For Immediate Release

Chicago, IL – September 28, 2009 – Zacks.com releases the list of companies likely to issue earnings surprises. This week’s list includes Walgreen (WAG) and Xyratex (XRTX). To see more earnings analysis, visit http://at.zacks.com/?id=3207.

Every day, Zacks.com makes 4 stock picks available, free of charge. To see them, go to http://at.zacks.com/?id=5612.

This Week's Events

Five S&P 500 companies are confirmed to report: Constellation Brands (STZ), Darden Restaurants (DRI), Jabil Circuit (JBL), Nike (NKE) and Walgreen (WAG). A total of 27 companies are on the calendar.

We are still a week away from the "official" start of third-quarter earnings season. Alcoa (AA) will release its results on Oct 7. The majority of companies will not start reporting until the latter half of October, however.

The economic calendar is most active towards the second half of the week with

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Five S&P 500 companies are confirmed to report: Constellation Brands (STZ), Darden Restaurants (DRI), Jabil Circuit (JBL), Nike (NKE) and Walgreen (WAG). A total of 27 companies are on the calendar.

We are still a week away from the "official" start of third-quarter earnings season. Alcoa (AA) will release its results on Oct 7. The majority of companies will not start reporting until the latter half of October, however.

The economic calendar is most active towards the second half of the week with the release of the ISM manufacturing survey and the monthly employment surveys.

Tuesday: September Conference Board consumer confidence survey, July Case-Schiller home price index Wednesday: September Chicago PMI, September ADP employment survey, final Q2 GDP, weekly crude inventories, weekly mortgage applications Thursday: September ISM manufacturing survey, August personal income and spending, August pending home sales, September auto sales, September Monster employment index, September

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The Cato Institute is hosting a discussion this month of the extent to which monetary policy may have contributed to our current economic problems. In the lead essay that appeared on Monday, Professor Scott Sumner of Bentley University suggested that the Fed erred in allowing nominal GDP to grow as slowly as it did. My response appeared this morning. I agree that faster growth of nominal GDP would have been a good thing, but argue that, particularly if you start the clock in the fall of 2008, the Fed lacked the tools to prevent a decline in nominal GDP.

Here I excerpt part of my discussion.

Professor Sumner appeals to the equation of exchange, MV = PY,

where M is a measure of the money supply, V its velocity, and nominal GDP is written as the product of the overall price level (P)

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Andrei Illarionov: "Interest in Venezuela - this is part of the big strategy"

Grigory Pasko, journalist

President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev recently carried out visits to the countries of Africa. Before this we observed his voyage to the countries of Latin America. What is this intense interest of the Russian president in such faraway countries brought about by? Why not seek friends and partners in business closer to Russia? Medvedev himself said it this way: "...We did not devote that much attention to sufficiently faraway continents, ones such as Africa, Latin America, but now we are simply duty-bound to do this. This is our close-in-spirit neighbors, this is countries that we really have helped and which, on the

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Barack Obama's much-anticipated first trip to Moscow is approaching, but will the new President's peacemaking endeavours be as effective on the Kremlin as they has been in other contexts?  As Russia welcomes Iranian President Ahmadinejad to the SCO summit, leaving blazing protests and threats of a recount in Tehran, are American hopes of the Kremlin leaning upon the nuclear state dwindling?  The New York Times posits some interesting reflections upon the US President's first foreign trip to 'adversarial territory'. The Russian leadership that Mr. Obama will meet, according to Lilia Shevtsova, a senior associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center, a think tank, is representative of "a system based on an official mechanism of anti-Americanism'.As supplier of Iran's nuclear wherewithal, Russia can make a difference by acting to halt its drive toward a nuclear weapon.But what's the ...

For weeks now the liberal world media dutifully has been repeating dire threats against so-called “tax havens” from the big spending, high taxing, anti-tax competition likes of Germany’s Merkel and France’s Sarkosy.

Even President Obama allowed his less than impressive Secretary of the Treasury to make some noise against tax havens.

The orchestrated battle of words hurled at offshore financial centers got so heated that British PM Gordon Brown felt obliged to demand for “the end of tax havens.”

