Entries Tagged 'finance' ↓

SMITHFIELD, Va. – Meat processor Smithfield Foods returned to a profit in the third quarter, partly due to strength in its packaged meats business and higher sales overseas.

Smithfield, like many meat companies, has been gradually recovering from a mix of high feed prices, low demand and industry consolidation.

Earnings were $37.3 million, or 22 cents per share, for the period ended Jan. 31. That compares with a loss of $105 business

NEW YORK – A hotel has opened on the edge of ground zero, and executives say the view it offers on the World Trade Center site rebuilding is a selling point.

The World Center Hotel is still under construction on some floors but began taking reservations last month. Its Web site features photographs of a memorial and the construction.

The hotel offers some rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows that open directly onto the work site. Guests and members will have access to the restaurant patio with views of giant cranes, jackhammers and metal scaffolding auto loan rates.

Australian tourist Josh Rowlands says he would like to stay at a hotel with a view of the rebuilding, especially because it’s so hard to see into the pit from the street.

But German tourist Michael Meindorfer says he thinks staying there would be too sad.

Ground zero hotel wants to attract WTC tourists

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BERLIN — As protesters upset with sharp cuts in Greece’s budget clashed with police in Athens on Friday, talks here between Greek and German leaders ended with Germany making no public offers of financial support.

In an appearance following their meeting, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, praised Greece’s latest austerity measures as an “inordinately important step,” and the Greek prime minister, George A. Papandreou, defended the package — which has provoked outrage at home — as critical to stabilizing his country’s finances.

“We had to take difficult decisions, but these decisions were necessary if we are to lead our country out of the crisis,” he said. He added that he had not asked Germany for financial support.

In the Greek capital, meanwhile, strikes hit schools, hospitals and public transportation and police used tear gas on the rioters in Athens as Parliament adopted its latest austerity package. Seven police officers were injured in the protests, among the most violent since Greece’s financial crisis hit, and at least five demonstrators were arrested.

The oversubscribed sale of nearly $7 billion in bonds on Thursday gave the Greek government much-needed breathing room in its scramble for new loans, and also took pressure off Mrs. Merkel to make a firm commitment to help Greece out of its fiscal predicament.

The two countries have been locked in an increasingly bitter war of words fought through the news media and lower-ranking politicians over Greece’s debt problems and the expectation that taxpayers from Germany, Europe’s largest economy, would bail them out. The dispute has exposed a gap between the declarations of solidarity in Europe and the nationalist sentiments that still rule public opinion.

While the Greek government is struggling to convince markets to help it bridge its financing gap, there is plenty at stake for Germany as well. With $43.6 billion in loans, German banks have the third-highest exposure to Greece. Deutsche Bank’s chief executive, Josef Ackermann, even flew to Athens last week to meet with Mr. Papandreou and other senior officials, sparking rumors a deal with the Germans was imminent.

A bailout of Greece would be far less expensive than the potential fallout from a chain reaction a debt crises leading to larger countries with budget woes, like Spain and Italy. But Mrs. Merkel, known at home for her patience and often described by friends and foes alike as a consummate political poker player, has stuck to platitudes, generalities and lectures that the Greeks must do their “own homework.”

“So far she’s kept her cards hidden, which I think is smart,” said Michael Stürmer, the chief correspondent for the German newspaper Die Welt. “In principle, her tactic is to hold herself in reserve, hold Germany in reserve.”

Even before Mr. Papandreou arrived in Berlin Friday, the German economy minister, Rainer Brüderle, had a stark message for him.

“The German government does not intend to give one cent,” Mr. Brüderle told reporters here in the capital.

An interview with Mr. Papandreou published Friday in the German daily the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ahead of his visit, aimed to calm public sentiment in Germany.

“We have not asked the German taxpayers to rescue us, to pay for our retirements and vacations,” Mr. Papandreou said. “We are not asking for money. What we need is the support of the E.U. and our European partners so that we can receive credit from the market at better terms inferred heaters.” Relations between the two countries have taken a sour turn in recent weeks as German news media outlets accused the Greeks of corruption, tax evasion and falsifying their budget numbers to join the euro zone. Greek politicians in turn have asked for reparations for damage inflicted by Nazi occupiers during World War II.

