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Pastimes : Clown-Free Zone... sorry, no clowns allowed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Giordano Bruno who wrote (365363)	4/14/2008 4:24:37 PM
From: Real Man	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 436258

April 14 (Bloomberg) -- An ``awful'' start to the first- quarter U.S. earnings season is a ``harbinger of things to come'' that will push stocks lower, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. ``Early signs are awful,'' a team led by New York-based David Kostin, Goldman's U.S. investment strategist, wrote in a note today. ``We expect generally disappointing results and a swath of lowered profit guidance that will drive the Standard & Poor's 500 Index lower in coming weeks.'' The S&P 500, the benchmark index for American equities, dropped 2.7 percent last week after General Electric Co. said the credit-market crisis caused an unexpected earnings decline, while slowing economic growth and rising energy prices eroded profit at United Parcel Service Inc. and Alcoa Inc. Futures on the S&P 500 lost 0.1 percent at 10:50 a.m. in London. Analysts surveyed by Bloomberg have cut their projections for first-quarter earnings at S&P 500 companies every week since Jan. 4. They now predict a 12.3 percent drop, compared with an estimate for an increase of 4.7 percent at the start of 2008. Alcoa marked the start of the earnings reporting season on April 7 when it became the first company in the Dow Jones Industrial Average to post results. Johnson & Johnson, the world's largest maker of consumer health-care products, is scheduled to report earnings tomorrow, while International Business Machines Corp., the biggest computer-services company, will follow a day later. Merrill Lynch & Co. will report April 17, while Citigroup Inc. will post results April 18. Merrill and Citigroup will reveal at least $15 billion more of subprime mortgage writedowns this week, the Sunday Times of London reported yesterday, citing analysts it didn't identify...