Today's Headlines

Bloomberg:

• U.S. Consumer Spending Cools as Food, Fuel Costs Climb. Consumer spending cooled more than forecast in January as rising food and fuel prices caused Americans to cut back on post-holiday visits to malls and restaurants. Purchases rose 0.2 percent, the smallest gain since June, as winter storms may have also discouraged shoppers, according to figures from the Commerce Department today in Washington.
• Business Activity in U.S. Grew at Fastest Pace in 20 Years. Businesses in the U.S. unexpectedly grew in February at the fastest pace in two decades, indicating manufacturing remains at the forefront of the recovery. The Institute for Supply Management-Chicago Inc. said today its business barometer rose to 71.2 this month, the highest level since July 1988, from 68.8 in January. The Chicago group’s production gauge rose to 78.2 from January’s reading of 73.7. The gauge of new orders climbed to 75.9 from 75.7. The employment measure fell to 59.8 from 64.1 the prior month.
• Oman Youth Protests Enter a Third Night as Sultan Promises to Create Jobs. Hundreds of Omani protesters gathered in the city of Sohar for a third night, demanding that the government open talks on their demands for more jobs, higher pay and more representative political institutions. Khaled Maqbuli, a leader of the protest, called on the demonstrators at a roundabout in the center of Sohar, north of the capital, Muscat, to stay peaceful and avoid confrontation with the army and the police.
• Oil Fluctuates as Saudis Offer Supplies, Unrest Spreads to Oman. Crude oil fluctuated as Saudi Arabia offered to make up for supplies lost because of unrest in Libya and as Mideast tensions spread to Oman, the region’s largest oil producer outside of OPEC. Futures slipped as much as 1.2 percent in New York after Khalid Al-Falih, the Saudi Arabian Oil Co.’s chief executive officer, said the kingdom is ready to compensate for any shortfall in crude supply. Two demonstrators were killed and several wounded in clashes with police yesterday in Oman, according to hospital and government officials. “The threat to supply overall doesn’t look as dangerous as it did last week,” said Tim Evans, an energy analyst at Citi Futures Perspective in New York. “Even the protests in Oman aside, events in Libya seem to be moving steadily in one direction, with oil production apparently not dropping further and some exports being loaded.” Crude oil for April delivery declined 12 cents to $97.76 a barrel at 11:34 a.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
• The cost of hiring capesize ships to haul iron ore and coal dropped for a 10th day on a lack of cargo and excess vessels. Capesize rents fell 1.8% to $4,567 a day, the lowest since Dec. 9, 2008.
• Ford(F) is Most Improved Automaker on Consumer Reports List. Ford Motor Co., the only major U.S. automaker that didn’t receive a government bailout, improved the most since last year in Consumer Reports’s annual automaker rankings, bolstered by reliability for resale value.
• Fed's Dudley Says Growth Not Reason to 'Reverse' Stimulus. Federal Reserve Bank of New York President William Dudley said the “considerably brighter” economic outlook isn’t yet reason for the central bank to withdraw its record monetary stimulus. “We provided additional monetary policy stimulus via the asset purchase program in order to help ensure the recovery did regain momentum,” Dudley said today in a speech in New York. “A stronger recovery with more rapid progress toward our dual mandate objectives is what we have been seeking. This is welcome and not a reason to reverse course.”
• Pent-Up Demand Lifts U.S. Economic Recovery Outlook, Business Survey Shows. U.S. companies expect the economy to grow faster than previously estimated as demand from consumers, businesses and other countries picks up, a survey showed. Gross domestic product in the world’s largest economy will expand at a 3.3 percent pace in 2011, up from the 2.6 percent rate forecast in November, according to a survey by the National Association for Business Economics issued today in Washington. Consumer spending, business investment and exports will also increase more than previously projected. “Pretty much across the board there has been a better view with regard to the economic recovery,” Bill Strauss, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, who analyzed the results, said in an interview. “The consumer sector is coming back, and we’re still looking at pretty good numbers coming from the business sector.”
• Capitulating Bears Push Short Sales to Lowest in Three Years. The biggest Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rally in more than five decades is forcing stock market bears to abandon short sales, cutting them to the lowest level since 2007 last month. Shares borrowed and sold to profit from declines dropped four straight months and represented 3.3 percent of all stock in January, according to data compiled by NYSE Euronext. Pessimists are giving up after missing the 95 percent rally in the S&P 500 spurred by the fastest earnings growth since 1994. The monthly decrease comes as individuals added $17.6 billion to U.S. mutual funds this year after withdrawing money since April. While short sales rose 2.8 percent in the two weeks ended Feb. 15, January’s low may foreshadow slower gains in equities as the pool of new investors shrinks, according to Doug Burtnick of Aberdeen, Scotland-based Aberdeen Asset Management Plc. To Laszlo Birinyi of Birinyi Associates Inc. in Westport, Connecticut, levels haven’t fallen enough to reverse gains or stop equities from climbing as the economy expands.
• Iran Arrests Opposition Leaders After Calls for Protest. Iran’s opposition leaders Mehdi Karrubi and Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who had been under forced seclusion at home, were transferred to a Tehran prison, as supporters prepared to hold a rally tomorrow, the opposition Kaleme website said. Mousavi and Karrubi, along with their wives, were “arrested and taken to Heshmatiyeh prison in Tehran,” Kaleme said on its website, which cited neighbors for some of the details.