Germany has the most fiscal flexibility among European Union members to help Greece, but public opposition to any assistance has been vehement. The debate has crystallized broader German misgivings about the European project into a public outcry.

“It’s like a mosaic and the Greece crisis is the last stone,” said Wolfgang Nowak, a former senior adviser to Mrs. Merkel’s predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, and head of Deutsche Bank’s International Forum. “More and more there is the feeling that French farmers, Polish farmers, Spanish infrastructure, that Europe is not a community but something held together by a German pay check.”

While protesters have not taken to the streets of Berlin in large numbers the way they have in Athens, Mrs. Merkel faces rising dissatisfaction at home. A new poll Friday found nearly three-quarters of Germans critical of her government’s performance since she was reelected last September.

With a crucial election in Germany’s largest state, North Rhine-Westphalia, barely two months away, Mrs. Merkel would be taking an enormous political risk by pledging support to Greece, which is seen as having a bloated public sector and excessively generous benefits, even by European standards.

“There would be no understanding in the population or in her own party if Germany would go it alone with help for Greece,” said Jürgen Falter, a political science professor at the University of Mainz.

The German press has been filled with stories detailing the tens of billions of dollars worth of European Union funds Greece has received in recent years. At the same time, stories of tax-dodging doctors and marinas filled with yachts have become staples of news reports here.

One of the most-cited statistics, and for Germans most infuriating, comes from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, showing that the median Greek retiree takes home 95.7 of his or her last salary, while the German pensioner gets only 43 percent. That is viewed as evidence that the Germans have taken painful cuts in their benefits to keep industry competitive and budget deficits under control, while the Greeks have not.

“We Europeans, despite our long history of cooperation, often indulge in the habit of throwing stones at each other, forgetting that we live in a glass house,” said Loukas Tsoukalis, president of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy, an Athens research group. The good news, according to Mr. Tsoukalis, was that a large majority of Greeks recognized that the problem was theirs to solve.

“It’s really something new that you have a government that announces pretty unpleasant measures that will have a real effect on people’s standard of living, and you have 75 percent of Greeks, depending on the opinion poll, who say they agree with the measures,” said Mr. Tsoukalis.

Niki Kitsantonis contributed reporting from Athens.

Germany Makes No Promise of Financial Support to Greece

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WASHINGTON — “On the Internet, the First Amendment is a local ordinance,” said Fred H. Cate, a law professor at Indiana University. He was talking about last week’s ruling from an Italian court that Google executives had violated Italian privacy law by allowing users to post a video on one of its services.

In one sense, the ruling was a nice discussion starter about how much responsibility to place on services like Google for offensive content that they passively distribute.

But in a deeper sense, it called attention to the profound European commitment to privacy, one that threatens the American conception of free expression and could restrict the flow of information on the Internet to everyone.

“Americans to this day don’t fully appreciate how Europeans regard privacy,” said Jane Kirtley, who teaches media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota. “The reality is that they consider privacy a fundamental human right.”

Google understands.

“The framework in Europe is of privacy as a human-dignity right,” said Nicole Wong, a lawyer with the company. “As enforced in the U.S., it’s a consumer-protection right.”

But Ms. Wong said Google’s policies on invasion of privacy, like its policies on hate speech, pornography and extreme violence, were best applied uniformly around the world. Trying to meet all the differing local standards “will make you tear your hair out and be paralyzed.”

The three Google executives were sentenced to six months in prison for failing to block a video showing an autistic boy being bullied by other students. The video was on line for two months in 2006, and was promptly removed after Google received a formal complaint. The prison sentences were suspended.

Still, Judge Oscar Magi’s ruling, in effect, balanced privacy against free speech and ruled in favor of the former. And given the borderless quality of the Internet, that balance has the potential to affect nations that prefer to tilt toward the values protected by the First Amendment.

“For many purposes, the European Union is today the effective sovereign of global privacy law,” Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu wrote in their book “Who Controls the Internet?” in 2006.

