January 15, 2010, 1:40 pm
The nation’s stores are celebrating the spirit of giving, as retail sales rose by 3.6 percent this holiday season compared to last year, according to initial data from MasterCard Advisors’ SpendingPulse. Online sales and last-minute electronics purchases helped boost sales this year.
Online sales rose 18 percent from Nov. 27 to Dec. 24 this year. Consumers seem more comfortable doing last-minute shopping in order to get the biggest bargains, the numbers suggests. A jump in purchases the week before Christmas helped electronics sales increase about 6 percent this year, according to Bloomberg news.
SpendingPulse measures retail sales across all payment forms, including cash and check. The firm did not disclose dollar spending totals.
The good news came despite a major snow storm on the East Coast the final weekend before Christmas that kept most shoppers home. Sales predictions were also less than rosy, with the National Retail Federation predicting a 1 percent decline in U.S. spending for the season, said Bloomberg.
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January 15, 2010, 3:07 am
An increasing number of young people are opting to become an entrepreneur as their career of choice. With entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson, Steven Jobs, Duncan Balentine, Peter Jones and numerous others are receiving an increasing amount of air time in the press and young people becoming ever more independent, becoming an entrepreneur through starting their own business is an attractive option. So if you are a young entrepreneur and you have your business plan drawn up, what are your options for business finance?
The entrepreneurial drive for twenty-somethings is increasing every year, and there are plenty of successful entrepreneurs who began their enterprises well before their twenty-fifth birthday. Age doesn’t matter when it comes to building a strong business plan and coming up with great ideas; in fact, one could argue that the younger generations are even more creative. One of the main problems that holds young entrepreneurs back is financing; they don’t have the experience or the business history to secure financing through traditional means.
My best advice for the young entrepreneur is to plan as much as possible in advance.
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January 15, 2010, 1:15 am
The Wall Street Journal
The Supreme Court seemed likely to deny the National Football League its long-sought goal of broad protection from antitrust suits, the big issue behind a narrower case concerning a license for making souvenir caps.
Each of the NFL’s 32 teams is separately owned, but they must operate collectively when it comes to the rules of the game or playoff schedules. That sets sports teams apart from other businesses, where agreements among competitors can run afoul of antitrust law if trade is restrained and consumers are hurt.
At oral argument Wednesday, the question was how far the league’s business model requires that the teams be treated as a single entity.
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January 14, 2010, 5:43 pm
DEPUTY First Minister Ieuan Wyn Jones yesterday described his deep disappointment that Bosch had decided to close its South Wales factory despite the Assembly’s efforts to save the plant’s 900 jobs.
Mr Jones said the announcement of the job losses was “extremely disappointing news” and “a significant blow to the hard working and highly-skilled employees of Bosch and the wider community”.
He said: “We have been working extremely closely with the company over the last few months to look at all options available to keep the plant running and to develop other product lines, diversify or draw on the advanced research work of Welsh universities.
“We have regularly met with senior representatives of the company and today I met with them again to press the case for keeping the plant open. Despite our eff
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January 14, 2010, 3:07 am
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What’s moving the markets: The Consumer Price Index, a key measure of inflation, rose 2.7% for 2009, and a modest 0.1% in December, below the 0.2% increase economists expected.
Analysts said investors continued to react to the 0.3% surprise fall of retail sales in December, which was released by the Commerce Department Thursday. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had anticipated that December sales would grow 0.5%.
Stocks fell sharply Friday, despite better-than-expected earnings reports from JP Morgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500) and Intel (INTC, Fortune 500).
What analysts are saying: “The rally of the buck is more of a reflection of weakness than strength,” said Kathy Lien, director of currency research at Global Forex Trading.
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January 14, 2010, 2:24 am
JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s profit rose more than four-fold to $3.28 billion in the last three months of 2009, but the results released Friday were tempered by rising loan losses at its consumer bank. Its shares fell almost 1 percent in early trading.
The bank had a sobering asessment of the economy, warning that it cannot say it has seen defaults on mortgages and other loans peak. Its earnings came on profits from its investment banking and asset management businesses, which thrived amid the now 10-month-old market rally. JPMorgan Chase earned $702 million a year earlier when the near-collapse of the mortgage banking business forced it to write down the value of billions of dollars in loans.
Over the past year, record-low interest rates have allowed banking companies to profit when lending money at higher rates. And the boom in the financial markets have brought in billions of dollars in trading and underwriting revenue that were decimated a year earlier by the stock market crash.
Investors were disappointed, however, probably because the company didn’t raise its 5 cents per share quarterly dividend, as the market had hoped.
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