Only the Strong Retailers will Survive from Bloggingstocks.com

Only strong retailers will survive
Posted Nov 20th 2008 5:20PM by Lita EpsteinFiled under: Wal-Mart (WMT), Target Corp. (TGT), Best Buy (BBY), Circuit City Stores (CC)
While you probably won't see many more doors closing before the end of the year, expect to see weak retailers facing liquidations if the holiday season is as bad as many predict it will be. We've already seen 22 retailers file for bankruptcy including Steve & Barry's, Circuit City and Linens 'n Things. Some may survive bankruptcy reorganization and live to see another day. Other retailers may not be able to find the funds to refinance and will be forced to liquidate and close.Locally, near me in Florida, only one Circuit City has closed and you don't see much evidence of the bankruptcy. Shelves are not stocked as well and advertising is down, but you'd only know that if you watch the stores closely.The top retailers, such as Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) and Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) will survive easily, but many second and third tier retailers will be struggling to make it. Standard & Poors downgraded the credit rating for 53 retailers already this year, which is higher than the total number of downgrades for all of 2007, and it expects to downgrade more before year end. Deloitte Research Chief Economist Carl Steidtmann told Business Week, "It's been a long time since we've seen an environment as challenging as this."Target (NYSE: TGT), Wal-Mart's key national competitor, announced Monday it will begin aggressive price cuts to increase the number of bargains available this holiday season. Its apparel and home products led Target's third-quarter earnings to fall 24 percent. Fourth-quarter earnings will likely be lower as well.Business Week also expected regional department stores, such as Bon-Ton, which bought 142 stores from Saks two years ago, and Dillard's, which has already closed 30 stories, to face significant financial hardship as every retailer fights to be the low-end "go to" for shoppers. While these retailers may succeed in selling inventory, will there be enough profit to make it through another year? Small local retailers will likely face even bigger problems as they try to compete with the big boys on price. Lita Epstein has written more than 25 books including "Reading Financial Reports for Dummies."

Yahoo News Video

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The World's 100 Most Powerful Women

Edited by Mary Ellen Egan and Chana R. Schoenberger 08.27.08, 6:00 PM ET
http://www.forbes.com/leadership/2008/08/27/most-powerful-women-biz-powerwomen08-cz_me_cs_0827women_land.html
Our annual ranking of the most powerful women in the world measures "power" as a composite of public profile--calculated using press mentions--and financial heft. The economic component of the ranking considers job title and past career accomplishments, as well as the amount of money the woman controls.

A chief executive "controls" the revenue of her business, for instance, while a head of state gets the country's gross domestic product. The raw numbers are modified to allow comparisons across financial realms.

For the third year running Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, is the world's most powerful woman. U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton (overall rank: 28) is the woman with the highest public profile, resulting from the intense media scrutiny of her failed presidential bid.

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The World's Hottest Job Markets

Tom Van Riper, 06.18.07, 1:00 PM ET
In Pictures: The World's 10 Hottest Job Markets
http://www.forbes.com/2007/06/18/manpower-employment-economy-biz-cx_tvr_0618globaljobs.html


To live in one of the world's hottest job markets, you may need to move to South America.

At least that's the case into the fall of 2007, as Argentina and Peru join traditional economic powers like the U.S., Canada and Hong Kong among the countries with the most robust job outlooks for the third quarter of the year.

While both countries have a long way to go to escape the ranks of the world's poor, they're booming, in recovery from the downtrodden 1990s. Freer trade, private sector investment in the mining and telecom industries, plus rising commodity prices that have boosted export dollars, have begun to show signs of paying off. Peru's economy grew 6.5% last year, while Argentina's shot up 8.5%.

In Pictures: The World's 10 Hottest Job Markets

"A lot of Latin America is starting to find its feet," says Jeffrey Joerres, chief executive of global placement firm Manpower (nyse: MAN - news - people ), which recently studied employment trends around the globe. He and others caution that the economic run in that region is still based more on a somewhat inevitable recovery than on a lot of structural change.

Bart van Ark, executive director for economic research at The Conference Board, says Latin America still needs to develop more labor-oriented industries to complement the capital-intensive telecom and mining sectors.

"We'll have to see if this is sustainable," he says of the recent boom.

Manpower's quarterly Global Employment Outlook, which surveyed over 50,000 employers across 27 countries, ranked Peru No. 2 and Argentina No. 4 in expected job growth for the July-September quarter. The firm scored each country by subtracting the percentage of companies that said they plan to cut back on workers from the percentage that said they plan to add them. A country where 75% of employers plan to add to their workforces and 25% plan to cut them, for example, scores +50%. Peru rated +48%, while Argentina weighed in at +38%.

Explaining the rest of the Top 10 list is pretty simple: Free markets and minimal government interference mean more jobs. Of the 10 countries with brightest employment outlooks, six also show up on the Top 10 on the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom, a guide the free market think tank uses to recognize those countries that adhere to relatively lower taxes and a light government touch to running the economy.

The six: Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, the U.S., New Zealand and Canada. All are also among the seven countries rated highest by the World Bank for "ease of doing business."

Meantime, Europe is mostly absent from Manpower's list of job-creating countries. Norway, benefiting from high oil prices, is the only representative. The continent is lagging in the all-important services sector, though Germany has managed to shake its "Old Europe" tag a bit to become a bigger exporter in the past year. Germany's 14% score is a big jump from the 1% it registered last year. Ireland, riding a strong tech wave in recent years, is due to cool off some in 2007 even as job growth remains positive.

While oil and metals prices can carry an economy for a little while, sustained growth invariably comes down to structural improvements in technology and productivity, asserts van Ark.

And it's Asia, sleepy for so long outside of Japan, where most of the progress is being made in those areas, with Vietnam and the Philippines joining China as converts to the notion that increased efficiency through technology is key to boosting wealth and jobs.

Facebook Traffic Up 50% Over Last Year; myYearbook on the Rise - Search Marketing News Blog - Search Engine Watch (SEW)

Facebook Traffic Up 50% Over Last Year; myYearbook on the Rise - Search Marketing News Blog - Search Engine Watch (SEW): "September 26, 2008
Facebook Traffic Up 50% Over Last Year; myYearbook on the Rise
Facebook's market share is up 50% year-over-year, according to data released by Hitwise. myYearbook.com saw a 256% growth, propelling it into the third spot for most visited social network sites in the United States in August 2008. Still, they only had 1.65% of the total share.
MySpace lost market share, 10% to be exact. But it still holds the number one spot at 67.54% of the market.
Here are the charts:



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