This may sound odd in America, where the First Amendment has pride of place in the Bill of Rights. In Europe, privacy comes first.

Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights says, “Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.” The First Amendment’s distant cousin comes later, in Article 10.

Americans like privacy, too, but they think about it in a different way, as an aspect of liberty and a protection against government overreaching, particularly into the home. Continental privacy protections, by contrast, focus on protecting people from having their lives exposed to public view, especially in the mass media.

The title of a Yale Law Journal article by James Q. Whitman captured the tension: “The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity Versus Liberty.” And historical experience helps explain the differing priorities.

“The privacy protections we see reflected in modern European law are a response to the Gestapo and the Stasi,” Professor Cate said, referring to the reviled Nazi and East German secret police — totalitarian regimes that used informers, surveillance and blackmail to maintain their power, creating a web of anxiety and betrayal that permeated those societies. “We haven’t really lived through that in the United States,” he said.

American experience has been entirely different, said Lee Levine, a Washington lawyer who has taught media law in America and France. “So much of the revolution that created our legal system was a reaction to excesses of government in areas of press and speech,” he said.

It was not until 1890 that Samuel Warren and Louis D flexcheck cash advance. Brandeis wrote “The Right to Privacy,” their groundbreaking Harvard Law Review article. Influential though it was, it came awfully late in the life of the republic.

The word privacy does not appear in the Constitution, and, outside the context of government searches, the document has almost nothing to say about the concept. This was perhaps best demonstrated by how hard the Supreme Court had to work in Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 ruling that established a right to marital privacy.

That right, Justice William O. Douglas wrote, was suggested by the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth and Ninth Amendments. The “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees,” he wrote, in a much-mocked passage.

European courts, by contrast, have Article 8.

In 2004, the European Court of Human Rights relied on it to rule that Princess Caroline of Monaco could block German magazines from publishing pictures of her — quite tame pictures — that had been taken in public. “I believe that the courts have to some extent and under American influence made a fetish of the freedom of the press,” Judge Bostjan M. Zupancic of Slovenia wrote in a concurrence. “It is time that the pendulum swung back to a different kind of balance between what is private and secluded and what is public and unshielded.”

The differing conceptions can have profound consequences. “Europeans are likely to privilege privacy protection over both economic efficiency and speech,” Susan P. Crawford, who teaches Internet law at the University of Michigan, wrote in an e-mail message. “They’re willing to risk huge economic losses and erect trade barriers in order to protect privacy.”

The Italian prosecution would be unimaginable in America. The Communications Decency Act of 1996 leaves online companies free of liability for transmitting most kinds of unlawful material supplied by others. Prosecutions for truthful speech on matters of public interest are almost certainly barred by the First Amendment.

Still, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, there may be something to learn from the Italian episode. “This video was enormously controversial, widely seen and very upsetting,” he said. “Sometimes,” he added, “there are egregious acts and there should be some responsibility.”

But Professor Crawford cautioned against thinking about the problem in categorical terms. Privacy is a broad enough concept, and Europe and America are varied enough, that it is easy to find counterexamples. Britain, for one, is only slowly moving toward the Continental model.

And what Italian prosecutors labeled a battle over principle may well have had another goal.

“Italian media is full of naked women and embarrassing revelations about both celebrities and ordinary people,” Professor Crawford wrote. “Any concern for privacy in this case is a pious cover for an (also naked) assertion of power over online companies.”

In some ways the Italian video represents the easy case. Google was merely a conduit for other people’s information, and that may well be enough to protect it in most of Europe.

The harder cases arise when Google is more active in gathering and disseminating information, as in its StreetView service, which provides ground-level panoramas gathered by cars with cameras on them. The program has generated legal challenges in Switzerland and Germany.

“Google is digitizing the world and expecting the world to conform to Google’s norms and conduct,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, who teaches media studies and law at the University of Virginia. “That’s a terribly naïve view of privacy and responsibility.”

When American and European Ideas of Privacy Collide

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SEOUL (AFP) – South Korea's top automaker Hyundai Motor said Wednesday it would recall its flagship Sonata sedan in the United States and the domestic market due to a door lock problem.

