American Railcar Q4 profit rises 39%

American Railcar Industries saw its fourth-quarter profit rise 39 percent but booked less than half the revenue it saw in the prior year’s quarter as railcar shipments fell.
For the quarter ended Dec. 31, the company reported net earnings of $10.5 million, up from nearly $7.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2008. American Railcar said […]

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WordPress.com crashes, downs major blogs

WordPress.com, the fast growing hosting service for millions of blogs, including TechCrunch and GigaOm, crashed briefly Thursday afternoon.
"WordPress.com will be back in a minute!" is the message that appeared shortly before 3 p.m. on some portion of the websites using the San Francisco blogging platform, which serves millions of blogs with a combined 72.2 million […]

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Foreclosure experts meet, debate strategies

JEFFERSON CITY — Foreclosures are running at an all-time high. And few think that will change any time soon.
So what do you do about them?
That was the subject of a conference here Thursday, where dozens of foreclosure counselors and experts from across the state gathered to talk about ways to try to […]

Luxury prices: To cut or not to cut?

Step into Nordstrom a year ago for handmade Italian pumps and flats from designer Anyi Lu and you’d be shelling out as much as $595 a pair. This season, everything in the spring collection that hits stores next month goes for under $400. For CEO David Spatz, adjusting prices downward simply made sense: "The […]

U.K. Treasury chief hints at tax hikes

LONDON–Britain’s Treasury chief said Sunday that the government must make difficult choices on spending cuts as it seeks to slash the country’s growing deficit.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling is expected to announce tax hikes and public-sector spending cuts in a pre-budget review on Wednesday.
The government has said it wants to halve […]

Key sponsors stand by Tiger

He is Tiger Inc. Hear him roar.
Multi-million dollar contracts. An estimated $100 million (U.S.) in endorsements per year. More than $92 million from PGA career tournament winings. Ballooning PGA ticket sales and TV viewership levels.
Tiger Woods was, until now at least, a thoroughly unpolarizing sponge for corporate money who, according to Forbes magazine, […]

Fed reduces AIG’s debt by $25 billion

AIG announced Tuesday that it completed a deal wiping out $25 billion of its debt to taxpayers by selling stakes in two subsidiaries to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The troubled insurer gave the New York Fed preferred shares of two of its international life insurance companies, including $16 billion of American International […]

Animatronic hamsters have stores scrambling

The hamsters are fake, with a coating of fuzz over a mechanized chassis and a small sound system. But when it comes to creating intense desire among kids — and desperation among shopping parents — Zhu Zhu Pets are the real deal.
When the Post-Dispatch profiled the electronic rodents eight weeks ago, toymaker […]

What Congress has in store for the Fed

More than a year after the financial meltdown of 2008, Congress is moving forward on plans to drastically curtail the power of the Federal Reserve.
There is a debate about lawmakers’ motivations, and many details must still be worked out between different proposals.
Currently, the main bills in the House and Senate differ in specifics, […]

IMF chief does not see double-dip U.S. recession

The head of the International Monetary Fund said on Friday the pace of the recovery in the U.S. economy remains sluggish but he does not believe there will be a double-dip recession.
IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said that capital flows to emerging markets reflected the positive outlook for those economies but warned that they […]