Today's Headlines

Bloomberg:

• Davis Sees UPS(UPS) Holiday Shipments Up 7.5% From 2009: Video. Davis, speaking with Betty Liu on Bloomberg Television's "In the Loop," says the company expects to handle 430 million package shipments between Thanksgiving and Christmas, up 7.5 percent from last year.
• UBS(UBS) Criminal Charge Dropped by U.S. After Compliance With Tax-Evasion Case.
• Fed's Fisher: Policy Makers Must Be Aware of Dollar Impact. Federal Reserve officials need to be mindful of the effect their actions are having on the dollar, said Richard Fisher, president of the Fed bank of Dallas and a former deputy U.S. trade representative. “We need to be aware of the impact whatever we do has on other variables, and one of the variables is the dollar, the value of the dollar against other currencies,” Fisher said in an interview this week at Bloomberg’s headquarters in New York. The U.S. currency has slumped more than 6 percent against six major counterparts since Aug. 27, when Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said the Fed “will do all that it can” to keep the recovery going and that more securities purchases may be warranted. Fisher is one of four regional Fed presidents who have questioned the effectiveness of further easing.
• Gold Heads for Biggest Weekly Loss Since July as Dollar Gain Curbs Demand. Gold futures fell in New York, heading for the biggest weekly loss since July, as a stronger dollar boosted speculation that the precious metal’s rally to a record this month was overdone. The dollar has rallied 0.6 percent this week against a basket of six currencies, snapping five straight weeks of declines. Before today, gold dropped 4.5 percent since touching an all-time high of $1,388.10 an ounce on Oct. 14. “Gold is in the midst of a long-awaited correction,” said Frank McGhee, the head dealer at Integrated Brokerage Services in Chicago. “From a technical point, there’s really nothing between here and $1,260 for gold to hang its hat on.”
• New York Stirs Teacher Angst Over Use of Student Test Scores in Ratings. A New York City court battle over the release of performance reports for public-school teachers highlights a national debate over judging instructors by their students’ success on standardized tests. The United Federation of Teachers yesterday asked the New York Supreme Court to block release of reports that measure individual instructors’ success in boosting student scores. The union and the city agreed not to release teachers’ names until the case is heard, Jesse Levine, a New York City assistant corporation counsel, said in an interview. News organizations made freedom-of-information requests to release and publish the data, which the union says is flawed and unfair.
• H&R Block(HRB) Default Swaps Tumble After 'Panic Selling' Over Loans. Credit-default swaps on debt issued by H&R Block Inc. fell for the first time in almost two weeks as investors wagered the “panic” over soured mortgages may be overdone. The annual cost to protect the debt of Block Financial LLC, which issues all of Kansas City, Missouri-based parent H&R Block’s public corporate debt, for five years dropped 62.1 basis points to 769.8 at 12:03 p.m. in New York, according to data from CMA.
• Wilmington Trust(WL) Said to Seek Buyers, Talk With Canadian Banks. Wilmington Trust Corp., the Delaware bank founded by the du Pont family, has been contacting bigger lenders in recent weeks to gauge their interest in buying the company, said people with knowledge of the matter.
• Rare-Earth Use From BlackBerry Buzz to Prius Underscores Alarm Over Supply.
  

Wall Street Journal:

• Apple(AAPL) Reaching for the Cloud With MacBook Air and N.C. Data Center. Steve Jobs says the MacBook Air is the future of the MacBook and the future of the notebook as well. But if that’s to be the case, the machine–and Apple’s ecosystem–needs to evolve a bit more to appeal to that strata of user tethered to the high-capacity hard drives that the Air has summarily dispatched. This being Apple we’re talking about, that evolution is likely already well under way and perhaps–perhaps–being engineered at the company’s massive new North Carolina data center. With its 500,000 square feet of data center space (currently, sources tell me that Apple is considering doubling that) the facility has been built for something. And what better use to put it to than the cloud services that might completely eliminate the need for high-capacity hard drives and give the Air storage to match its performance characteristics.
• G-20 Proposal on Curbing Trade Imbalances Faces Opposition.A proposal among the Group of 20 nations to target curbs on current-account imbalances, meant to avert a "currency war," itself ran into opposition from industrial and developing nations Friday.

CNBC:

• Health-Care Law a 'Ponzi Scheme,' Will Be Killed: Corker. President Obama's health-care reform law signed earlier this year is not working and will ultimately be dismantled, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) told CNBC. “There is not a thinking person in Washington that believes the health care bill that passed will work. Not one," Corker said in a live interview. "It’s not going to work. It’s going to be dismantled." “It’s a Ponzi scheme," he added. “The financing for it absolutely will not work.” Corker believes that Democrats will help work to dismantle the law, which he said was “very damaging to our country.”
• Democrats Get Big Donations From Foreign Companies.
  

Business Insider:

• French Senate Approves Retirement Age Increase, Protests Still Raging.
• Philly Fed President Admits to Massive Conflict of Interest at the Fed in Suit Against Bank of America(BAC).
  

Zero Hedge:

• Unsatisfied by Frontrunning the Fed - Presenting the Most Likely Short Squeeze Candidates.
• BLS Reports Jobs Losses by State in September More Than Double 95K Loss Reported in NFP Report.
  

Benzinga:

• BlackRock(BLK) Looking for Partner to Buy Bank of America(BAC). In what could potentially be the biggest news of 2010, Charlie Gasparino has just said on Fox Business Network that Blackrock (BLK) CEO Larry Fink has begun looking for a partner to buy 35% of Bank of America (BAC). Blackrock currently owns around 5.3% of Bank of America In an interesting note, Bank of America also owns 34% of Blackrock, thanks to its acquisition of Merrill Lynch.

Real Clear World:

• Europe Spending Itself to Death. Nicolas Sarkozy's problems in France are a foretaste of fundamental challenges to Western democracies: the inability to govern with growing sovereign debt.

Politico:

• Barack Obama Struggles to Win Women Back. Despite 22 months of such gender-specific policy moves — and a recent push to energize disenchanted women voters — Obama has steadily lost ground with women, the Democratic Party’s biggest constituency. Their lack of enthusiasm has imperiled a crop of 2010 congressional candidates, complicated Obama’s own path to victory in 2012 and resulted in the president's making the kind of explicit, eleventh-hour appeal to women voters that he made here Thursday.
• Juan William: NPR Was 'Vindictive' Juan Williams said Friday morning that NPR fired him this week because the radio network had become “vindictive” over his appearances on Fox News.

Rasmussen Reports:

• Daily Presidential Tracking Poll. The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 27% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Forty-four percent (44%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -17 (see trends).

Kathimerini:

• Moody's Investors Service, Fitch Ratings Services and Standard & Poor's will send teams to Athens in November to assess Greece's economy.