Today's Headlines

Bloomberg:
- Federal Reserve policy makers last month predicted the U.S. economy will contract through the middle of 2009, with some prepared to cut interest rates further in response, according to a record of their meeting. ``Some suggested that additional policy easing could well be appropriate at future meetings,'' the Fed said in minutes of the Oct. 28-29 Federal Open Market Committee gathering released today. ``In any event, the Committee agreed to take whatever steps were necessary to support the recovery.''

- Representative Henry Waxman won the first round of voting in his bid to take the chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee away from Representative John Dingell. The Democratic Steering Committee voted today 25 to 22 for Waxman over Dingell, said Rosa DeLauro, the chairwoman of the steering committee.

- US fuel demand fell 5.2% in the first 10 months of this year, the biggest drop since 1981, the American Petroleum Institute said. Deliveries of distillate fuel, a category that includes heating oil and diesel, averaged 3.93 million barrels a day during the period, down 6.7%. Jet-fuel consumption average 1.55 million barrels a day, a 4.5% decline. Implied demand for residential fuel averaged 591,000 barrels a day during the 10-month period, down 19% from a year earlier, according to the report. The US produced 4.9 million barrels a day of crude oil through October, down 2.6% from a year earlier. Production for the period was down 49% from the peak of 9.6 million barrels a day in 1970.

Wall Street Journal:

- The exchange-traded-fund industry is stepping up efforts to capture the crown jewel of the mutual-fund business: lucrative 401(k) retirement plans.

NY Times:
- Responding to the economic downturn, Wal-Mart Stores Inc.(WMT) plans to give more than 90 million pounds of fresh food annually to the nation’s largest nonprofit organization addressing hunger, Feeding America.

BBC:

- Opec members have lost about $700bn because of falling crude prices, the oil cartel's president Chakib Khelil said in an interview. Oil prices have fallen 60% from their $147 peak, prompting speculation Opec will cut output again to boost prices. However, speaking to Algerian newspaper El Khabar, Mr Khelil said Opec was unlikely to make a decision this month.

Slate:

- Harvard’s Investment Errors. That’s where America’s greatest university is investing its endowment? The 13-F shows Harvard with some 231 positions worth nearly $2.9 billion, highly concentrated in popped macroeconomic bubble plays. The top 10 holdings, which Bloomberg helpfully breaks out, account for 70 percent of the value of the disclosed holdings. Virtually all of them performed rather poorly in the third quarter, and virtually all of them have slid in the weeks since Sept. 30. The biggest position disclosed—all amounts and dollar values are as of Sept. 30—was $463 million in the iShares MSCI Emerging Market fund. As the six-month chart shows, that fund's off nearly 60 percent from this summer and down by about one-third from the end of September. The top 10 included $232 million in the iShares MSCI Brazil Index Fund, off about 40 percent since the end of September; about $51 million in the iPATH MSCI India Index, off about one-third since the end of September; and $158 million in the iShares FTSE/Xinhua China Index, off about 30 percent since the end of September. For good measure, top 10 holdings also included index funds that were plays on South Africa's commodity-based economy and on the perennially emerging market of Mexico. Even the best, most experienced, and highly regarded long-term investors can get suckered into new-era thinking and make investments that turn out to be highly risky bets. The 13-F shows that the managers running this Harvard portfolio were huge believers in the decoupling theory—i.e., that emerging markets would continue to thrive even as the United States stalled—and in the notion that commodities would keep booming.

Reuters:
- Nigerian Oil Minister Odein Ajumogobia said on Wednesday that Nigeria was not pushing for a further OPEC production cut but that a meeting in Cairo this month would consider all options to address falling prices. "We are in the process of sending our budget to the national assembly based on an (oil) benchmark of $45 ... If you cut the volume then it is going to affect your budget, so obviously we are not advocating for a cut because it is not in our interest," Ajumogobia told Reuters in the capital Abuja.

Interfax:

- Russia’s inflation rate in the year through Nov. 17 reached 12%, citing a government official. The rate is higher than it was in the same period last year, when inflation reached 10%.

CNBC TV-18:
- Steel Authority of India Ltd. has cut prices by as much as 40% from peak levels, citing Chairman S.K. Roongta. The company has cut prices by as much as 20% this month.