Daily Highlights: 3.17.10

• Asian stocks, commodity prices rise on Fed rate pledge, BOJ lending expansion.
• Bank of Japan doubles credit program to $222B, holds interest rate.
• BoJ loosens monetary policy, increasing low-interest loans available to the money market.
• India may create sovereign wealth fund to help state entities to acquire overseas energy assets.
• OPEC Ministers poised to keep output steady with Oil over $80/bbl.
• World Bank raised its forecast for China's growth this year to 9.5%.
• AAR Corp beats by $0.01, posts Q3 EPS of $0.36. Revs fell 8.6% to $309.6M.
• Batista's OSX slashes IPO price 40%, cuts share sale size to 3.1M.
• CIT Group loses $1B in Q4, excluding a huge one-time reorganization benefit.
• Google's China advertising agents demand compensation in event of pullout.
• Hartford Financial selling $3.05B in securities in plan to repay $3.4B from federal bailout.
• Honda recalls 412,000 Odyssey vans, Element wagons to repair 'soft' brakes.
• India's Bharti Airtel in talks with banks for $8.5B to help it buy most of Zain’s African assets.
• MDU Resources to purchase Green River Basin production assets for $113M.
• PepsiCo to remove full-calorie sweetened drinks from schools in 200 countries by 2012.
• Reliance Industries in talks with Atlas Energy to invest in latter's shale assets.
• San Miguel to raise $1B selling stakes in its food, packaging & liquor businesses to fund growth and acquisitions.
• Simon Property Group is readying a sweetened takeover bid for General Growth Properties.
• UniCredit's Q4 net falls 27% on rising provisions against bad loans.
• VirnetX wins case against Microsoft, gets $106M in compensation.

Economic Calendar: Data on PPI, Crude Inventories to be released today.

Earnings Calendar: ATU, AXAS, COMS, CWCO, DNE, IHS, LUB, MLHR, NKE, PATK.

RECENT RATING ACTIONS
SUNTRUST BANKS INC (STI)
HEXCEL CORP (HXL)
AMR CORP (AMR)
LTD BRANDS INC (LTD)
TRINITY INDUSTRIES INC (TRN)
REYNOLDS AMERICAN INC (RAI)
NORTHROP GRUMMAN CORP (NOC)
XL CAPITAL LTD (XL)
CAPITAL ONE FINANCIAL CORP (COF)
PALL CORP (PLL)
ACCO BRANDS CORP (ABD)
BOSTON SCIENTIFIC CORP (BSX)

Data provided by Egan-Jones Ratings and Analytics

Comments

[Quantum Noise]

Tyler, I would put Jon Stewart's monologue from last night right up there.

[Wynn]

+1

http://www.thedailyshow.com/

[RobotTrader]

Market is getting stronger, breadth seems to be surging higher every day.

Breakout City.....

[mark456]

ucvhost is a leading web site hosting service provider that is known to provide reliable and affordable hosting packages to customers. The company believes in providing absolute and superior control to the customer as well as complete security and flexibility through its many packages. cheap vps Moreover, the company provides technical support as well as customer service 24x7, in order to enable its customers to easily upgrade their software, install it or even solve their problems. ucvhost offers the following different packages to its customers