My finance view

U.S. online sales this holiday shopping season are up 15 percent compared to last year, after what may have been the busiest week of the season, said research firm comScore on Sunday.

Shoppers have spent $30.9 billion online from Nov. 1 through Dec. 16, up from $26.9 billion at the same point last year, said the Reston, Va., company, which tracks Web use.

Online sales surpassed $1 billion on four days last week. Total sales for the week climbed 15 percent to $6.31 billion compared to last year.

The five days that ended on Friday “will almost certainly be the heaviest week of the online holiday shopping season,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. Online spending will begin to slow as Christmas draws closer, he said.

But “Cyber Monday,” the Monday after Thanksgiving, is still the largest online shopping day ever, according to comScore. Sales for that day rose 22 percent from last year to $1.25 billion. Cyber Monday sales topped $1 billion for the first time last year.

The holiday shopping season can make up to 40 percent of retailers’ annual revenue. The online sales data point to Americans’ growing comfort with using their personal computers, tablets and smartphones to shop for the holidays.

Discounting and promotions have also boosted shopping this year. ComScore said on Sunday that shoppers have received free shipping on at least half of all their purchases in each week of this year’s holiday shopping season.

Source

Lee Enterprises, the owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and one of the largest newspaper publishers in the country, announced Friday that it will file for bankruptcy after efforts to work out a debt exchange deal with its lenders failed.

In a press release, Lee Enterprises, based in Davenport, Iowa, didn’t say when it would file for “pre-packaged” Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

However, the publisher said the bankruptcy will cause no changes to its business. Vendors, subscriptions, employees and the company’s operations will not be affected.

The publicly-held company said earlier this year it would seek a ‘prepackaged’ bankruptcy if it failed to refinance $904.5 million in debt that matures in April 2012.

In an debt exchange proposal, Lee had tried to convince at least 95 percent of its lenders to swap existing debt for new debt with a later maturity date and a higher interest rate. At one point, it had 90 percent acceptance for the swap.

Those efforts ultimately failed, however, in reaching that level, prompting Lee to proceed with the bankruptcy filing.

However, the level of support for debt restructuring by the vast bulk of creditors will allow the company to file a prepackaged bankruptcy, the company said.

“We have achieved agreements with an overwhelming majority of our creditors to extend our existing loan agreements on reasonable terms that preserve stockholders’ ownership interests in the company with only 13% dilution,” Lee Chief Executive Mary Junck said in a press release.

With a prepackaged deal, Lee expects to exit bankruptcy in sixty days or less.

Source

Discount chain 99 Cents Only Stores Inc. said Tuesday that it has agreed to be acquired for about $1.6 billion by private equity firm Ares Management LLC and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, the latest big investors to bet on the increasingly popular dollar store industry.

The $22 per share cash offer is 7.4 percent higher than the retailer’s shares finished at on Monday. But it is a 32 percent premium over the company’s closing price on March 10, the day before 99 Cents Only disclosed that it had received an acquisition offer from a different private equity firm.

Dollar store operators like 99 Cents Only have thrived in the weak economy. Shoppers have turned to the discounters for deals on necessities like food and cleaning supplies, and for bargains on toys and other household goods one hour payday loan.

99 Cents Only, based in Commerce, Calif., operates 289 stores in the Western U.S.

99 Cents must have its deal approved by its shareholders. The retailer’s board is recommending approval. And members of the Schiffer-Gold family, which founded the company, said in a statement that they support the deal. They will hold a significant minority stake after the deal is complete.

The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of next year.

Shares of the company rose 90 cents, or 4.4 percent, to close at $21.39 Tuesday.

Source

ST. LOUIS 

Gunmen wearing military-style uniforms broke into the house of a pro-government Sunni militiaman early on Wednesday and killed five members of his family, including three children, Iraqi officials said.

A police official said the gunmen shot the women and children as they were sleeping in their home in Abu Ghraib, a Sunni-dominated area that used to be a haven for al-Qaida in Iraq.

Seven other family members were wounded in the attack. The militiaman, Hameed al-Zobaie, was not in the house at the time of the attack, the police official said.

A medical official in a nearby hospital confirmed the casualties. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

Police said the gunmen likely were targeting al-Zobaie, who is a member of the Iraqi Sahwa, or Awakening Councils personal loans for bad credit. The group joined forces with U.S. troops at the height of the Iraq war to fight al-Qaida. Ever since then, it has been a target for Sunni insurgents who call its members traitors.

Insurgents have stepped up attacks in Iraq recently as the U.S. military prepares to withdraw from the country by the end of the year.

