“The rebound in U.S. auto sales shows few signs of slowing down according to a new report that projects new vehicle registrations will top 15 million this year. The auto research firm Polk estimates new vehicle registrations will increase by 900,000 and total 15.3 million for the year.

“Provided we don’t see the economy slow down, we should see relatively strong auto sales growth this year,” said Anthony Pratt, director of forecasting for the Americas at Polk.

(Read More: Sticker Shock: New Car Prices Are Going Up)

Polk tracks new vehicle registrations, which tend to come in just short of auto industry sales….”

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“U.S. sales of warplanes, anti-missile systems and other costly weapons to China’s and North Korea’s neighbors appear set for significant growth amid regional security jitters.

Strengthening treaty allies and other security partners is central to the White House’s “pivot” toward a Pacific region jolted by maritime territorial disputes in China’s case, and missile and nuclear programs, in North Korea’s.

The pivot “will result in growing opportunities for our industry to help equip our friends,” said Fred Downey, vice president for national security at the Aerospace Industries Association, a trade group that includes top U.S. arms makers.

Demand for big-ticket U.S. weapons is expected to stay strong for at least the next few years, the trade group said in a 2012 year-end review and forecast released in December….”

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“In a display of confidence about its fourth calendar quarter sales, Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F) yesterday announced that its Ford Focus nameplate is the best-selling car in the world, with more than 737,000 new vehicle registrations through September. The company’s Ford Fiesta nameplate is on track to be the fifth best-selling car globally, with more than 520,000 sales and the venerable Ford F-150 pickup truck is number four, with more than 576,000 sales.”

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“(Reuters) – U.S. media giant The Tribune Co, owner of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, said late on Sunday it will emerge from bankruptcy on December 31, ending four years ofChapter 11 reorganization.

Chicago-based Tribune said it will emerge from the Chapter 11 process with a portfolio of profitable assets that will include eight major daily newspapers and 23 TV stations. The company will also have a new board of directors.

“Tribune will emerge as a dynamic multi-media company with a great mix of profitable assets, powerful brands in major markets, sufficient liquidity for operations and investments and significantly less debt,” Eddy Hartenstein, Tribune’s chief executive officer, said in an email to employees. “In short, Tribune is far stronger than it was when we began the Chapter 11 process.”

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“SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc has agreed to withdraw patent claims against a new Samsungphone with a high-end display after Samsung said it was not offering to sell the product in the crucial U.S. market.

Apple disclosed the agreement in a filing on Friday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California.

Last month Apple asked to add the Galaxy S III Mini and other Samsung products, including several tablet models, to its wide-ranging patent litigation against Samsung.

In response, Samsung said the Galaxy S III Mini was not available for sale in the United States and should not be included in the case.

Apple won a $1.05 billion verdict against Samsung earlier this year, but has failed to secure a permanent sales ban against several, mostly older Samsung models. The patents Apple is asserting against the Galaxy S III Mini are separate from those that went to trial…”

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“NEW YORK (Reuters) – One of hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen’s largest outside investors, private equity firm Blackstone Group LP, appears inclined to keep its money with his SAC Capital Advisors, even as the U.S. government scrutinizes the fund in its ongoing insider trading probe.

Three sources said the asset management arm of Blackstone , which has $550 million invested with SAC Capital, is in no rush to redeem money from the Stamford, Connecticut-based hedge fund. Blackstone has had at least three discussions with the $14 billion hedge fund’s executives about the insider trading investigation and talked to its own investors, which include state pension funds, endowments and wealthy individuals.

Seven current and former SAC employees have been charged or implicated in the insider trading probe into hedge funds and their sources of trading tips, and the firm itself – along with the 56-year-old Cohen – has been drawing renewed scrutiny.

“I am unaware of any representation by Blackstone that they are pulling out,” said Robert Klausner, a Florida attorney who represents a pension fund from Louisiana that is an investor in a Blackstone fund with money at SAC Capital.

A Blackstone spokesman and an SAC Capital spokesman both declined to comment.

