When
"It's a very powerful bull market right now," said Thomas Bentz, an oil analyst with BNP Paribas in New York.
appears in the same column with
Stocks tumbled yesterday in their steepest slide in nearly three years, after crude oil surged past $68 a barrel and several corporate giants reported disappointing earnings.
you know there are wormholes and warps appearing in the very fabric of the multiverse.
Either that, or somebody is lying.
The New York Pravda blames the uncertainty of the tech sector market on Google's reluctance to give Dear Leader the keys to its' hard drives, of course.
For a more expansive view of what is going on in America, it pays to see what the Brits have to say about it. That's going to be colored with their own preoccupations with Pounds Sterling, of course:
...details began to emerge of Ford's plan to cut 25,000 jobs and close up to 10 plants. The plan, due to be announced on Monday, will deliver another heavy blow to America's fast disappearing manufacturing industry.
The declines were a sharp reversal for Wall Street. The Dow had rallied past the 11,000-point mark earlier this month for the first time since 2001, on the expectation interest rate rises were coming to an end. The Dow has now erased all of its gains in the first few weeks of 2006. In percentage terms, yesterday was the Dow's worst performance for nine months.
The heavy selling will doubtless put London under pressure on Monday.
Wall Street had been growing increasingly nervous this week after earnings reports from the likes of Yahoo, Intel and Apple Computer that, while far from disastrous, had tempered expectations. Google was among the biggest losers yesterday, falling 8.4% to just below $400, the biggest one-day percentage fall for the search engine since it joined the market 18 months ago. The company hit a high of $471.63 on January 11.
Fourth-quarter figures from Citigroup and General Electric yesterday, which fell shy of Wall Street hopes, suggested that slowing growth was not confined to the technology sector.
Rick Pendergraft, an equity trader at Schaeffer's Investment Research, said Wall Street had overblown expectations. "The ramp-up we had into earnings let you know that people were expecting big things," he said. "Any time we go into an earnings season and the market is overbought, it sends up a caution flag to me."
Citigroup, America's largest banking firm, missed analyst estimates - its fourth quarter earnings were $4.97bn, against forecasts of $5.05bn. It was the biggest decliner in the Dow, its shares falling almost 5%. GE, the world's second largest company by market value, reported its smallest profit gains since 2004. Mobile phone maker Motorola also lowered its outlook on Thursday night after the market closed.
Oil prices were another factor unsettling investors. Crude was back at four-month highs, stoked by the tensions between the west and Iran, attacks on oil workers in Nigeria, and the apparent re-emergence of al-Qaida's leader Osama bin Laden. A barrel of light crude rose $1.29 to $68.48 in New York.
The cuts at Ford represent 20% of its North American workforce. The firm lost $1.2bn in its domestic auto business in the first nine months of the year. It is struggling with intense competition and high labour and raw material costs, as well as a shift away from its sport utility vehicles as oil prices rise. The planned announcement is the second wrenching restructuring at Ford in four years. In January 2002, it began reducing the workforce by 35,000. It is also an admission that the turnaround plan put in place that year by Bill Ford Jr, the great grandson of founder Henry Ford, has failed. Another 5,000 white collar jobs are also being cut, most of which had already been announced.
The spikes in gasoline prices post-Katrina were rapidly followed by Detroit announcing its new lines of 2006- S.U.V.s. Which caused sales of "American" automobiles to sink like a lead brick attached to everything else of course. But the problems in the market must be all Google's fault for dissing Abu Gonzales and Commander Codpiece:
...the highflying shares of Google fell 8.5 percent yesterday, their biggest decline ever, after the company said it would fight federal prosecutors' demands for records on Internet users' search queries.
It could never be part of the never ending saga of high-flying market fraud infecting all of the world's financial concerns could it?
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