The firm said in a statement that 1,300 Sonata sedans already sold in the United States and another 46,000 cars in South Korea would be recalled.

Hyundai said the move was in response to reported defective front-door locks on some of its modified Sonatas launched last September high quality business cards. It said it ordered its US dealers on Tuesday to stop selling the model.

The recall was announced on the same day that Toyota's top US executive admitted that global recalls by the Japanese giant had "not totally" fixed dangerous safety flaws.

Hyundai to recall Sonata sedan in US and S.Korea

ATHENS, Greece – Greek drivers lined up for gas at the few stations still open Friday as a customs strike against government austerity measures left many pumps running dry.

The fuel shortage was the first serious consequence of growing labor protests against the Socialist government’s emergency spending cuts program, aimed at easing the debt crisis in Greece and shoring up market confidence.

Customs workers have extended their strike against salary freezes and bonus cuts through next Wednesday, when unions across Greece will hold a general strike that is set to bring the country to a standstill.

European finance ministers have told Athens it must demonstrate signs of fiscal improvement by March 16 or it will be ordered to impose even tougher budget cuts. Greece has promised to slash its deficit from an estimated 12.7 percent of gross domestic product to 8.7 percent this year.

Finance Ministry officials say they are under EU pressure to ax the public servants’ so-called “14th salary.” Greek workers get their annual salary divided into 14 payments, with two of them given as holiday bonuses, in a measure originally designed to alleviate those with low incomes.

“We would consider cutting the 14th (salary) to be an act of war,” said Yiannis Papagopoulos, leader of Greece’s trade union umbrella group, the GSEE.

“The measures must be socially just. And this is something that we have not seen so far. They are generally aimed at wage-earners and pensioners, while business remains immune sears kerosene heaters. It is finally time for those who for so many years gathered riches to pay up, invest, and help deal with the major problem at this time, which is unemployment.”

The customs walkout has hampered imports and exports, but the supply of fuel has been the most affected. Gas stations around greater Athens were rationing fuel while stocks lasted. Traffic policemen were posted at some gas stations in Athens as cars queued for hundreds of meters (yards).

“We’re out of regular unleaded, and now we’re only selling diesel,” said attendant Ioanna Antoniou at a gas station in the northern Athens suburb of Halandri. “There were a lot of cars lined up here earlier while we still had some unleaded left.”

Antoniou said the gas station had rationed fuel to limit sales to euro20 ($27) per customer so they could serve more people.

Taxis also held a 24-hour strike Friday, protesting parts of the austerity package that increased fuel tax and will force them to issue receipts. Taxi drivers chanting “The measures mean unemployment” staged a noisy protest in central Athens that choked traffic.

“These measures won’t do anything, all they will do is throw us out of work,” cab driver Anastasis Damianidis said. “We can’t become tax collectors — that’s what they’re trying to do. We will keep demonstrating.”

Fuel shortage hits Greece as strikes grow

BRUSSELS – European Union leaders on Thursday offered Greece moral support but no money to help it weather a debt crisis — vague assurances that didn’t calm the market fear that has shaken the entire EU and undermined the shared euro currency.

The 16 countries that use the euro said only that they “will take determined and coordinated action, if needed, to safeguard financial stability in the euro as a whole.”

But no money or loan guarantees were put on the table in the statement from a summit meeting in Brussels.

Markets appeared disappointed at not seeing a concrete backstop to ward off a potential default by Greece, which needs to borrow euro54 billion this year to cover its outsized budget deficit.

The Greek crisis is the leading edge of the debt troubles that have hit governments in the developed world during the world’s three years of economic turbulence, as they run up deficits bailing out banks and stimulating their economies.

A default would be a serious blow to Europe’s monetary union, and fears that Athens might not be able to pay its debts have already led markets demanding higher borrowing costs for Greece.

There are also concerns that the contagion could spread to other financially wobbly countries, such as Portugal and Spain, and that other governments will have to pay more to borrow.

The leaders said Greece had not requested financial support and called on Athens to push through “in a rigorous and determined manner” its budget cuts that have already triggered protests and strikes — and to prepare bigger cuts if needed.