Wall Street Journal:

• Pro-Gadhafi Forces Attempt Raids on East. Libya's government moved Monday to recapture key sections of the country controlled by rebel forces, launching attacks in two coastal cities to the east of the capital Tripoli, according to witnesses and rebel army commanders. Forces loyal to Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi attempted to bomb Benghazi, Libya's second-largest city and a stronghold of opposition to the Gadhafi regime, with airplanes, according to an opposition commander there.
• Tech to the Rescue. An early look at three technologies that may provide more energy in the future.
• Walker Issues Ultimatum to Democrats. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker issued an ultimatum to the 14 state Senate Democrats blocking a vote on a bill restricting workers' collective-bargaining rights, saying the state will lose its chance to refinance $165 million in bonds if the bill isn't passed by Tuesday.
• Google's(GOOG) Search Cleanup Has Big Effect. Google Inc.'s move last week to lower the search rankings of websites that the company said offer little useful information appears to be having a dramatic impact, according to firms that study search-engine data. Many websites that previously ranked highly in searches for certain keywords on Google dropped sharply following the change in the company's search algorithms, the firms found.
• Google(GOOG) Executive Sees Online Display Ad Market Reaching $100 Billion Over Next Few Years. The online display advertising market could top $100 billion over the next several years and represents "a pretty enormous opportunity" for Internet search giant Google Inc. (GOOG), a company executive said Monday.

CNBC.com:

• Fed May Need to Take Break From Easing: Bullard. With the central bank about halfway through its purchases of $600 billion in Treasurys, Bullard said the Fed should consider a return to more normalized monetary policy. "Policy is a continuous process," he said. "I would see it as possibly finishing the program a little bit shy of where we intended initially then go on pause for a while, let more information come in on the economy, see how things develop. "If things continue to go as well as I think they will in 2011 then we can start the process of getting the balance sheet back to normal and getting interest rates up there eventually."
• No Inflation? That's Not What Food Prices Are Saying.
  

Business Insider:

• Why Americans Should Fear The Middle East And North Africa Revolutions.
• Prisoner Swap in Pakistan Rejected.
• Deutsche Bank Just Took Out The Hatchet to Its Economic Outlook.
  
  One of the biggest bulls on the street, Deutsche Bank's Joe LaVorgna just sliced his economic outlook.
• The BlackBerry PlayBook is a Huge Disappointment So Far.
• WikiLeaks Goes After Saudi Royal Family. Wikileaks just released a motherload of info on the taboo subject of Saudi Arabian royal rents.
  