This belated anti-tax haven baloney comes from Her Majesty’s first minister whose government is in charge (and has been for a decade) of the United Kingdom’s many tax havens in its overseas territories (Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, the Turks & Caicos) and its Crown Dependencies (the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey and the Isle of Man), plus Gibraltar.

Does the Rt. Hon. Gordon believe that the

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It was on;y six months ago that Zimbabwe came out with a a href="http://stockerblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/zimbabwe-inflation-breaks-above.html"$100 billion bill/a. It finally happened; inflation in Zimbabwe is so bad, that the country finally issued a a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090116/ts_afp/zimbabweeconomycurrency_20090116125326" target="_blank"$100 trillion bill/a - that's 100,000,000,000,000 Zimbabwe dollars. This is happening because the government in July reported that they are experiencing inflation of 231 million percent - that's 231,000,000%. Yet the Libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute, believes that the real inflation rate is 89.7 sextillion percent - that's 89,700,000,000,000,000,000,000%. br /br /By the way, that 100,000,000,000,000 Zimbabwe Dollar Bill is equal to about $300. And to think that just last April, the country had a href="http://stockerblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/100000-inflation-rate-election-dispute.html"inflation of 'only' 100,000%/a.div class="blogger-post-footer"div class='adsense' style='text-align:center; padding: 0px 3px 0.5em 3px;' script type="text/javascript"!-- google_ad_client="ca-pub-2427831169011625"; google_ad_width=300; google_ad_height=250; google_ad_format="300x250_as"; google_ad_type="text"; google_ad_channel ="8681602088"; google_color_border="FFF3DB"; google_color_bg="FFF3DB"; google_color_link="1B0431"; google_color_url="1B0431"; google_color_text="29303B"; //--/script script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js" /script /div

In this portion of the economic cycle, we typically see all sorts of causes and reasons for fault. This time, its no different...br /br /We've seen "the fall of the U.S." theories...br /h1 style="font-style: italic;"span style="font-size:78%;"a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123051100709638419.html"As if Things Weren't Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S./a/span/h1Its an interesting theory, but pretty light on the substance. This guy fails to take into consideration the actual climate in America.br /br /And of course "the death of free-market capitalism" calls...br /br /a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/12/laissezfaire_capitalism_should.html"span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;"Laissez-Faire Capitalism Should Be as Dead as Soviet Communism/span/abr /br /Again, awfully light on substance. Its so easily to rip on free-market capitalism during recessions, but people often forget about the wealth created by capitalism which probably is the reason the writer had a job to begin with. Some like to have it both ways. Its easy to tear down ...

Buy gold, silver and oil as fast as you can, you morons, or die a horrible death by inflation like the people of Zimbabwe!

Mike Shedlock of globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com writes that I - and people like me, who are expecting inflation - are a bunch of idiots, which is unfortunately true about me, and I am grateful that my Natural Mogambo Stupidity (NMS) is his only complaint about me. I only wish that others were equally restrained in their criticism, as there is apparently no end to either my personal shortcomings or their delight in pointing them out.

He writes, thankfully not mentioning me by name, “You would think that inflationistas would have caught on. But they haven’t. Nor will they. And articles about shrinking day care, collapsing retail sales, rising unemployment, record foreclosures, massive credit card defaults, bankrupt insurers, collapsing auto sales, sinking commercial real estate, plunging commodity prices, and dozens of

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Washington Is Quietly Repudiating Its Debts

Posted at: Wall Street Journal

By GERALD P. O’DRISCOLL JR. August 22, 2008; Page A15

Will the U.S. Treasury repudiate its obligations to its creditors, be they citizens or investors around the world? Most observers would answer “no” without hesitation. But Congress, with the complicity of the White House and the Fed, has arguably embarked on a stealth repudiation.

In his famous treatise, “The Wealth of Nations,” Adam Smith noted there had never been a “single instance” of sovereign debts having been repaid once “accumulated to a certain degree.” We may have reached Smith’s threshold.

Corbis

The bond markets are certainly not protecting creditors from the risk of what Smith called “pretended payment” through inflation. Nor did they do so until far into the great inflation

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