President Barack Obama will renominate Nobel-prize winning economist Peter Diamond to the Federal Reserve Board next year when the new Senate convenes, a White House official said Thursday.
The Senate scuttled Diamond’s nomination Wednesday by failing to vote on it before adjourning its lame duck session for the year. Get the full story »
ICE Trust, the unit of exchange operator IntercontinentalExchange Inc. dedicated to clearing credit-default swaps, has withdrawn its application to be a derivatives clearing organization registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in response to changes proposed by the regulator.
ICE filed the application Nov. 12, but a spokeswoman told Dow Jones Newswires on Thursday that it decided to withdraw it, “given the significant changes proposed to the commission regulations” for derivatives-clearing organizations, or DCOs. Get the full story »
Shares of PrivateBancorp Inc. are down 3.9 percent Thursday morning after a BMO Capital Markets report downgraded it to “market perform” from “outperform.”
The “market perform” designation means that it’s now forecast to perform about in line with the market. Get the full story »
Blu-ray is emerging as a holiday hero for Hollywood as the film industry grapples with the rise of digital video and a persistent slump in its most profitable source of revenue — DVD sales.
A combination of the weak economy, online piracy and low-cost rental and streaming services has driven continued declines in DVD sales this year, but strong growth in Blu-ray, premium-priced discs that offer a higher quality home viewing experience, suggests consumers still have an appetite for physical home movie products. Get the full story »
General Motors Co. is recalling nearly 96,000 Cadillac CTS cars for the model years 2005 to 2007 because a front passenger air-bag sensor could break and disable the bag.
Repeated “flexing” of the passenger sensing system mat in the front seat could cause the mat to “kink, bend or fold,” GM said according to a notice posted on U.S. safety regulators’ Web site Thursday. Get the full story »
Rates on fixed mortgages dipped after rising for five weeks in a row.
Still, they remain more than a half-point higher than last month and are at the highest level since late spring. Get the full story »
The head of the Federal Communications Commission is laying out regulatory conditions to ensure that cable giant Comcast Corp. cannot stifle video competition once it takes control of NBC Universal.
The conditions are intended to guarantee that existing subscription television services and new online video services can still get access to NBC content. Get the full story »
More Americans purchased new homes in November, though not enough to signal better times are ahead for the battered housing industry.
Sales of new homes rose 5.5 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 290,000 units, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. That’s less than half the rate that economists consider healthy. And the increase follows an October sales pace that nearly matched the lowest level in 47 years. Get the full story »
Fannie Mae said serious delinquencies on single-family mortgages declined further in October from September, while Freddie Mac reported that such delinquencies turned up in November for a second straight month, after seeing declines since February.
While the number of U.S. households behind on their mortgage payments declined during the third quarter, the number of newly initiated foreclosures rose as banks continued to clear a backlog of delinquent loans. Get the full story »
An employee at a store in New York, Dec. 6, 2010. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
New U.S. claims for jobless benefits dipped last week and consumer spending increased in November for a fifth straight month, reinforcing views of a solid economic growth pace in the fourth quarter.
Initial claims fell 3,000 to a seasonally adjusted 420,000, the Labor Department said on Thursday, matching economists’ expectations.
A separate report from the Commerce Department showed spending rose 0.4 percent after increasing by an upwardly revised 0.7 percent in October. Get the full story »
From ComputerWorld | Skype estimates that about two-thirds of its users are still unable to log in after an outage caused by problems with its underlying peer-to-peer interconnection system, it said in a blog post around midday European time Thursday.
Abbott Laboratories and British drug giant AstraZeneca have decided to stop developing the drug Certriad, a pill that combines drugs already on the market.
Such combination pills are developed as a convenience to consumers by having several different drugs in one pill, but criticized by consumer groups, health plans and employers as a way for the drug makers to extend patents and continue charging high prices. Critics say the ingredients generally used in the pills have cheaper generic copies or similar less expensive rivals already on the market.
The Certiad product included a combination of a statin and a fenofibrate. There are already generic statins and fenofibrates on the market. Get the full story »
Nearly 1.8 million passengers are expected to travel through Chicago’s airports during the Christmas holiday week.
Airlines are projecting that Thursday will be the busiest travel day at both O’Hare and Midway international airports, with nearly 190,000 passengers are expected at O’Hare and nearly 63,000 passengers at Midway.
Both airports are featuring live blues and jazz performances from 2 to 5 p.m. Get the full story »
From Property Week | Mark Simms, an associate director from CB Richard Ellis who joined CBRE in April from Cushman & Wakefield, will join computer giant Apple’s property team.
