Producing economically sensitive goods like washing machines, refrigerators, electric water heaters and gas cookers is going to be a tough business in the next few quarters. Egyptian Olympic group will face some tough times. Indeed, its third-quarter profit already fell 60 percent, mostly on cost increases on its marketing and salary side. Still, things may not be that bad as it has just announced it will buy back up to 3 million shares representing 5 percent of the company's capital. The shares in jumped 17.46 percent on the news!

by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /br /blockquoteIn view of Greece's EMU membership, the availability of external financing is not a concern, but the correction of cumulating indebtedness could weigh appreciably on growth going forward. While the risk of transmitting vulnerabilities to the euro area is very small reflecting Greece’s small relative size, large persistent current account deficits would increase the vulnerabilities to a reversal in market sentiment, leading to a corrective retrenchment of private sector balance-sheets in the face of rising indebtedness, and a possible appreciable rise in the cost of funding over time. These developments would have significant negative implications for growth.br /a href="http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.cfm?sk=21937.0"Greece: 2007 Article IV Consultation/a - IMF Staff Report/blockquotepbr /br //ppa href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/SUEsR712NQI/AAAAAAAALuU/VGFiqyCyzBw/s1600-h/bond+spreads+2.png"img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5278548924887872770" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; HEIGHT: 170px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/SUEsR712NQI/AAAAAAAALuU/VGFiqyCyzBw/s320/bond+spreads+2.png" border="0" //abr /The above quited paragraph from the IMF is a very good example of what used to be ...

This week traditional Christmas shopping season is starting with Black Friday for retailers and with Cyber Monday for online sellers. Many of them already started with promotions and discounts. You can find out a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/27955155" target="_blank"strategy for online retailers/a in latest CNBC article.br /br /Today I would like to post on StockWeb also some deals worth of your interest. I have short listed couple of magazines related to business, investing and world of finance. All these magazines you can get for free. For each I put information about availability because some of them are for US readers only.br /br /* * *br /br /For me span style="font-weight: bold;"BusinessWeek/span is number one among business and financial magazines. I like especially December special edition with the projection for the global stock markets for the next year. Also with analysis and trends for coming year.br /br /a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" ...

Global markets are soaring today on renewed bailout efforts. But Irwin Greenstein says its probably not a good idea to jump back in to these emerging markets just yet. As always, China will be the bellwether for a sustainable recovery. And commodity prices will remain crucial for resource-rich nations.

“I woke up this morning and everything was green - not the trees but the gains on my emerging market portfolio.”

Up, up, up, with the exception of the iShares MSCI Turkey Invest Mkt Index (NYSE:TUR), which was down 5.67%.

Some of the highlights include the HANG SENG INDEX (^HSI) up 12.82%. The RTSI INDEX (RTS.RS) jumped 18.2% after Putin approved nearly $10 billion in bailout loans - most of them going to his billionaire pals who made extremely bad bets on the markets.

The JAKARTA COMPOSITE INDEX (^JKSE) increased 5.41%. The TSEC weighted index

...

China’s economy is slowing. But the country is still investing heavily in the future says Irwin Greenstein. He says the post-Olympic malaise will soon be replaced with massive construction and infrastructure projects that will last decades. Irwin thinks these are the trends that long-term investors cannot afford to ignore.

If you read the Wall Street Journal or The Economist dire warnings are now being issued about China’s economic growth.

While China is experiencing “negative growth” you get the feeling that somehow the slowdown is taken out of context - giving investors a somewhat distorted view of the current opportunity.

The bad news started when China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced that economic growth Q3 was 9% year-on-year, down from 10.1% in the previous three months. China’s economic growth could actually drop below 10% for the first time since 2002.

Still, to put that into perspective, the U.S. GDP for Q2 gained 2.8%, up from

...

Next week, China will release its official GDP statistics for Q3 and I expect it to be down from the 10.1% in Q2. That doesn’t mean that the Chinese economy is falling. Consider this report of Beijing cement factories. “Of the 28 cement factories in Beijing, 27 were shut
down during the Olympics. The only one left open was Beijing Cement
Factory, which survived because it was also the city’s biggest solid
waste treatment company.”

“However, it was also asked to stop one of its
production lines the day before the Games’ opening ceremony to ensure
good air quality.”

That same pattern happened to thousands of businesses in Beijing and those temporary shutdowns are why Chinese GDP will be down in Q3,

Yesterday we blogged about the death of hockey star Alexei Cherepanov. Today an ESPN columnist makes a call for greater transparency in Russia's top league, the KHL: Many hockey people who have been to Russia in recent years -- whether they're players, GMs, scouts or agents -- describe a certain Wild West element to the country's society, and its hockey business in particular. The KHL, with its deep pockets and sometimes suspect way of doing business, has done little to disabuse observers of that notion. League officials acknowledged that Radulov was under contract to the Predators before he returned to Russia to play in the KHL this season, but they did nothing to stop him. Avangard Omsk offered Stanley Cup-winning coach Bob Hartley a contract to become its bench boss, then turned around and offered the job to former Canadian Olympic assistant Wayne Fleming. Now, with many troubling questions ...

It's been a bumpy ride for solar stocks recently.

The industry received a boost when clean energy tax credits were added to the $700 bailout bill to help its passage from Congress. But fears of falling demand and oversupply have weighed on solar stocks. The Claymore/MAC Global Solar Index ETF (NYSE:TAN) fell 35% in the first eight trading days of October.

William Patalon III, however, says new mapping technology and advances that have made solar power more eco-friendly will boost solar stocks in the long run.

Gold soared from the beginning of London trading through to the second hour of the New York session on Monday, pushing as high as $875, fell into the noon hour, then rolled up and down through the Globex, finishing at $856.90, up $22.10 from Friday. Overnight, gold is sharply higher.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed below 10,000 today for the first time in four years. The sell-off has been particularly brutal among stocks levered to commodities and the global growth story, with most names down over 60% since oil peaked in July, and many hitting multi-year lows. This summer’s surge in resources was mainly fueled by the thesis that the ranks of the world’s middle class are swelling in the developing world, and that these newly affluent people will hunger for materials. If you believe that this macro long-term trend remains intact, and that the current financial crisis amounts to little more than a speed bump, then it is a good idea to compile a shopping list of cyclical stocks that could bounce back hard during a broader market turnaround.

There were several indications that today’s intraday lows could mark at least a short-term bottom. The

...