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Friday, Jul 30, 2010 |
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Weather Forecast |
| Cities / State |
°C |
°F |
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Atlanta
(Georgia) |
24.6 |
76.2 |
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Charleston
(South Carolina) |
27.6 |
81.6 |
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Charlotte
(North Carolina) |
24.5 |
76.1 |
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Columbia
(South Carolina) |
26.6 |
79.8 |
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Dallas
(Texas) |
26.1 |
79.0 |
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Miami
(Florida) |
27.4 |
81.3 |
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Nashville
(Tennessee) |
24.2 |
75.5 |
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News » Home
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| Dump Your Landline, but Keep Your Home Phone |
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Date: 29-07-2010
Ask anyone under 30 for their home phone number and they may look at you funny. The landline business is in permanent decline. After peaking at about 141 million in 2000, the number of U.S. home phones fell to 78 million by the end of 2008, according to the Federal Communications Commission. While most of this erosion was the result of people going wireless, the FCC says some 19 million households replaced landlines with Internet phones.
For the last month I've been testing the latest Internet calling device, Ooma Telo, which offers people who might otherwise go all-wireless the security blanket of a landline-like phone.
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| New home sales up, but sales remain slow |
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Date: 27-07-2010
Sales of new homes jumped last month, but it was the second-weakest month on record. The lackluster economy has made potential buyers skittish about shopping for homes.
New home sales rose nearly 24 percent in June from a month earlier to a seasonally adjusted annual sales pace of 330,000, the Commerce Department said Monday. May's number was revised downward to a rate of 267,000, the slowest pace on records dating back to 1963. Sales for April and March were also revised downward.
High unemployment, slow job growth, and tight credit have kept people from buying homes. The industry received a boost this spring when the government offered tax credits to homebuyers. But since they expired in April, the number of people looking to buy has dropped, even with the lowest mortgage rates in decades available.
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| Stocks on brink of breakout |
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Date: 26-07-2010
Wall Street enters this week on the cusp of a breakout in U.S. stocks, but it will need another spate of convincing earnings reports to feed the rally that sprouted at the end of last week.
The markets endured malaise with poor economic data and downbeat testimony from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Wednesday, but turned decisively after a number of strong results pointed to better times ahead.
This week brings more results from bellwethers including Chevron (CVX.N), DuPont (DD.N) and Boeing (BA.N). The trick will be turning the whipsaw action into accumulated gains -- and hoped-for improvements in volume -- that would signal an upturn in sentiment.
"There's a constant struggle between the bulls and the bears when in fact the answer is in the middle ground. This market is more like a turkey and not a bull or a bear," said Brian Jacobsen, chief portfolio strategist at Wells Fargo Fund Management in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin.
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| House, Senate lawmakers finalize deal on bank bill |
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Date: 25-06-2010
One year in the making, a sweeping overhaul of Wall Street rules forged in the aftermath of a financial crisis cleared congressional negotiations early Friday and headed to the House and Senate for final votes.
Lawmakers hope to have a bill on President Barack Obama's desk by July 4.
Success came at 5:39 a.m., hours after Obama administration officials helped broker a deal that cracked the last impediment to the bill — a proposal to force banks to spin off their lucrative derivatives trading business.
The legislation, the most ambitious rewrite of financial regulations since the Great Depression, touches on an exhaustive range of financial transactions, from a debit card swipe at a supermarket to the most complex securities deals cut in downtown Manhattan.
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| House passes tax cut for small-business investment |
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Date: 15-06-2010
Long-term investors in some small businesses would escape capital gains taxes under a bill passed by the House Tuesday as congressional Democrats tried to revive their jobs agenda.
The bill would also increase tax deductions for startup expenses by new small businesses. The House passed the bill on a mostly party-line vote of 247 to 170.
House Democrats plan to merge the bill with legislation creating a $30 billion fund for community banks to increase lending to small businesses. The House could vote on the lending bill as early as Wednesday, sending the entire package to the Senate.
Congressional Democrats started the year with an aggressive agenda of passing a series of bills designed to create jobs. Many of the proposals stalled as lawmakers, after hearing from angry voters, became wary of adding to the federal budget deficit.
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| Retail sales to show spending holding up |
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Date: 08-06-2010
U.S. retail sales likely notched an eighth straight month of gains in May as consumers took comfort in a gradually improving job market.
Sales are estimated to have climbed 0.2 percent last month following a 0.4 percent rise in April, according to median estimates of economists polled by Reuters. Excluding cars, sales were seen increasing 0.1 percent.
"Retail sales probably registered a decent gain in May, driven mainly by motor vehicles," economists at Goldman Sachs said in a research note.
Declines in gasoline prices may have dented overall sales, analysts said.
The Labor Department will release the report on Friday at 8:30 a.m. EDT.
The U.S. economy has been recovering solidly since last summer, having posted three consecutive quarters of expansion. In the first three months of the year, gross domestic product grew 3.0 percent, according to Commerce Department data.
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| Job hopes rise on flurry of economic reports |
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Date: 03-06-2010
Fewer people are filing claims for unemployment aid, new jobs are showing up in service industries, and companies are squeezing all they can from lean staffs and may need to hire soon.
Hopes for the job market brightened Thursday ahead of a closely watched report on the nation's employment picture — although experts cautioned that the economy probably isn't creating jobs as quickly as usual after a recession.
"While we will see a period of job growth, it is going to take a long time to get back the jobs we lost," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, who predicts the nation will not recover the 8 million jobs lost in the downturn until 2013. Zandi says it will take until 2015 to get back to full employment, which he defined as a jobless rate of around 5.5 percent.
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| Pending home sales race to 6-month high |
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Date: 02-06-2010
Pending home sales hit a six-month high in April but falling demand for home loans pointed to ebbing activity in the vital housing market with the expiration of a popular tax credit for buyers.
The National Association of Realtors said on Wednesday its Pending Home Sales Index, based on contracts signed in April, rose 6 percent to 110.9, the highest level since October and above expectations of a 5 percent gain.
But applications for loans to buy homes dropped last week for the fourth straight week, holding 13-year lows, the Mortgage Bankers Association said.
"It's partly attributable to the last-minute rush to take advantage of the homebuyer's tax credit," said David Resler, chief U.S. economist at Nomura Securities in New York. "The next month or two, we might get some payback as the homebuyers who were induced to buy early are no longer in the market."
To be eligible for the federal tax credit, prospective home buyers had to sign contracts by the end of April and close by the end of June.
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