Archive for July 22nd, 2009

After the market closed on Wednesday, Amazon.com announced plans to buy privately held online shoe retailer Zappos.com in a mostly all-share deal that values Zappos at 850 million.Amazon will acquire all of the outstanding shares and assume all outstanding options and warrants of Zappos in exchange for approximately 10 million shares of Amazon common stock,… »

Rising unemployment spells trouble for credit card companies. Laid off from their jobs, some borrowers fall behind on their loan payments and companies such as American Express and Capital One Financial eventually consider a portion of their loans uncollectible and write them off. With the jobless rate at 9.7%, loan losses and late payments are… »

As generics continue to bite into GlaxoSmithKline’s profits and its sales drop, the swine flu pandemic couldn’t have come at a better time for the drug company. The firm said it expected to triple its capacity of its antiviral Relenza to 195 million doses of the drug as it continued ongoing talks with up to… »

Stocks pulled back from their strong earnings-season rally on Wednesday, even as more corporate reports beat analyst estimates for the second quarter. Apple led the tech sector higher after a strong report after Tuesday’s close, but the major indexes lost their midday momentum to finish the day mixed.The Dow Jones industrial average fell 35 points,… »

The energy sector will get a look at two sides of the industry on Thursday when both Occidental Petroleum, an exploration and production oil and gas company, and Diamond Offshore Drilling, a drilling contractor, report second-quarter earnings. Occidental Petroleum is extremely well-positioned with its low exposure to the U.S. gas market, stable domestic production and… »

Things are looking good for the new owner of most of Chrysler’s assets. Italian carmaker Fiat, which last June acquired a 20% stake in Chrysler, confirmed its targets for the year, cut its debt by 900 million euros , higher than expected, and hinted that business could show some improvement in the last quarter of… »

Forget Germany’s rather tepid climate for a moment and imagine that its economy is like a tropical island: When times are sunny, life is exceedingly good, and when hurricane season comes around, times are quite the opposite. Such is the case with the country’s heavy reliance on exports, with manufacturers like Daimler , BMW Siemens… »

What started as an inconvenience—less tax money to pay for schools, roads and prisons—has quickly mushroomed into a catastrophe for the states. Thanks to the financial crisis and ensuing recession, unemployment is the highest since the early 1980s, spending is down, personal income and business taxes are falling. In California, which had to issue IOUs… »

HONG KONG – The design of the latest, yet unreleased, fourth-generation iPhone is top secret at Apple-one so “priceless” that it claimed the life of a young Chinese engineering graduate who was held responsible for misplacing a prototype.Sun Danyong, a 25-year-old employee of Foxconn , which manufactures the iPhone for Apple , jumped from the… »

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has tended to the largest banks in the U.S. the way a park ranger deals with an endangered species. He caught them, took them in and nursed them back to health. Now he has to release them back into the wild. He’s hoping for an easy transition.There are more than… »