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Posted
Jun 15 2009, 04:05 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
The U.S. Postal Service, which has been dying for years due to the advent of the fax, e-mail, and overnight delivery, may finally be close to its last act.
The agency lost nearly $2 billion in its last fiscal year and is faced with the serious consideration of cuts of up to 3,100 offices, potentially eliminating thousand of jobs. Media reports say that first class mail volumes are plunging.
What is killing and will probably eventually finish off the Post Office? In a word: “broadband,” the high-speed Internet system that the current Administration plans to build out in the next two years.
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Posted
Apr 17 2008, 03:28 PM
by
Charley Blaine
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
Google shareholders had to be thrilled by the stock market's reaction to the company's first-quarter earnings report on Thursday afternoon.
And nobody could have been happier than Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Each saw the value of his stake jump about $2.2 billion in less than an hour as the stock jumped 17% to $526.50.
The stock took off after the company beat Wall Street estimates on revenue, net income and earnings per share for the first quarter and crushed just about all concerns that Google's business might be peaking.
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Posted
May 18 2009, 03:30 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
It is the classic face-off between the king of bricks-and-mortar and the ruler of the e-commerce world. Wal-Mart (WMT) is about to up its bet on consumer electronics, a highly profitable and growing part of Amazon’s (AMZN) business.
At stake is whether physical stores can take back business from e-commerce sites which have been besting them at sales growth rates for nearly a decade.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Wal-Mart is "revamping the electronics departments in its more than 3,500 U.S. stores this week, ramping up an aggressive battle with Best Buy Co. (BBY) and Amazon.com."
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Posted
Dec 15 2008, 06:36 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
OPEC wants to see oil prices higher, much higher. Some of its member nations are running huge national deficits now that the price of crude has gone from $147 last summer to under $50. Several experts think it could go lower due to falling global demand. Even the Chinese are using less oil.
Americans are dreaming of $40 crude and $1.50 gas. OPEC members of dreaming of the Yankees sitting in their cars in long lines which snake for miles while they wait to buy a gallon of gas for $5.
Someone has to be wrong about what is going to happen to oil prices. Every day it looks a bit more like OPEC will have its way.
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Posted
May 26 2009, 01:37 PM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
Is Facebook worth $10 billion? The Russians think so.
The social networking company has raised $200 million from a Russian investment firm, a deal that values Facebook at $10 billion. That's down from the $15 billion valuation set when Microsoft (MSFT) invested in the company two years ago.
Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in a conference call that Microsoft bought in "at the absolute peak of the market," according to MarketWatch. The world is a different place now, he added. Gee, that's gotta make Microsoft feel good.
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Posted
Nov 28 2007, 11:40 AM
by
Robert Walberg
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
Now that the dust has settled back on our keyboards, which company was the big winner of Cyber Monday? Was it a) Amazon with its new Kindle, b) Wal-Mart with its cheap big-screen TVs, c) Blue Nile with its sparkling diamonds, or d) none of the above?
If you guessed "d" then you are today's winner. While anecdotal evidence suggests that each of the highlighted retailers fared reasonably well on Monday, the real winner of Cyber Monday was FedEx.
Internet sales totalled a whopping $733 million Monday, an impressive 21% jump over the year-ago total. But to jack up sales so significantly at a time when consumer confidence is in the toilet required some serious effort -- and by effort I mean discounting prices. Sales were everywhere online Monday, and that's why I'm not as excited by the retailers as I am by FedEx. You see slashing prices might jumpstart sales, but it does so at the cost of lowering margins. Lower margins mean slow to no profit growth, and it's earnings growth that ultimately drives stock prices.
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Posted
Jan 04 2008, 11:35 AM
by
Jon Markman
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
Whenever your job is getting you down, just be glad you aren’t a financial journalist who has to make annual predictions that live forever on the web. Since the advent of MSN Search and Google, there is no hiding my most unfortunate calls in the drawer anymore. It’s all out there. So as an addendum to my 2008 forecast, which you can read right here, here’s how my '07 predictions fared.
1. Bull market, year 5. Well, sort of. I forecast an S&P 500 gain of 13% on 2007. We got 3.5%. The Nasdaq 100 did go up 19%, though, so let’s average them out and call it good.
2. Goldilocks lives! I forecast modestly rising inflation, modest job growth and below-trend U.S. economic growth of 2.6%. This was right on, as annualized growth came to 2.8% in 2007.
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Posted
Aug 26 2009, 04:03 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 American Internet speeds are slow, very slow, by international standards. That may be one reason the $787 billion economic stimulus package has a large financial commitment to building broadband infrastructure.
The U.S. ranks 28th among large countries in Internet connection speeds, according to new data from the Communications Workers of America. The organization has a reason to track the information. Many of the union members’ jobs rely on cable and telecom firms continuing to invest to build larger broadband systems, particularly the communications giants Comcast (CMCSA), Time Warner Cable (TWC), AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ).
The Internet speed champions are led by South Korea, Japan, Sweden, and the Netherlands.
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Posted
Apr 01 2009, 03:59 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
The business of having online sites with content created by amateurs to be viewed by other amateurs never had a reasonable chance of making money. The fact that Facebook once had a $15 billion valuation, and that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (NWS) bought MySpace, and that Google (GOOG) bought YouTube only proves the “greater fool” theory.
YouTube was started in 2005 and MySpace in 2003. Normally, having a social network where people go to share profiles of themselves, write blogs and submit videos would not seem like much of a business. But MySpace has well over 100 million users. People viewed over 5 billion videos at YouTube last month.
Investors assumed that any medium with such a large number of users had to become a huge business. Millions and millions of users must be worth something. They can’t be worth nothing. That couldn’t be possible.
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Posted
Jun 15 2009, 05:18 PM
by
Catherine Holahan
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 The music has officially stopped playing at
Virgin Megastores. The last of the iconic record shops closed today, June 14. The
New York
Times, present for the last day of business at the chain's landmark store
in Union Square, described the
closing as "particularly dispiriting."
That's putting it mildly. Sure, it's not as
though the demise of Virgin Megastores is surprising. Record stores have long
struggled for relevance in a digital age defined by à la carte downloads and
illegal file-sharing sites. Even the music discovery part of the record store experience
-- long touted by store owners as what would keep people coming into their
shops -- has largely been usurped by ad-supported music blogs and MySpace
pages.
But Virgin Megastores' closing is more than another
example of consumers pushing aside an old distribution model for a newer,
more-immediate one. It is a symbol of the inability of the music industry as a
whole to successfully adapt its business for digital consumers. As such,
Virgin's closing is downright depressing.
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