The Chicago Board Options Exchange’s parent is now formally open to “strategic transactions” such as a sale or merger with another exchange operator, a person with direct knowledge of the company’s stance said on Wednesday. Get the full story »
Boeing considered underdog for tanker contract
Boeing Co. is the underdog to land a $35 billion contract for aerial refueling tankers that the Pentagon is expected to award as early as Thursday, analysts said.
If conventional wisdom is right, EADS North America would win its first major U.S. Defense Department deal and be the front-runner to replace the entire half-century-old tanker fleet in contracts expected to total more than $100 billion. Get the full story »
U.S. gas demand rises for 6th straight week
U.S. retail gasoline demand rose last week as much of the country thawed out from weeks of winter storms, MasterCard Advisors’ SpendingPulse report showed Wednesday.
Average gasoline demand climbed 4.5 percent, to 8.847 million barrels-per-day in the week ended Feb. 18. Get the full story »
Abbott wins appeal of Humira patent enfringement
Abbott's Humira drug. (Handout)
Turning back a threat to sales of Abbott Laboratories’ most lucrative drug, a federal appeals court Wednesday overturned a lower court ruling that claimed the North Chicago drug giant used Johnson & Johnson’s technology to make a blockbuster rheumatoid arthritis drug.
Humira is Abbott’s largest-selling product and one of the world’s top-selling drugs, generating more than $5 billion in annual sales as a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease and psoriasis among other autoimmune disorders.
The ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eastern District of Texas overturned a $1.67 billion verdict against Abbott from Marshall County. At the time of the lower court ruling last year, observers said it was known for being friendly to plaintiffs. Get the full story »
Report: Job creation at low end of wage scale
About 86 percent of the more than 1.3 million jobs created in the last year have been in industries that pay wages below $19 per hour, according to a report released Wednesday by the National Employment Law Project, a policy advocacy group.
The report says there is an “striking imbalance” between the jobs lost in the recession and the jobs created in the last 12 months. For instance, 40 percent of the jobs lost paid $19 to $32 an hour, but only 14 percent of the jobs created were in this category. Get the full story »
U.S. oil prices back at $100 a barrel
U.S. oil prices spiked above $100 a barrel for the first time in more than two years Wednesday, as reports of Libyan production shutdowns swirled.
Italian oil giant Eni said Wednesday that it had partially shut down its 150,000-barrel-per-day production in the North African country. Get the full story »
Feb. 23 at 12:39 p.m.
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Filed under: Computers, Education, Government, Software, Wireless Chicago, Vernon Hills hop on Microsoft’s cloud
The City of Chicago and Vernon Hills Police Department are among 16 new government and education customers for Microsoft’s cloud computing program, the company announced at its Public Sector CIO Summit Wednesday.
“Public sector organizations are looking for enterprise-grade cloud solutions, and that means providing high levels of security, functionality and support,” Curt Kolcun, vice president of U.S. Public Sector at the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant said in a statement. “We’re seeing government and education organizations of every size and dimension using Microsoft cloud solutions to help reduce costs and increase productivity in support of their missions.” Get the full story »
Google rolls out Cloud Connect rival to Office
Google Inc., taking aim at Microsoft Corp.’s lucrative Office franchise, plans to release a free tool allowing users to transfer files from the widely used software suite to the Web so that multiple people can edit and collaborate on them.
The long-anticipated move is intended to bolster one of Google’s fastest-growing businesses not related to its popular search engine — selling online software to companies. The company’s Google Apps offering includes online word-processing, spreadsheet and collaboration tools used through a Web browser that are part of a service called Google Docs. They compete with Office applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Get the full story »
Judge: Motorola can’t transfer Huawei technology
A federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction that prohibits Motorola Solutions Inc. from transferring confidential information by Chinese company Huawei Technologies to Nokia Siemens Networks, which is planning to buy Motorola’s networks business in a $1.2 billion transaction.
Huawei sued Motorola last month, arguing that the deal with NSN would represent a misappropriation of Huawei trade secrets. Motorola and Huawei have commercial agreements dating back a decade, during which Motorola bought Huawei network technologies and resold the equipment under its own brand. Get the full story »
Chicago existing home, condo sales plunge in Jan.
Sales of existing homes in the Chicago area fell last month, and plunged dramatically within the city of Chicago, but consumers who did close transactions were able to buy a lot of house for their money.
The Illinois Association of Realtors said Wednesday that 3,844 single-family homes and condominiums were sold in January, a 2 percent drop from January 2010. Sales activity within the collar counties mitigated the anemic performance within the city of Chicago, and especially in the condo market. Get the full story »
Sears Canada’s fourth-quarter profit falls
Retailer Sears Canada posted a 28 percent drop in its quarterly profit, hurt in part by lower demand for appliances.
“The 2010 results were disappointing due to several external factors including increasing household debt, at an all time high, which affects sales in major expense items such as appliances,” Chief Executive Dene Rogers said in a statement. Get the full story »
Nasdaq may partner with CME on NYSE bid
Chicago's CME Group offices at 30 S. Wacker Drive in Chicago. (Nancy Stone/Chicago Tribune)
Nasdaq OMX Group could launch a rival bid for NYSE Euronext to avoid being left on the sidelines, a source said, as traditional exchanges race to merge to see off upstart electronic rivals.
This is one option Nasdaq, valued at $5.7 billion, is considering as a spate of deals shakes up an industry under intense cost pressure from new entrants such as BATS Global Markets, which last week snapped up rival Chi-X.
Nasdaq’s alternatives include tying up with IntercontinentalExchange Inc or the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) to wrest NYSE from its planned $10.2 billion takeover by Deutsche Boerse, the source familiar with the matter said. Get the full story »
US exchanges cry foul over ‘arbitrary’ CFTC rule
A proposed rule meant to protect investor access to fair prices on U.S. futures markets will instead drive business to less-regulated venues, boost costs, and stifle competition, the exchanges warned.
Eleven exchanges — including NYSE Euronext’s U.S. futures market, exchange giant CME Group, energy markets operator IntercontinentalExchange and Wall Street-backed ELX Futures LP — took aim at the rule in comment letters posted late Tuesday to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s web site, an unusual chorus of unity among fierce competitors. Fund manager Blackrock Inc also opposed the rule. Get the full story »
High yield may up demand for $3.7B Illinois bond
The cash-strapped state of Illinois will likely offer juicy yields to entice buyers of a $3.7 billion taxable pension bond expected to be sold Wednesday in the municipal-bond market.
According to a term sheet, initial price talk for the longest maturity in the offering, dated 2019, is about 2.40 percentage points above comparable Treasurys, for a yield of about 5.85%. That is about 1.79 percentage point more than comparably rated nine-year debt from cigarette maker Philip Morris International Inc., which traded at 0.61 percentage point above Treasurys on Tuesday. It is also 0.05 percentage point tighter than the initial price target on the deal for that maturity. Get the full story »
Merger wave only just begun, says LSE head
The recent wave of exchange mergers marks an era of consolidation that will leave no more than four global trading firms in five years’ time, said Xavier Rolet, the chief executive of the London Stock Exchange. Get the full story »