In an earlier attack, a car bomb exploded near a popular restaurant in a Shiite neighborhood in southwestern Baghdad late on Tuesday night, killing three people and wounding 10 others, police said Wednesday.

Source

The economy slowed in the first six months of 2011 to its weakest pace since the recession ended. High gas prices and scant income gains forced Americans to sharply pull back on spending.

The Commerce Department says the economy expanded only 1.3 percent in the April-June period. And it downwardly revised the January-March figures to show growth of just 0.4 percent, the weakest since the recession ended two years ago.

Consumer spending was almost flat this spring. It increased only 0.1 percent, after 2.1 percent growth in the winter. Spending on long-lasting manufactured goods, such as autos and appliances, fell 4.4 percent.

Government spending fell for the third straight quarter. And state and local governments cut spending for the seventh quarter in eight since the recession ended.

Source

A promise from Italy to fast-track austerity measures nudged stock indexes slightly higher Tuesday. Investors are still worried that Italy might become the next European country to need help managing its debts.

A successful auction of new Italian government bonds also reassured markets that the country will be able to manage on its own without backstops from international lenders like the International Monetary Fund. A default by Italy, the third-largest economy in Europe, would cause far more damage to the global financial system than one by Greece, which is much smaller.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index and the Dow Jones industrial average bounced between small gains and losses. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose 1 point, or 0.1 percent, to 1,321 in afternoon trading. The Dow rose 2 points to 12,512.

Italian finance minister Giulio Tremonti said budget cuts originally scheduled for August would be passed by this Sunday. The news sent Milan’s main stock index up 1.2 percent.

U.S. bank stocks rose as tensions eased about Europe’s financial crisis. If that region’s debt troubles spread beyond Greece and Ireland to much larger economies like Italy and Spain, global banks would likely sustain the most losses since they hold bonds issued by European countries. They would also be affected if a default slows down global lending. Wells Fargo & Co. rose 1 percent.

Technology stocks were the weakest in the market following poor results at chip makers. The Nasdaq composite was the only major stock to fall all day. It was down 7, or 0.3 percent, to 2,795.

Microchip Technology Inc. plunged 13 percent, the most of any stock in the S&P 500 index, after the chip maker said it expected lower quarterly revenue and income because of waning demand from car makers. That pushed the stocks of other chip makers lower too. Novellus Systems Inc. fell 11 percent after lowering its own profit forecast, and Texas Instruments Inc. fell 3.9 percent.

Investors also felt some relief after a meeting of 17 finance ministers Monday resulted in a statement that implied they were open to buying distressed Greek bonds.

“They are trying to staunch the bleeding,” said Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist for Prudential Financial. “That has reassured investors that there are, in essence, buyers of last resort.”

The yields on the government bonds of Italy and Spain shot up this week as investors lost confidence in the quality of their debt. That increased borrowing costs for those countries and raised the grim possibility that they might need a financial backstop like those arranged for Greece and Ireland. Some of the concerns about Italy eased Tuesday after a successful auction of new government debt.

Investors had assumed Italy would be able to manage its heavy debt load in part because of a high personal savings rate among its citizens. But after concerns arose last week that Italian and Spanish banks might not pass upcoming stress tests, stock in those countries’ largest banks fell sharply. Results of the tests are expected to be announced Friday.

At the center of the panic over European government debt is the fear that the European banking system could be hurt by the weakening finances of countries on Europe’s periphery like Greece, Ireland and Portugal. That would affect a global network of financial institutions, potentially freezing up lending and affecting U.S. companies that do business internationally.

Investors are also worried about U.S. debt. The looming Aug. 2 deadline to resolve contentious budget negotiations and signs that the U.S. economy could be in for an extended downturn are also pushing stocks lower.

Radiant Systems Inc. rose 6.5 percent after saying ATM maker NCR Corp. would buy the company, which makes equipment and software for the hospitality and retail industries, for $1.2 billion. But Central Vermont Public Service Corp. fell 2.5 percent after it announced Canada’s Gaz Metro would buy the utility for $472.4 million. Rival bidder Fortis cancelled its offer.

International Game Technology rose 2.6 percent after a Sterne Agee analyst raised its rating on the company, saying it would likely sell more casino games.

News Corp. rose 1 percent after the beleaguered media company said it would buy back $5 billion worth of its own stock. The company is facing opposition in England to its takeover of British Sky Broadcasting, a highly profitable satellite television operator, because of a widening phone-hacking scandal at its newspapers in Britain.

Source

French and British food safety officials on Saturday were investigating seeds from a British company linked to an E. coli outbreak near Bordeaux.