Huffington Post:

• Obama Puts Single Payer and Public Option Back on the Table. At the National Governors Association, President Obama just threw his weight behind a bi-partisan effort in the US Senate to allow states to innovate with health reform, including adopting a public insurance system or single payer health care system by 2013 instead of 2017. The governors embraced the state innovations waiver proposal, since conservative states want to weed back the federal health reform and states like California might like to push ahead with public insurance options or single payer health care systems. The idea is to let states meet federal targets anyway they want to, rather than how the federal government prescribes, by 2013 rather than the current 2017 deadline.
  

Apple Insider:

• Apple's(AAPL) to Launch $500 Joint Venture Small Business Support Plan. Last week, AppleInsider exclusively reported that Apple had scheduled a secretive meeting Sunday for retail employees. Details emerged later that week, revealing that the meeting was called to prepare employees for the imminent announcement of a new enterprise service plan, dubbed Joint Venture. According to people in attendance, the meeting's agenda on Sunday did indeed involve an internal unveiling of the new Joint Venture priority service plan. Sources have told AppleInsider that the plan will cost around $500 a year and will be made available to businesses when purchasing a new Mac. Up to 5 systems will be covered by the plan, though additional systems may be added for $99 a year.
  

Forbes:

• Apple(AAPL) Plots Move to Expand iPhone's Market Share. In a research note this morning, Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi reports on a meeting he had last week with Apple COO Tim Cook, CFO Peter Oppenheimer and VP of Internet Services Eddy Cue. His high level takeaway is that the executives “projected a very confident tone,” and that Apple is focused on “the right things,” in particular expanding the market for the iPhone and capitalizing on “explosive” tablet demand. Here are some key points from Sacconaghi’s report:

CNN Money:

• SEC Casts Wide Net in Private Stock Trading Probe. Now the SEC is taking a closer look at so-called "pre-IPO" trading in Facebook and other private companies to see if securities laws were broken. An ongoing investigation is probing not just the exchanges themselves, but also several red-hot social media companies and at least three investment funds that specialize in buying up their shares.

Real Clear Politics:

• Why Middle America is Rejecting Big Government.
  

Rasmussen Reports:

• 58% Support Government Shutdown Until Spending Cuts Are Agreed Upon.

Reuters:

• China's Unipec Not Buying More Crude to Replace Libyan Supply. Unipec, the trading arm of top Asian refiner Sinopec, has so far declined Saudi Aramco's offer of more Saudi crude oil to replace Libyan crude supplies, trading sources said on Monday. The Chinese company is not buying any more crude oil to replace Libyan supplies, they said. "There is no shortage of crude overall in Sinopec," said one source. "We have the ability to adjust sweet and sour crudes among our refineries."
• SEC Top Attorney Didn't Recuse Himself on Madoff. The top attorney for the U.S. securities regulator was advised not to recuse himself from handling Bernard Madoff matters for the agency even though his family's estate had invested with the swindler.

Independent:

• Al Qaida Tries to Exploit Unrest. Al Qaida has attempted to exploit the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia with a recorded message urging people to create Islamic states. Osama bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahri appeared to have made the audio tape between the January 14 fall of Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and before the February 11 overthrow of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak. Al-Zawahri urged Egyptians and Tunisians to keep up their protests and push out the interim governments that continue in place in both nations. The wave of popular protests in both countries was led by mainly secular youths calling for greater democracy and their success appears to have caught Osama bin Laden's terror network off guard. Al-Zawahri tried to depict the uprisings as aiming to set up Islamic governments.

Xinhua:

• China will take "firm" measures to curb "excessive and rapid" rise in property prices, citing Jiang Weixin, minister of Housing and Urban-Rural Development. Jiang said the country will continue to increase housing supply, and draw up measures to stabilize the property market in the medium and long term.