Today's Headlines

Bloomberg:
- The Broad Institute, an affiliate of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will get $400 million from Eli and Edythe Broad, the philanthropists who started the genetics laboratory.
- Wal-Mart Stores Inc.(WMT) said sales increased 3 percent in August, beating its forecast after price cuts on groceries, back-to-school supplies and consumer electronics drew shoppers.
- Boeing Co.'s(BA) largest union rejected a contract and its leaders gave the world's second-largest planemaker 48 hours to improve their offer and avert a strike that might further delay the 787 Dreamliner.
- The ruble fell to the lowest level in almost a year against the US dollar as concern about Russia's intentions in the region spurred investors to sell the country's assets. Investors have taken about $30 billion out of Russia since the start of its five-day war with Georgia on Aug. 8, according to BNP Paribas SA, with concern heightened by U.S. and European condemnation of the invasion and this week's split in nearby Ukraine's ruling coalition. ``Six weeks ago Russia was touted as a safe haven; now it's a pariah state,'' said Ian McCall, London-based director of Argo Capital Management, where he helps manage about $1 billion in emerging-market, including Russian, debt.
- Goldman Sachs Group Inc.(GS) downgraded U.S. steel stocks and reduced its price forecast for the metal in the next 16 months because of slowing economic growth in China and a strengthening U.S. dollar. The steel industry was downgraded to ``neutral'' from ``attractive,'' Goldman analysts led by Sal Tharani in New York said today in a note to investors.
- Hedge fends, pensions funds and other speculators may have had ``enough of the commodity business'' and will sell assets, driving the price of oil to below $100 a barrel, economist Dennis Gartman said. ``A lot of portfolio managers and pension funds that started owning commodities generally owned a lot of crude oil and they are finally saying, `You know what? This is not quite what it is cracked up to be,''' Gartman said in a Bloomberg Television interview in New York today. ``The markets wants to go under $100, and I think it's going to go at least there.'' Investors are ``just saying, `We've had enough of this commodity business. This is no fun. We were told this was an asset class, and it's proven not to be,''' said Gartman, editor of the Suffolk, Virginia-based Gartman Letter who correctly predicted in June that gold and other commodities would fall. ``The trend right now is down,'' said Gartman. ``There's not much one can be long on in the commodity market.''
- Crude oil fell more than $2 a barrel as the euro weakened to the lowest against the dollar this year, curbing the appeal of commodities as an inflation hedge. Oil tumbled 6.5 percent this week as the euro dropped amid signs that Europe's economy is slowing.
- The euro fell to the lowest level against the US dollar this year as European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet said the countries that use the currency are in an ``episode of weak activity.'' The 15-nation euro dropped against the yen and the pound after Luxembourg Finance Minister Jean-Claude Juncker said the currency is ``overvalued.''
- Sales of distressed Miami properties have begun, signaling a bottom for south Florida's real estate market and the end of waiting for vulture funds armed with about $30 billion to spend. The sale of 120 condominiums last month to a Philadelphia private equity firm and Related Group of Florida, a development company led by Jorge Perez, ``broke the logjam'' for investors targeting the oversupply of condos in downtown Miami, said Peter Zalewski, owner of the Condo Vultures LLC consulting firm in Bal Harbour, Florida.
- U.K. house prices plunged at the fastest annual pace in at least a quarter century in August as banks withheld finance for new homes and consumers lost confidence in the economy, HBOS Plc said.
- German factory orders unexpectedly fell in July, extending their longest-ever declining streak and increasing the likelihood that Europe's largest economy is heading for a recession.
- The European Central Bank kept interest rates at a seven-year high to fight inflation even as the euro-region economy teeters on the brink of a recession.

Wall Street Journal:
- Will Barack Obama and John McCain's picks for their running mates affect the election? I asked some leading political science professors what research on this topic revealed. Their answer: Running mates usually don't matter, but this may be an unusual election.
- Credit is mostly paralyzed, but one of the first corners of the debt market to lock up last year appears to be moving again. The amount of outstanding commercial paper -- short-term debt issued by companies to finance their operations -- has risen for the past three weeks to $1.79 trillion, its highest level since April.

The Washington Post:
- Democrats officially warned Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman on Wednesday that he could face repercussions for delivering a speech at the Republican National Convention in which he called Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama an "eloquent young man" who lacked the experience to be in the White House. Most of Lieberman's speech focused on McCain's credentials, but toward the end, he pointedly said Obama "has not reached across party lines to get anything significant done, nor has he been willing to take on powerful interest groups in the Democratic Party." Democratic leaders have considered stripping him of his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The strongest reprimand would be to strip him of all his committee assignments, which would effectively be a banishment from the Democratic caucus.

AppleInsider:
- With its competitors struggling to catch up with multi-touch technology introduced last year as part of the iPhone, Apple(AAPL) is already conceptualizing new versions of the technology that would fuse a variety of secondary inputs with today's touch-based gestures to produce more efficient data input operations.

MoneyNews.com:
- It might seem like only oil-rich foreign governments have any cash to invest these days. And they have lots, more than $2.5 trillion by a Morgan Stanley estimate. But don't count out cash closer to home. Merrill Lynch reports that total investable money right now in hedge funds has hit $156 billion, the highest since data collection began in 1992. "Hedge funds have de-leveraged and continue to increase their record cash balances, which will be a very powerful source when they decide to come back to the market," Merrill Lynch analyst Mary Ann Bartels tells Bloomberg. "The significant amount of cash on the sidelines is a contrarian bullish'' indicator for U.S. stocks, she says. The news wire service calculated that the cash horde would be nearly enough to buy General Motors, Alcoa, DuPont, Caterpillar, and American Express combined. The five companies have a combined market value of $159.9 billion.

USA Today:
- Several colleges and universities in Texas, Ohio, Maryland and New York are freezing 2008-2009 tuitions at last year's levels in an effort to make college more affordable for the nation's middle class.

Reuters:
- Commodity market regulators are probing whether energy market players are injecting false crude oil supply data into the marketplace, the Wall Street Journal said. Regulators are concerned that companies may be reporting inventory levels that benefit their own trading positions but may not be accurate, the paper said, citing people familiar with the probe.
- Vedanta Resources Ltd expects aluminium output to rise to about 500,000 tonnes in the year to March 2009, up 28 percent from about 390,000 tonnes in the previous year, a senior company official told Reuters.

Financial Times:
- Oil companies' profitability fell last year as rising costs eroded gains from the rise in oil prices, an industry study has found. The companies' return on capital from their oil and gas production fell to 19 per cent, 3.5 percentage points lower than in 2006, according to the study from IHS Herold, a research firm, and Harrison Lovegrove, a corporate finance firm owned by Standard Chartered bank.
- Too much is being made of the economic impact of the Beijing Olympics on China and the rest of Asia. China was slowing before the onset of the XXIX Olympiad and is likely to continue to slow in the year ahead. Elsewhere in Asia, a similar outcome appears to be in the offing.