Posted by Katharine Crnko
For Marketplace Morning Report, Wednesday May 4, 2011
Here are today’s top headlines from the Marketplace Morning Report and from around the web.
A couple of employment gauges out this morning point to continued slow growth in the nation’s job market. Private companies added fewer jobs than expected in April. And consultants Challenger, Gray and Christmas said today 36,000 job layoffs were announced last month. The lowest number of planned layoffs this year.
The U.S. service sector, which employs nearly 90 percent of the nation’s work force, grew for the 17th straight month in April, though at the slowest pace since August.
European leaders today said Portugal could get more than $100 billion in loans from its neighbors.
AOL said first quarter profit tanked. Blamed on fewer ads and less money coming in from subscriptions.
Applications for home mortgages rose last week, helped by refinancing demand as interest rates fell for the third week in a row, an industry group said Wednesday.
BMW outshone its rivals with a sharp increase in first quarter sales, fueled by demand for the German group’s cars from China and the United States.
The highly anticipated initial public offering of Renren, one of China’s largest social networks, will be delayed until Wednesday, sources familiar with the deal said Tuesday.
The country’s largest cable company — Comcast — which now owns NBC Universal made almost $1 billion last quarter. That’s up 9 percent from the same period last year. Comcast says it lost 39,000 video subscribers but it added almost 500,000 Internet customers.
Sony today said it’s hired outside help to clean up its video game networks. That’s after a breach exposed personal data of more than 100 million account users.
With warmer weather comes more outdoor corporate camaraderie lke the company softball team. The Wall Street Journal’s sports columnist Jason Gay has some do’s and don’ts for those who to take to the diamond. Keep your special, expensive bat at home. Is your ego that big? Maybe don’t bunt. And for goodness sakes, don’t keep any statistics. Really, nobody cares. Except maybe the boss. Who you let slide into home for that game winning score.
You can read the rest of today’s stories from the Marketplace Morning Report here.
Here’s what we played…
- Something to Die For — The SoundsBuy
- Skin to Skin — Sway MachineryBuy
- How in the World — Family Force Five Buy
- Bohemian Like You — Dandy WarholsBuy
- Red Right Hand — Nick Cave and the Bad SeedsBuy
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