Lowest growth rate in 5 months….

“A gauge of manufacturing in New York State tumbled much more than expected in May to its lowest level in five months, while prices paid rose sharply, the New York Federal Reserve said in a report on Monday.

The New York Fed’s “Empire State” general business conditions index fell to 11.88 from 21.70 in April. It was the lowest level since December 2010 and well below economists’ expectations of 19.85.

The prices paid index jumped to 69.89 from 57.69, the highest level since July 2008. Roughly 70 percent of respondents reported price increases and none reported declines, the report said.

Employment gauges showed some strength. The index for the number of employees rose to 24.73 from 23.08 the month before. It was the highest level since May 2004. The average employee workweek index jumped to 23.66 from 10.26.

The survey of manufacturing plants in the state is one of the earliest monthly guideposts to U.S. factory conditions.”

Full report

“Just announced on the Treasury department blog…

Today, the United States has reached the statutory debt limit. Secretary Geithner sent the following letter to Congress this morning alerting them to actions that have be taken to create additional headroom under the debt limit so that Treasury can continue funding obligations made by Congresses past and present. The Secretary declared a “debt issuance suspension period” for the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund, permitting Treasury to redeem a portion of existing Treasury securities held by that fund as investments and suspend issuance of new Treasury securities to that fund as investments. He also suspended the daily reinvestment of Treasury securities held as investments by the Government Securities Investment Fund of the Federal Employees’ Retirement System Thrift Savings Plan. For more information on these measures, please read this FAQ.

Last Friday, Secretary Geithner also responded to an inquiry from Senator Bennet regarding the fiscal and economic consequences of failing to increase the debt limit. That letter can be found here.

Secretary Geithner continues to urge Congress to raise the debt limit in a timely manner in order to uphold the full faith and credit of the United States.

Read the full blog post >”

Full article

Full article

Upgrades

AAV – Advantage Oil and Gas upgraded to Buy from Hold at TD Newcrest

ENOC – EnerNOC upgraded to Outperform from Neutral at Credit Suisse

F – Ford Motor upgraded to Buy from Hold at Citigroup

AEO – American Eagle upgraded to Positive from Neutral at Susquehanna

AMR – AMR and Jetblue (JBLU) upgraded to Overweight from Neutral at JP Morgan

ASCA – Ameristar Casinos and MGM Resorts (MGM) upgraded to Buy from Hold at Jefferies

IPSU – Imperial Sugar upgraded to Buy at BWS Financial

SLE – Sara Lee upgraded to Overweight from Neutral at JP Morgan

PETM – PETsMART ests raised at Stifel Nicolaus ahead of earnings on 5/18

CRM – Salesforce.com Q1 earnings preview; expects slight upside to consensus revenue; inline EPS – RBC Capital Mkts

SUN – Sunoco: Refinery outages sink 1Q11 results; coke spin-off could boost valuation – Oppenheimer

Downgrades

HPQ – Hewlett-Packard: Expect modest upside to results due to tech demand & FX – Collins Stewart

VTAL – Vital Images downgraded to Accumulate at Craig Hallum

TKC – Turkcell downgraded to Sell from Neutral at Goldman

Gapping Up

DMED +5.4%, MGM +0.7%, SD +1.6%, CPIX +6.5%, PRM +54.1%, CISG +21.6%, AMR +2.7%, CONM +17%, SIGA +14.9%, DECK +1.5%, JBLU +2.4%

Gapping Down

NYX -7.6%, ARMH -2.8%, NOK -2.1%, RICK -1.9%,

In Play

On the Wires

“Economists are dialing back their expectations for U.S. economic growth this year.

A survey from the National Association for Business Economics predicts GDP will grow 2.8 percent this year — down from the group’s February prediction that it would grow 3.3 percent. Their outlook for consumer spending and the housing market also weakened, in part because they expect oil prices to remain above $100 a barrel through 2012.

In a survey that the NABE releases Monday, a panel of 41 economists also said they “remain highly concerned” about the growing federal deficit, and said that growth in the first three months of the year had been weaker than expected….”

Full article

Selloff Scares Away Few Bulls

Hedge Funds Mostly Maintain Bets on Rising Commodities Prices After Plunge

NEW YORK—Hedge funds and other investors still have large bets that commodity prices will continue to rise, even after one of the steepest selloffs in years.

