Posted by Katharine Crnko
For Marketplace Morning Report, Thursday June 9, 2011
Here are today’s top headlines from the Marketplace Morning Report and from around the web.
The stock market has it closed down every day for a week. That’s the longest losing streak one index has seen in two years.
Weekly unemployment claims are only slightly higher than the previous week — up by about 1,000. But that still means they’re stuck at a higher than comfortable level.
Interested in buying a barrel of crude oil? Well, in New York, it’ll set you back more than $101 this morning. The price is about $1 higher, mostly the result of a chaotic OPEC meeting yesterday in Vienna. The oil cartel rejected international calls to pump more oil — and in fact the summit ended so badly, some called it the ‘worst OPEC meeting ever.’ Gasoline futures for July have lost a penny, slipping to $2.98 a gallon. Don’t get your hopes up — that’s not going to show up at the pump in our lifetimes.
The Department of Agriculture told us all the natural disasters that have been going on in the nation’s midsection will impact food prices. U.S. corn supplies are at their tightest levels in 15 years because of devastating floods.
The Bank of England has kept its key interest rate at an all-time low of 0.5 percent as the muted economic recovery in Britain continues to trump concerns over rising inflation.
The European Central Bank is in “strong vigilance” mode over inflation pressures, ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet said on Thursday, using code words to indicate an interest rate increase is probably only a month away.
Don’t bother stopping me if this sounds familiar: Hackers have breached online security at — insert big corporation’s name here. This time, the names, account numbers and email addresses of hundreds of thousands of Citibank credit card customers were compromised in early May.
Now to Colorado where today the ski industry association said resorts in the state saw 2.6 percent more visitors this season than they did last season. In fact the state’s ski areas are on track to pass the 12 million skier mark for the third time ever.
Well if you’re looking for French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde today you can find her on Twitter. She’s taking questions a day before the nominations deadline in the race to run the International Monetary Fund.
To Northampton, Massachusetts where a guy got a letter from Bank of America that was definitely worth saving. The letter said his home would be foreclosed on if he didn’t pay up immediately. The amount he owed, according to the letter? Zero dollars, zero cents. After the local TV station WWLP did a story on this Bank of America told the man he could stay in his home. And they sent him a $150 check for the trouble.
You can read the rest of today’s stories from the Marketplace Morning Report here.
Here are the songs we played:
- The Stranger — RJD2Buy
- No Dice — BeirutBuy
- In the Morning — Natural Self Buy
- California — DJ QuikBuy
- Young Blood — The Naked and FamousBuy
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