The U.S. government on Sunday entered into an agreement with Citigroup to bolster the company with $20 billion in capital from the TARP pool. The treasury has also announced that it, along with FDIC, will provide protection against an asset pool of approximately $306 billion of loans and securities backed by residential and commercial real [...]

The economy is bad to say the least and consumer spending has been going down. For the month of October consumer spending dropped 0.3 percent the biggest setback since June 2004. Naturally the commodity sale volume has been going down as well including Cell Phones. But tough situations separate good from bad and the winner [...]

Apple is political now. In a very unusual move for the industry, Apple has declared itself publicly opposed to Proposition 8. Proposition 8, titled ‘Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry’, is an initiative measure to amend California’s constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry in California. Such marriages were legalized following a decision of the [...]

The US national debt clock has overflown the digits as the country’s debt has reached $10 trillion. The one and the dollar sign had to be squeezed into the same square. The clock also display’s the amount owed by each citizen of the US, which as of last week stood at $86,017.
The national debt clock [...]

HP has acquired LeftHand Networks Inc., a storage virtualization and iSCSI storage area network (SAN) solutions company for $360 million in cash. LeftHand Networks’ solutions enable midsize companies and remote offices or branches of large corporations to easily and cost-effectively protect critical business data
Founded in 1999, LeftHand Networks is privately held and headquartered in Boulder, [...]

Wachovia is the next big bank to fall and it’s banking assets have been acquired by Citi. Under the terms of the agreement, Citi will pay Wachovia approximately $2.16 billion in stock and assume Wachovia’s senior and subordinated debt, totaling approximately $53 billion. This will create a U.S. retail bank with 9.8% U.S. market deposit [...]

The financial meltdown is having a big impact on online image based advertising revenues. According to a study by the Neilsen group, financial services companies are hurting and cutting down on ad spending.
Compares to the first 2 quarters of 2007, financial services companies have spent 27% less in the first two quarters in 2008, a [...]

The fed is working on, what amounts to the biggest bail out for banks in over a decade. With AIG, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Washington Mutual all falling prey to their own practices and a panic stricken economy, the fed and treasury have come together with separate measures to help struggling banks.
The Treasury [...]

As HP integrates it’s acquisition of EDS, the company has announced restructuring of it’s combined workforce. HP will shed approximately 7.5 percent! of it’s employees or about 24600 heads. About half of the reductions will occur in the United States. HP says it will provide employees affected by this restructuring program with severance packages, counseling [...]

Best Buy, the consumer technology retailer, has purchased Napster, a pioneer in digital music entertainment. Napster agreed to be acquired at $2.65 per share in cash for a purchase price of approximately $121 million.
This is good for Napster but where does it fit in within Best Buy?  Maybe Best Buy can offer Napster music solutions [...]

Zetta, a provider of cloud storage solutions for enterprises, today announced that it has closed a $10.68 million Series A financing round led by venture capital firms Sigma Partners and Foundation Capital. Zetta plans [...]

Redhat has acquired Qumranet for approximately $107 million in cash.Qumranet’s claim to fame has been the KVM module, an open source project for Linux kernel based virtualization using technologies embedded in processors from Intel and AMD.
Redhat has shown a keen interest in building its own virtulization portfolio to entrench itself deeper in customer environments ( [...]

FDIC today released data on commercial banks insured by them. Net Earnings for these commercial entities fell to $5 billion, a decline of $31.8 billion (86.5 percent) from the $36.8 billion that the industry earned in the second quarter of 2007. The latest earnings were the lowest for the industry since the fourth quarter of [...]

The National Association of Realtors has release Existing-home sales numbers for July. The NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® Existing-Home Sales Series is the premier measurement of the residential real estate market. On or about the 25th of each month, NAR releases statistics on sales and prices of existing single-family homes for the nation and the four [...]

With the consumer market now starting to open up to color LCD devices, SIANO aims to add a digital TV function to all color LCD’s. SIANO is a mobile silion company stablished in June, 2004 and develops highly integrated silicon receivers for the mobile digital TV (MDTV) market.
“We are witnessing massive embedding of our products [...]

Rackspace Hosting Inc. saw its shares fall on its first day of trading Friday morning following an initial public offering that priced at the low end of the company’s expectations. The company operates the Mosso Cloud Computing Infrastructure.
The debut was a disappointment for the first venture-backed company to brave the IPO waters in nearly five [...]

ExxonMobile - the world famous US-based integrated energy giant made $11.68 billion in 2nd quarter of 2008, a 14% increase compared to the same quarter in 2007. This is the highest profit ever made by any corporation in the world, Ever! However, I also noticed US oil demand dropped 3% in 2008’s first 6 months [...]

The Federal Open Market Committee decided today to keep its target for the federal funds rate at 2 percent. According to the press release, Economic activity expanded in the second quarter, partly reflecting growth in consumer spending and exports. However, the committee echoed concerns over a softening labor market.
The unemployment rate for July rose to [...]