标题: [2009.04.18] Business this week 经济一周 [打印本页] 作者: chance98 时间: 2009-4-20 07:20 标题: [2009.04.18] Business this week 经济一周
Business this week
经济一周
Apr 16th 2009
From The Economist print edition
The quarterly earnings season at America’s big banks got under way. Goldman Sachs surprised markets by reporting a net profit of $1.8 billion for the first quarter, 20% higher than a year ago and a stark contrast to the heavy losses it racked up at the end of 2008. Goldman also gave notice of its intention to raise $5 billion, equivalent to 9% of its current value, through a sale of common shares to help repay the $10 billion it got from a government bail-out.
JPMorgan Chase posted a net profit for the first quarter of $2.14 billion. Wells Fargo said it expected to make a $3 billion quarterly profit, a record for the bank, on the basis of a strong performance at its Wachovia unit.
UBS forecast a quarterly net loss of almost SFr2 billion ($1.8 billion). The Swiss bank, which has written down close to $50 billion on toxic assets since the start of the credit crisis, now expects to shed 8,700 jobs, or 11% of its global workforce, as part of a cost-cutting exercise.
Investors also pored over the earnings of technology companies for signs of recovery. Intel’s quarterly net profit fell by 55% compared with a year earlier, to $647m, and its revenue was down by 26%, though it did better than expected. The chipmaker judged that conditions remain too volatile for it to issue a reliable profit forecast, but it did declare that the personal-computer market may have “bottomed out”.
Mary Schapiro, the chairman of America’s Securities and Exchange Commission, called for an “intense review” of the function of credit-rating agencies in the markets. Rating agencies have been criticised for not downgrading debt sufficiently in the run-up to the financial crisis. Some observers say there is a conflict of interest, as the issuers of securities pay the agencies to rate them.
EBay announced plans to spin off Skype in an initial public offering next year. EBay bought Skype, which makes software to allow calls over the internet, in 2005, but the partnership proved a bad fit for both companies; eBay eventually wrote down the value of its investment by half. The online commerce company did consider selling Skype to a private-equity consortium.
Joseph Nacchio was ordered to report to prison to begin a six-year jail term, two years after he was sentenced for insider trading. The former boss of Qwest, a telecoms company, was one of a number of executives convicted in a rash of high-profile corporate scandals several years ago. A federal appeals court recently upheld Mr Nacchio’s conviction.
Express Scripts agreed to buy WellPoint’s pharmacy-benefits management (PBM) business for $4.7 billion. PBMs administer the drug benefits provided through a company’s insurance scheme to employees. The deal gives Express Scripts the scale to compete on PBM services with rivals such as CVS Caremark, itself the product of a merger in 2007.
Retail sales in America fell unexpectedly in March. Consumer prices dropped by 0.4% in the year to March, the first time they have fallen at an annual rate since 1955. And American industrial production fell again; the amount of industrial capacity in use dropped to 69.3%, the lowest since 1967.
More than 800,000 homes received a foreclosure filing in the first quarter, a record high according to a survey compiled by RealtyTrac, a property company. Meanwhile, General Growth Properties, which owns more than 200 malls, entered bankruptcy protection as it tries to rejig $27 billion in accumulated debt.
Nevertheless, Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, pointed to “tentative signs” from data in home sales, homebuilding and consumer spending that indicate “the sharp decline in economic activity may be slowing”. Barack Obama said there were “glimmers of hope” in America’s economy, but added that there would “be more pain” before the year is out.
China’s growth rate fell to 6.1% in the year to the first quarter, less than half of what it was in mid-2007. However, with some signs of economic recovery, notably an uptick in industrial production for the year to March, Beijing thinks China is still on track to achieve GDP growth of 8% this year.
The Treasury Department declined to tag China as a currency manipulator in a report. The (non) decision upset manufacturers and contradicted Tim Geithner’s statement to Congress in January, when he explicitly laid that charge. The treasury secretary thinks the yuan is still undervalued, but that China “had taken steps to enhance exchange-rate flexibility”.