France halted the sale of fenugreek, mustard and arugula sprout seeds from British seed and plant vendor Thompson & Morgan after eight people were hospitalized following an E. coli outbreak. French investigators found that two of them were sickened after consuming sprouts from the three seed types in the southwestern town of Begles, a suburb of Bordeaux.

Some of those affected were infected by the same strain of E. coli that has killed 44 people _ all but one in Germany _ and sickened more than 3,700 in recent weeks.

The company cautioned the link was unsubstantiated, arguing in a statement that it believed that “something local in the Bordeaux area, or the way the product has been handled and grown, is responsible for the incident rather than our seeds.”

The company said it understood that French officials were still testing the seeds and investigating how they were grown. In the meantime, Thompson & Morgan said it had submitted samples of its seeds to British health authorities for investigation.

A spokesman for Britain’s Food Safety Agency said that officials “don’t have definitive evidence that the company is the source of the contamination” and that an investigation was ongoing. He noted that European health authorities have misattributed the source of E. coli outbreaks in the past. Spanish cucumbers, for example, were wrongly blamed for the illnesses in Germany.

The food safety official spoke on condition of anonymity, in line with department policy.

Source

Morgan Keegan & Co. is paying $200 million to settle civil fraud charges that it overstated the value of mortgage investments just as the housing market was collapsing and lured buyers in with false sales materials.

Federal and state regulators said the Memphis-based investment firm failed to use “reasonable” procedures to calculate the value of the investments. Half of the money will go toward compensating investors in five states loan for people with bad credit.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, regulators in five states and securities industry regulators announced the settlement Wednesday. Two former employees of the firm also agreed to pay civil penalties.

Source

The stock of popular but unprofitable Internet radio service Pandora Media Inc. increased in its market debut Wednesday, adding to the IPO frenzy that has some watchers talking tech bubble.

Its shares opened at $20 each and rose as high as $26 in early trading on Wednesday. That’s up from offering price of $16, the high end of their proposed range. By afternoon, its shares traded at $18.75, up $2.75, or 17 percent, from the offering price. At that level, Pandora’s 159.7 million shares were worth nearly $3 billion.

“In my opinion that’s extremely rich for a company that’s hoping to make a profit in fiscal 2012,” said Scott Sweet, managing partner of IPOboutique.com.

In fact it is well above the current value of AOL Inc. ($2.1 billion), a relic of the previous Internet era that is working to transform its business from dial-up service to online and advertising. But it’s a small fraction of such Internet behemoths as Google Inc. ($162 billion) or even Yahoo Inc. ($19 billion).

Pandora’s offering comes amid a recent fervor for high-profile Internet IPOs. Though sky-high valuations have evoked the tech bubble of the late 1990s, investors hope this time it’s different. Today’s biggest Web startups are more mature than their ’90s counterparts were, and some are already profitable.

The professional networking service LinkedIn Corp. was one of the first to make its public debut among in the latest generation of Web startups. Already profitable, LinkedIn has a market capitalization of about $7 billion.

Daily deals site Groupon Inc. has also filed to go public, though it has not yet provided details on its expected price range or the amount of shares it plans to sell. “FarmVille” maker Zynga Inc. is also expected to make its public debut soon.

Facebook, the owner of the world’s largest social network, has indicated it will file its IPO documents before May 2012. Based on a Goldman Sachs Group investment, Facebook was valued at $50 billion at the beginning of this year low interest rate personal loans.

Pandora, based in Oakland, Calif., got its start in 2000 as a music recommendation service, then known as Savage Beast Technologies. It changed its name in 2005 when it launched an Internet radio service that lets people stream music over the Web, letting users create custom stations based on songs, genres or artists. It also created the “Music Genome Project,” assembling hundreds of musical characteristics, or “genes,” into a “Music Genome.” This analysis became the basis of Pandora’s music recommendation service.

“It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records _ it’s about what each individual song sounds like,” wrote Pandora’s founder, Tim Westergren, on the company’s website.

The service is popular, but so far the company has not turned a profit. Pandora has 94 million registered users and it makes most of its money from advertising. It also offers an ad-free, premium service at a cost, but only a small percentage of its users have signed up for it.

In the most recent fiscal year, Pandora booked a loss of $1.8 million before paying dividends on preferred stock. Its revenue was $138 million.

“Unless they can continue to increase their subscribers or offer new material, obviously their losses will continue to grow,” Sweet said. “I am not optimistic long term with Pandora.”

Shares can be volatile on their first day trading. LinkedIn priced its stock at $45 in mid-May. The shares soared above $100 before noon on the day they hit the market and closed at $94.25 on a trading volume of 30 million shares.

On Wednesday, LinkedIn’s stock fell $2.44, or 3.2 percent, to $73.90 in afternoon trading.

Source