Outside investors in SAC Capital, who can redeem four times a year, have until the middle of February to decide whether to pull out some money. So officials at Blackstone, which accounts for about 9 percent of the outside money invested in SAC Capital, could still change their view on the hedge fund in the event of a new development in the insider trading investigation…”

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“LONDON (Reuters) – Mike Lynch, the founder of the software firm sold to Hewlett-Packard last year in a deal tainted by accusations of accounting fraud, said he would defend the company’s accounts toU.S. Federal investigators.

HP confirmed in a filing late on Thursday that the U.S. Department of Justice was investigatingAutonomy’s books.

The PC and printer maker bought the British company for $11 billion last year to lead its push into the more profitable software sector.

Autonomy did not deliver the growth expected, resulting in Lynch’s departure earlier this year.

But worse was to come last month when HP wrote off some $5 billion of the company’s value and accused its former management of accounting improprieties that inflated its value.

The Silicon Valley company said it had passed information from a whistleblower to the U.S. Department of Justice, the SEC and Britain’s Serious Fraud Office.

“On November 21, 2012, representatives of the U.S. Department of Justice advised HP that they had opened an investigation relating to Autonomy,” it said in the filing.

“HP is cooperating with the three investigating agencies.”

Lynch launched a robust defense of his track record almost immediately after HP made the accusations…”

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“Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) is buying shares of Japanese exporters and banks as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s new government promises to do more to end deflation and weaken the yen.

The investment bank’s asset management unit in Japan is buying shares of the nation’s machinery and electronics exporters, financial firms and electricity producers, according to Hiroyuki Ito, Tokyo-based head of equity investment at Goldman Sachs Asset Management Co., which oversees about $716 billion globally. Goldman Sachs started increasing its holdings in October in anticipation that elections would be called, he said. The Liberal Democratic Partytook power in a Dec. 16 poll…”

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“Customer experience analytics company ForeSee released its eighth annual holiday online satisfaction report this morning, which rates the top e-retailer websites in 2012. This year’s newly expanded list puts Amazon.com again at the top, while Apple, Dell, and JCPenney.com all slid down in customer rankings.

Previously, ForeSee measured data on the top 40 retailers, but this year, the firm expanded its list to the top 100. As before, the retailer rankings are generated by customer surveys. To compile this year’s list, 24,000 customer surveys were collected between Thanksgiving and Christmas, ForeSee says.

Amazon again scored 88 on a 100-point scale – the same record-breaking number it saw last year. In fact, the online retailer has now had the highest scores in ForeSee’s index for eight years in a row. ForeSee says this is partially due to Amazon’s appeal and the variety of merchandise it offers – but that’s almost too simple an explanation. It’s not just the quality, variety or size of Amazon’s inventory at play here, its the end-to-end shopping experience that Amazon provides on web, mobile, tablet – and even offline. Customers can scans the barcodes of in-store merchandise, then search for a better deal on Amazon, where often they’ll find one. With Amazon’s one-click checkout, fast shipping, no-hassle returns, value-added Prime membership accounts, and more, it’s not surprising to find that Amazon remains the high bar that others aspire to reach.

“At this point, Amazon has been dominant for so long and has such a history of focusing on the customer, its hard to imagine anyone else coming close,” noted Larry Freed, ForeSee president and CEO in a statement. “Companies should emulate Amazon’s focus on the customer, which is clearly linked to superior revenues over the years.”

In response the survey’s finding, Amazon today also issued an announcement, saying that holiday 2012 was its biggest holiday season ever with over 26.5 million items ordered worldwide on its peak day, which is also a record-breaking 306 items per second. Also on its peak day, Amazon’s worldwide fulfillment network shipped over 15.6 million units across all product categories….”

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“(Reuters) – Ford Motor Co plans to invest more than $773 million on new equipment and capacity expansions across six U.S. manufacturing plants in southeast Michigan.

The plan is part of its commitment to invest $6.2 billion in U.S. plants by 2015 as part of the agreement reached in October 2011 with the United Auto Workers union, the automaker said on Thursday.

Ford said the investments will create 2,350 hourly jobs and allow it to retain another 3,240 hourly jobs. The new jobs are part of the 12,000 Ford previously said it would add or retain in the United States by 2015 under the UAW deal.

