Warner Music Group, a major holdout on selling music online without copy protection, caved in to the growing trend Thursday and agreed to sell its tunes on Amazon.com’s digital music store. Until now, Warner Music had resisted offering songs by its artists in the MP3 format, which can be copied to multiple computers and burned onto CDs without restriction, and played on most PCs and digital media players. Warner Music’s entire catalog, including work by artists Led Zeppelin, Aretha Franklin and Sean Paul, will be added to the site throughout the week.
Small increase in factory orders
U.S. factories saw orders for costly manufactured goods rise only marginally in November — falling short of expectations for a much bigger gain and underscoring the strains on the economy from housing and credit problems. The Commerce Department reported Thursday that orders for durable goods — products expected to last at least three years — increased by just 0.1 percent last month. The tiny rise came after durable-goods orders fell by 0.4 percent in October.
Sallie Mae stock sale questioned
Sallie Mae’s planned $2.5 billion stock sale doesn’t answer all of Wall Street’s questions about the struggling student lender’s future. While some analysts see the company’s financing woes as a short-term problem, others highlight serious concerns about the Reston, Va., company, such as soaring loan defaults and a potential cut in its credit ratings. Sallie Mae, formally known as SLM Corp., lowered its earnings forecast for next year by more than 13 percent.
Disaster losses double in 2007
Losses to insurers from natural disasters nearly doubled this year to just below $30 billion globally after an unusually quiet 2006, a leading reinsurer said Thursday, from winter storms in Europe, flooding in Britain and wildfires in the U.S. While losses soared in 2007, the figure was far short of the $99 billion reinsurance writer Munich Re recorded in 2005 — when Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans.
Business threats growing overseas
Cyberattacks in Europe, theft of intellectual property in Asia, natural disasters in Latin America and terrorism on many continents were among the threats U.S. businesses faced in 2007, a State Department report said Thursday. In Europe, two weeks of attacks by computer interlopers that crippled government and corporate Web sites beginning in late April raised a new worry that U.S. companies also could be vulnerable to attack by computer.
Bad loan writeoffs swell at Citigroup
When Citigroup warned in early November that it was likely to write down its portfolio by $8 billion to $11 billion in the fourth quarter because of exposure to bad loans, investors recoiled at the size of the losses. But Goldman analysts say the writeoff is closer to $18.7 billion. If it does reach that amount, the bank may be forced to lower its dividend by 40 percent, Goldman predicts.
From Herald wire services
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