Money managers cut their net-long position in crude-oil futures by 10% on the New York Mercantile Exchange during the week ended Tuesday, according to data released Friday by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The decline left speculative investors holding 233,569 more long contracts that anticipate rising prices than short contracts wagering on a decline. A week earlier, these traders held 258,668 more long contracts.

View Full Image

ReutersTraders work in the crude-oil and natural-gas options pit on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange in April.

Copper saw some of the steepest declines in money managers’ bets on rising prices, with the category cutting their net-long position in the metal by 59% to 6,076 contracts, from 14,942 a week earlier. Traders shed 6,247 bets on higher prices and added 2,619 bets on lower prices as copper futures tumbled below $4 a pound.

The CFTC, which regulates futures and other derivatives, provides weekly reports on outstanding commodity futures contracts that are closely watched for clues about speculators’ positions.

Read the rest of the article in full here

“(Reuters) – Research In Motion Ltd has recalled about 1,000 of its Playbook tablets which were shipped with a flawed operating system build that could pose problems during the initial set-up, technology blog Engadget and several other media channels reported.

In a statement to CrackBerry.com, the Blackberry maker said the majority of the affected devices were still in the distribution channel and had not reached customers.

The company is working to replace the affected tablets, it said.

The Engadget blog reported on Saturday that the faulty batch was shipped to office supply chain Staples Inc.”

Full article

Chart

“PARIS – The lawyer for a woman who says she was sexually assaulted by Dominique Strauss-Kahn nine years ago says she wants to file a legal complaint against the International Monetary Fund chief.

Lawyer David Koubbi says Tristane Banon did not file suit earlier due to “pressures” she face over the alleged 2002 sexual assault by Strauss-Kahn and was dissuaded by her own mother, a regional Socialist official.

The IMF chief — a possible Socialist contender in France’s 2012 presidential race — is in custody in New York after being accused of a weekend sexual assault against a hotel maid.

Koubbi told RTL radio Monday he is likely to file suit for Banon now because “she knows she’ll be heard and she knows she’ll be taken seriously.”

Full article

“Number 2 US home improvement chain Lowe’s reported a weaker-than-expected quarterly profit, hurt by a slow start to the spring selling season.

Colder-than-usual weather and high precipitation rates kept many shoppers away in many parts of the United States, Lowe’s [LOW 25.76   -0.22  (-0.85%)   ] main market.

Both Lowe’s and larger rival Home Depot [HD 37.01   -0.28  (-0.75%)   ] are also up against strong numbers from last year, when a first-time homebuyer tax credit and “cash for appliances” program helped boost demand.

Home Depot is due to report its results on Tuesday.”

Full report

“Nasdaq OMX Group and IntercontinentalExchange are withdrawing their bid for rival exchange NYSE Euronext, saying it became clear they would not win approval for the deal from the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust division.”

Full article

“Petroleo Brasileiro SA (PETR4), the world’s fifth-largest oil company by market value, said first-quarter profit beat analyst estimates on higher crude output and prices.

Net income rose to 10.99 billion reais ($6.72 billion), or 84 centavos a share, from 7.73 billion reais, or 88 centavos, in the year earlier period, Rio de Janeiro-based Petrobras said May 13 in a regulatory filing. Sales gained about 9 percent to 54.8 billion reais. The company, which sold $70 billion of shares in September, was expected to post per share profit of 74 centavos, the median estimate of four analysts surveyed by Bloomberg News.

Oil and natural gas output gained 3 percent after the company added offshore production platforms in the Campos and Santos basins, while crude traded in New York climbed 20 percent in the quarter to average $94.60 a barrel. The company also posted a financial gain of about 2.7 billion reais, helped by the appreciation of the Brazilian real, which reduced the value of the company’s dollar-denominated debt. Per share profit dropped after the company sold new shares in September.

“The stock has underperformed the market, so it could bounce back,” Eric Conrads, who helps manage $12 billion in emerging-market stocks at ING Investment Management in New York, said in a May 13 telephone interview. “The stock has been deeply oversold relative to the Brazilian context.”

Full article

“Nine of the 125 gates at Louisiana’s Morganza floodway opened yesterday, allowing the muddyMississippi River to pour into the Atchafalaya River basin as part of the Army Corps of Engineers strategy to save Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

With the gates open, the National Weather Service is predicting near-record flooding for towns along the Atchafalaya and surrounding wetlands. The Mississippi was threatening to reach to a flow rate of 1.62 million cubic feet per second unless water was diverted, putting in peril the levees at Baton Rouge, home to an estimated 229,000 people and industrial areas that include an Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) refinery, the company’s second largest U.S. facility.

