Filed under: Energy , Economy There are two schools of thought on oil prices. The first is that the recession will not last long and that exploration by major oil companies has slowed as oil fields begin to yield less. In this case, oil prices will move back toward $100 over the next year. Another contributing...

Filed under: Investing , Earnings Big financial institutions begin reporting first-quarter results next week. JPMorgan Chase ( JPM ), Bank of America ( BAC ) and Citigroup ( C ), the three largest banks by total assets, and Goldman Sachs ( GS ), the biggest remaining Wall Street firm, are kicking things...

Filed under: Company News , Earnings There have been rumors for several weeks that Goldman Sachs ( GS ) would raise money to pay back its TARP obligations. It now appears that the action is more likely, probably fueled by the jump up in financial shares. Goldman traded below $73 in early March, but...

Filed under: Company News , Earnings Late yesterday, two of the largest American companies, Boeing ( BA ) and Chevron ( CVX ) warned on Q1 results. Almost anyone could have guessed Boeing is having a hard time. Global air travel is off sharply due to the recession and a number of airlines are expected...

Filed under: Company News , Technology It sounds like a bad joke: The Internet went down in Silicon Valley and traffic came to a halt. But it was no laughing matter. A telephone outage in Northern California is hurting many high-tech companies and residents alike as parts of Silicon Valley have no phone...

Filed under: Investing With all eyes on the financial sector these days, the market’s reaction to an extremely upbeat early look at first-quarter earnings from Wells Fargo ( WFC ) was hardly a surprise. With banks in the lead, the Dow Jones Industrial Average surged 3.14 percent, or 246 points,...

Filed under: Company News Because of complex methods for valuing certain bonds, Morgan Stanley ( MS ) will probably lose money in the first quarter. According to The Wall Street Journal, ” Because of the accounting treatment on some bonds issued by Morgan Stanley before the financial crisis erupted,...

Filed under: Economy Recently, The New York Times explored the increasingly blurry question of journalistic integrity. Many magazines, desperate for revenue, are edging closer to selling cover space to advertisers, and media watchers are trying to define the line between editorial and advertising content....

Filed under: Economy Perhaps this is another one of those ‘green shoots’ in the economy that Fed Chair Ben Bernanke is talking about. Wholesale inventories declined for the first time in eight months in February, falling 1.5 percent, the U.S. Commerce Department announced Wednesday ( pdf...

Filed under: Company News The Newspaper Association of America got an earful from Google ( GOOG ) CEO Eric Schmidt. Newspaper executives got to sit and listen to a man whose company is making the extraordinary kind of money that they did a decade ago, in the age before broadband. Now consumers can turn...