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The New York Times is reporting the Home Buyer Tax Credit a “success”, whereby success means that a lot of people have taken free money. Broaden the definition to mean increasing the number of first first-time homebuyers and the program doesn’t seem so stellar: Though the Treasury Department and the real estate industry have termed the [...] Goldman Sachs profits surge amid fraud scandal Read more on AFP via Yahoo! News Known on Wall Street as Big MO — a reference to its ticker symbol (MO), which harks back to its prior identity as Philip Morris and to its lengthy record of strong shareholder returns — Altria lately has done little for investors. The Street is concerned that the company overpaid early this year for smokeless-tobacco [...] To judge a dividend’s affordability, some investors compare the dollar amount of payments with some measure of how much money a company makes, like earnings or free cash flow. That’s a good start, but it has shortcomings. Earnings aren’t quite the same as real cash coming in. Free cash flow is, but [...] 5 weeks ago, Wall Street was mostly convinced that the economy was about to turn a corner. At the time, traders were piling into the stock market, chasing big gains and selling everything risk-averse. Mortgage bonds were in very low demand and the supply glut pushed rates north of 6 percent. Since then, [...] So that brings us to today’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting. Looking at the chart at top, markets are 99.3% certain that the Federal Reserve won’t raise the Fed Funds Rate from its current range of “near-zero”. Investors have come to this conclusion because the Fed has repeatedly said it will keep the Fed [...] This past weekend, while I was enjoying the beauties of nature — and the company of my family — in Idaho, the leaders of the G8 were having a meeting in Italy. Members of the G8 spent most of the time patting themselves on the back, telling each other that they had done a marvelous [...] It’s been nearly five years since Merck pulled Vioxx off the market, but it will be a while longer before the legal system is through with the case. The Supreme Court said yesterday that it would hear Merck’s appeal in a lawsuit filed by shareholders who argue that the company misled them by downplaying data that [...] |
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