Word: year-ago
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...line as they face a showdown with frugal shoppers. "Inventories are in good shape, but sales may suffer more than we thought as retailers are forced to blink on promotions to drive traffic," says Jeff Black, director at Barclays Capital, who expects holiday sales to be flat with year-ago levels. (See 20 tech gadgets...
Investors are skittish because China's 7.1% second-quarter GDP expansion was due in part to a burst of bank lending, which was up 31% in May and 34% in June from year-ago levels. To date, cumulative loans outstanding have topped $1.1 trillion, far higher than the government's $735 billion target for the year. Most of the money is aimed at funding infrastructure projects under Beijing's two-year, $585 billion stimulus package. But according to government researchers, about $170 billion in bank loans were channeled into the stock market from January to May, which partly explains...
...long-running boom in the construction of new apartments and houses across urban China ended abruptly last year and is now unwinding. Deflation is evident in Beijing and Shanghai in particular, where real estate developers and brokers report prices will likely be down 15% to 20% this year. Prices in the once booming city of Shenzhen are down more than 18% from year-ago levels. Nationwide, according to a recent forecast by economists at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, housing prices in China may decline 10% to 15% this year, as the overall economy struggles amidst the global financial...
...officials of the Community Foundation Silicon Valley, where contributions this year have been running 50% behind the year-ago pace. The foundation suffered major setbacks when the Web portal AltaVista, which had pledged 25,000 IPO shares, postponed the offering last April and then abandoned it altogether in January in the midst of an ice-cold market and following several rounds of layoffs...
...know if the profit cycle is really turning. We can hope that the current shenanigans ultimately represent nothing more than the fleeting worries of people who watch for such things. Indeed, technology bellwether Intel, among the first to report, said last week that it not only beat its year-ago fourth-quarter results but topped analysts' estimates as well...