“With the opening of the Morganza, we are expecting some significant rises on the Atchafalaya,” said Fred Zeigler, a weather service meteorologist in Slidell, Louisiana. “It will be the second-highest crest at Butte La Rose.”

Butte La Rose, Louisiana, is a small town at a bend on the Atchafalaya about 40 miles west of Baton Rouge. Last night residents came to the river bank to watch the rising waters, while a work gang of convicts wearing black and white striped uniforms filled sandbags under the watchful eye of armed guards.

The Atchafalaya is expected to crest at Butte La Rose on May 24 at 27 feet, Zeigler said. The record of 27.28 feet was set there on May 23, 1973. When the river rises to 22 feet, shipping will become difficult because of the twists and the turns, Zeigler said. When it reaches 26 feet, the gauge used to measure it will be underwater, he said.”

Full article

10 yr @ 15.58%

2 yr @ 24.95%

Full article

“For three pennies an hour, hackers can rent Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)’s servers to wage cyber attacks such as the one that crippled Sony Corp. (6758)’s PlayStation Network and led to the second-largest online data breach in U.S. history.

A hacker used Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud, or EC2, service to attack Sony’s online entertainment systems last month, a person with knowledge of the matter said May 13. The intruder, who used a bogus name to set up an account that’s now disabled, didn’t hack into Amazon’s servers, the person said.

The incident helps illustrate the dilemma facing Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos: Amazon’s cloud-computing service is as cheap and convenient for hackers as it is for customers ranging from Netflix Inc. (NFLX) to Eli Lilly & Co. (LLY) Last month’s attack on Sony compromised more than 100 million customer accounts, the largest data breach in the U.S. since intruders stole credit and debit card numbers from Heartland Payment Systems in 2009.

“Anyone can go get an Amazon account and use it anonymously,” said Pete Malcolm, chief executive officer of Abiquo Inc., a Redwood City, California-based company that helps customers manage data internally and through cloud computing. “If they have computers in their back bedroom they are much easier to trace than if they are on Amazon’s Web Services.”

Full article

“Sales of gold coins are on track for the best month in a year amid the worst commodities rout since 2008, a sign that bullion’s longest bull market in nine decades has further to run, if history is a guide.

The U.S. Mint sold 85,000 ounces of American Eagle coins since May 1 as the Standard & Poor’s GSCI Index of 24 raw materials fell 9.9 percent. The last time sales reached that level, bullion rose 21 percent in the next year. Gold will advance 17 percent to a record $1,750 an ounce by Dec. 31 and keep gaining in 2012, the median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of 31 analysts, traders and investors shows.

Investors in exchange-traded products backed by the metal accumulated $98 billion of gold as prices rose 74 percent since U.S. borrowing costs fell to near zero in December 2008 and the Dollar Index dropped 6.2 percent. With the gauge, a measure against six currencies, forecast to weaken through 2012 and the Federal Reserve expected to keep rates on hold through the fourth quarter, the rally may not reverse any time soon.”

Full article

“The Swiss franc appreciated against all 16 of its most-traded peers as investors sought the safest assets amid speculation a meeting of finance ministers will struggle to resolve the euro area’s debt crisis.

The franc rose from its weakest level against the dollar since April 20. The yen strengthened as equities and crude oil declined, while U.S. Treasuries advanced. New Zealand’s dollar fell for a second day as investors sold higher-yielding assets.

“You could argue that the Swiss franc is going up because there’s greater concern about the euro periphery,” said Daragh Maher, deputy head of global foreign exchange strategy at Credit Agricole CIB in London. “There doesn’t seem to be much conviction to euro buying. People are still very nervous.”

Full article

Just your everyday liquidation sale in Dubai:

Stock cars come under the hammer for UAE racing fans

Race fans dreaming of owning their own 620 horsepower stock car have a chance to fulfil their fantasy.

All the equipment from the defunct Speedcar racing series, an attempt to bring Nascar-style racing to Dubai’s Autodrome, are on the auction block. The sale includes spare engines, tools, telemetry systems and shipping containers, in addition to 27 cars capable of speeds of about 225km an hour.

Full article and video here