Today's Headlines

Bloomberg:
- Latin America’s economic expansion may slow this year as the impact of the credit squeeze is drying up financing worldwide and a global surge in food and fuel prices stokes inflation, said Augusto de la Torre, the World Bank’s chief economist for the region.
- Goldman Sachs(GS) reported an increase in harder-to- value assets during the first quarter, exceeding those at Morgan Stanley(MS) and Lehman(LEH).
- Venezuelan bonds fell, pushing yields over US Treasuries to their widest in three days, after the government said it will nationalize Luxembourg-based Ternium SA’s local steel unit.
- Emerging-market bonds yields over US Treasuries widened for the first time in more than a week on concern slowing US economic growth will limit demand for developing nations’ exports.
- The Australian dollar may fall by as much as 10% against the yen in 2008 as economic growth cools and as the central bank has probably ended its series of rate increases for now, according to Suncorp-Metway Ltd.
- Commodities rallied the most in two weeks, with gasoline and corn reaching records on a slumping dollar and historic investment fund speculation.
- Obaidah al-Masri, a senior al-Qaeda official involved in the July 7, 2005, London bombings, is believed to have died of natural causes in the past several months in Pakistan.
- Josef Ackermann, CEO of Deutsche Bank, Says Capital Raising by Banks Shows Confidence. (video)
- NYSE Trading Volume Drops as Investors ‘Wait and See.’
- Mortgage applications in the US rose last week as purchases and refinancing increased.

Wall Street Journal:
- A major Yahoo Inc.(YHOO) shareholder said Microsoft(MSFT) “blundered” last weekend by threatening a hostile takeover at a lower price.
- The OECD is recommending that its member-nations shouldn’t use national security as an excuse for barring sovereign wealth funds from investing.
- Demand Soars for Firms That Fit Out Private Jets.
- Goldman Sachs(GS) now faces a black eye for an ill-fated investment in student-loan company First Marblehead.

NY Times:
- Study Gives High Marks to US Internet.

NY Post:
- Activist hedge fund investor Robert L. Chapman Jr. is notorious for raising trouble with companies. Now, there are questions brewing about whether Chapman’s firm is running into some problems of its own.

Schaeffers Research:
- Examining the heavy bearish sentiment in the financial media. We have never seen such an onslaught of negative magazine cover stories in all our years of tracking the market.

Financial Times:
- Paul Otellini, Intel’s(INTC) CEO, said the company plans to break into the market for mobile-phone chips, where it barely has a foothold at present.