Some of the new jobs will earn entry-level wages, which start at just under $16 an hour. Traditional nonskilled UAW workers at Ford earn an average of just over $28. This year, Ford has added more than 6,500 hourly jobs and most of those were filled by people hired at the entry-level pay rate.

Over the next six months, Ford said it will upgrade stamping operations at Michigan Assembly Plantand Dearborn Stamping Plant, as well as finish work at Flat Rock Assembly Plant to build the new Fusion sedan. Some Fusion production was shifted from Mexico under the four-year pact with the UAW.

The work will include $59.4 million to expand the stamping press line at Michigan Assembly, $305 million for plant modernization and new equipment at Dearborn Stamping, and $161 million for new equipment in Flat Rock….”

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“(Reuters) – Marvell Technology Group Ltd said on Thursday it will try to void a $1.17 billion damages award imposed by a federal jury that found the chipmaker had infringed two patents held by Carnegie Mellon University.

In a statement, the company said it will seek to overturn Wednesday’s verdict in post-trial proceedings in the U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh. It said if necessary, it will take its case to the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington

Marvell said it has not determined the financial impact, if any, on operating results for its fiscal fourth quarter, which ends on February 2, 2013. Shares of the company fell 1.5 percent in premarket trading.”

“Toyota Motor Corp. (7203), Asia’s biggest automaker, will take a $1.1 billion charge to settle U.S. consumer claims that the value of their vehicles diminished because of recalls related to unintended acceleration.

The settlement, pending approval from a judge in federal court in Santa Ana, California, will cover costs such as cash payments to customers, Toyota said in a statement yesterday. The deal is valued at $1.2 billion to $1.4 billion, a record in the U.S. in terms of financial scale and number of vehicles, according to Seattle-based law firm Hagens Berman, which represented plaintiffs….”

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A, AVY, BP, CONN, CFI, THO, ORCL, FB, GM, YHOO, YUM,

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“Dec. 26 (Bloomberg) — Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investors Service are cutting corporate debt ratings at the fastest pace since 2009 as a global economic slowdown and record borrowing erode credit quality.

The ratio of ratings downgrades to upgrades worldwide climbed to 1.85 this year from 1.23 in 2011, according to S&P data. PSA Peugeot Citroen, Europe’s second-largest carmaker, was cut three times by Moody’s since March to speculative grade. Fort Worth, Texas-based RadioShack Corp. was lowered four steps this year by S&P to seven levels below investment grade. Defaults rose to 80 issuers from 52 in 2011, according to S&P.

Europe’s second recession in four years and slowing global economic growth are helping to push a measure of corporate debt to earnings to a three-year high, Barclays Plc data show. Companies from the neediest to the most creditworthy sold unprecedented amounts of debt at record-low yields in 2012 as the Federal Reserve held interest rates at almost zero for a fourth year in an effort to boost the U.S. economy.

“We’re going to have an elevated level of negative outlooks,” Diane Vazza, head of S&P’s global fixed-income research, said in a telephone interview. “The companies that we’re seeing with downgrade pressure are speculative-grade companies….”

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“TOKYO (Reuters) – Toyota Motor Corp expects its global production under the Toyota and Lexusbrands to hit 8.7 million vehicles in 2013, nearly the same as the 8.74 million vehicles it expects to have produced in 2012, the Japanese automaker said on Wednesday.

Global sales of Toyota and Lexus brands are expected to be at 8.9 million vehicles in 2013, up 2.5 percent from the sales expected this year.

Group-wide, Toyota expects to produce 9.94 million vehicles and sell 9.91 million vehicles in 2013. The group-wide forecasts include figures at Daihatsu Motor Co and Hino Motors Ltd .

For 2012, Toyota expects its group-wide production to be 9.92 million vehicles globally, up 26 percent from a year ago, as it recovers from a huge earthquake in Japan and Thai floods that took place in 2011.

It sees its group-wide global sales for 2012 to be 9.7 million vehicles, up 22 percent.

(Reporting by Yoko Kubota; Editing by Matt Driskill)”