Sears is planning to offer a buyer protection program for its home appliances to help consumers who lose their jobs during the recession. The program covers appliance purchases of more than $399 made on a Sears card by cardholders who lose their jobs. The…

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Sears Holdings to start buyer protection program

LONDON (Reuters) – Oil prices gave away early gains on Tuesday, easing toward $71 a barrel ahead of U.S. inventory data expected to show a rise in oil product stocks.

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Oil eases towards $71 ahead of inventory data

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Is $70 Oil the New Normal?

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Clean Diesel is Coming

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Business Exchange: Housing Market

Home price declines are stabilizing, but delinquent mortgages and foreclosures are getting worse despite efforts to modify unaffordable loans

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Good News, Bad News in Housing

Japan’s jobless rate rose to a five-and-a-half year high in May, the government said Tuesday, possibly delaying a recovery for the world’s second-largest economy even as manufacturers enjoy a nascent rebound. The unemployment rate jumped to 5.2 percent from 5…

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Global IT spending will plunge 10.6%, a new report says. But BW’s Rob Hof notes that may actually accelerate the recovery next year

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Awful 2009 Tech Spending Will Speed Rebound

Worldwide spending on information technology equipment and services will plunge 10.6% in U.S. dollars, according to a new report from Forrester Research. That’s way down from the market research firm’s forecast at the start of the year, which predicted only a 3% drop.

The U.S. will fare relatively better than the rest of the world, with spending there forecast to fall 5.1%. According to Forrester, purchases of computer equipment will be down 13.5% for the year, communications equipment down 12.4%, software down 8.2% and IT consulting and outsourcing down 8.6%.

But the precipitous drop in first-quarter tech spending will mean a faster-than-expected recovery starting later this year, according to analyst Andrew Bartels (and flagged in a mid-April story in BusinessWeek):

While Q1 2009 saw a scary drop in purchases in the US tech market, ironically that is good news for the long run and we expect to see a stronger rebound sooner. The big drops are not precursors to further declines; rather, we think they are evidence of a temporary pause in US tech purchases, which we expect to start recovering in Q4 as businesses realize that they overreacted in the first quarter. We also expect that tech markets in Europe and Asia will start to recover in the first half of 2010.

It appears that investors also are already anticipating this. The tech-driven Nasdaq is up 17% so far this year, compared with less than a 3% rise in the S&P 500.

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Awful 2009 Tech Spending Will Lead to Faster Rebound

Oil prices rose to near $72 a barrel Tuesday after briefly jumping above $73 as a weakening U.S. dollar and attacks on oil installations in Nigeria helped push prices to eight-month highs. Analysts also said prices were boosted by speculative trades and…

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Oil up to near $72 on dollar fall, Nigeria attack

Oil prices rose to near $72 a barrel Tuesday after briefly jumping above $73 as a weakening U.S. dollar and attacks on oil installations in Nigeria helped push prices to eight-month highs.

Oil nears $72 on dollar fall, Nigeria attack

The home and commercial security business that The Brink’s Co. spun off last fall is being renamed Broadview Security, a move that entails increasing advertising spending by as much as $120 million, the company said Tuesday. Irving, Texas-based Broadview…

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Few investments performed better than oil during 2009′s second quarter. Black gold is up 44% for the second quarter and has traded near $70 for the past four weeks.

But a consensus appears to have emerged that oil is overpriced and ready for a fall. The International Energy Agency released a report on June 29 showing weak demand. Furthermore, while fundamentals may be determining the direction of the price, speculation is responsible for oil’s enormous price swings. In its Perspectives Quarterly, Credit Agricole says that $70 is unsustainable. “Looking at fundamentals, however, the recent rebound in prices appears overdone,” the French bank says. It expects prices to return to $60 per barrel in the third quarter before increasing to $68 per barrel in the fourth quarter.

And the Wall Street Journal attacked the notion of $70 oil in two separate blogs, “$70 Oil, but Where’s the Demand?” and “Is the Oil Bubble Back?”

British bank Barclays has a different take. In a new report, Commodity Refiner: Children of the Revolution, Barclays claims the fall in oil to below $40 a barrel was the aberration, and the recent rise in oil prices is a “return to normalcy.” Look no further than the price of December 2015 futures contracts, which have traded above $66.77 since September 2008, despite market turmoil and the complete collapse of spot oil to under $40 a barrel.

“Even at the lowest point for macroeconomic expectations, and for oil demand forecasts and sentiment, the idea that a sub-$70 per barrel price could be sustainable did not seemingly gain any significant traction,” the report says.

Barclays attributes oil’s renewed vigor to the fact that the world economy didn’t implode, an event that may have been priced into the market. (Sorry, no link.) It also says that the declines in oil production caused by the collapse in oil prices has yet to hit the economy. When it does, it will make up for the lack of demand cited by the IEA.

If Barclays is right, it’s time to stop assigning blame for $70 oil and learn to live with it.

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$70 Oil: The New Normal?

2008 ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE PHOTOApple chief executive Steve Jobs is back at work after a six-month medical leave. With the intense — some would say obsessive — scrutiny of Steve Jobs and his health, what is sometimes overlooked is the…

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Apple CEO Steve Jobs returns to a business as usual