Baer [...]
SHANGHAI | Sun May 6, 2012 11:43pm EDT SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Lenovo Group Ltd, the world’s No.2 PC maker by sales, said on Monday that it will invest about 5 billion yuan ($793 million) over the next five years in an integrated mobile devices facility in China to meet rising global demand for smartphones and [...]
DJ-AIG Commodity Indexes Soybean futures have slid 6.6% from a nearly four-year high at the end of April. And they have further to fall heading into the summer. Soybeans rallied, starting in mid-December — and July futures climbed 33.1% to their April high of $15.055 a bushel — as forecasters repeatedly cut their estimates for [...]