Neil Mackinnon, global macro strategist at VTB Capital said, “it just looks like a pledge of solidarity, but no actual details of a program which is why the euro is still in the doldrums.”

“They have to stop this right now…they are firefighting at the moment but they need to put out this fire right now,” said Neil Mellor, currency strategist at Bank of New York Mellon. “It won’t appease those looking for a bona fide rescue plan.”

The euro hit a new nine-month low of $1.3635, having been as high as $1.38 earlier in the day on hopes of more substantive Greek bailout news. It was $1.51 in December. German and French stocks were down, while shares in Britain, which doesn’t use the euro, rose.

Markets see Greece at risk of defaulting on its massive borrowings because it faces several years of sluggish growth and mounting debt that current austerity plans may not be able to stem payday loans guaranteed no fax.

Those fiscal problems have also exposed the vulnerability of Europe’s monetary union in times of crisis. Euro members countries agree to limit their budget deficits to 3 percent of gross domestic output because overspending can undermine their shared currency. But those deficit rules have been broken repeatedly and have not been prevented Greece and other countries from trouble.

The leaders may make more comments on Greece later in the day.

Luxembourg government spokesman Guy Schuller said no firm bailout figures are on the table at this point, but many options are under discussion. “Paris and Berlin are at the head” of efforts that would be shared by all 16 eurozone nations, he said.

Among possibilities for Greece that have been floated in recent days are EU member countries guaranteeing Greece’s debt, a special credit line for the Greek government, and bilateral loans.

But German Chancellor Angela Merkel talked down a full financial bailout, but said other European governments would not leave Greece in the lurch.

“We won’t let Greece be alone but there are rules and they have to be respected and based on that we’ll issue a statement and an explanation,” she said.

Greece needs to borrow euro54 billion (nearly $75 billion) from bond markets this year to plug its budget gap. So far it has been able to borrow from markets but is facing increasing interest costs as markets price in higher risk of a possible default.

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou has promised to reduce Greece’s deficit to 8.7 percent of gross domestic product this year, from 12.7 percent last year, the highest in the EU and four times above an EU limit.

But markets doubt Greece’s credibility after it admitted falsifying statistics for years to make the deficit look smaller. They also worry that Greece can’t carry out any cuts because it risks social unrest.

Greek workers shut down schools, grounded flights and walked out of hospitals Wednesday to protest austerity measures, and a much broader strike is planned for Feb. 24.

___

Associated Press writers Pan Pylas, Angela Charlton and Leslie Patton in Brussels contributed to this report.

EU leaders offer Greece support, but no money

CAMARILLO, Calif. – The average price of regular gasoline in the United States fell 5.76 cents over a two-week period to $2.67.

That’s according to the national Lundberg Survey of fuel prices released Sunday.

Analyst Trilby Lundberg says the average price for a gallon of mid-grade was $2.80. Premium was at $2.91.

Cheyenne, Wyo., had the lowest average price among cities surveyed at $2 short term personal loan.38 a gallon for regular. Honolulu was the highest at $3.32.

In California, a gallon of regular cost an average of $2.94.

Fresno had the state’s least expensive gas at $2.86 a gallon. San Francisco remained the steepest at $2.97.

Average gas prices down 5.76 cents nationwide

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Citigroup Inc. said Tuesday that it posted a fourth-quarter loss of $7.6 billion, in line with analysts’ estimates, accounting for more than $6 billion in expenses associated with the payback of some government investments.

The $7.6 billion loss amounted to 33 cents a share, compared with a loss of $17.24 billion, or $3.40 a share, in the year-ago quarter.

Citigroup Chief Financial Officer John Gerspach in the company’s fourth-quarter earnings release Tuesday said that although Citi remains “cautious and continues to monitor the future impacts of our current loss mitigation efforts, we continue to see indications that credit may be stabilizing or improving, particularly in Asia and Latin America.”

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The CFO said the company had made “significant progress” in 2009. “While the environment continues to be challenging, we have a strong capital base and client franchise.”

“Provisions and charge-offs were lower than we expected, suggesting that Citi’s outlook for its loan book has improved, particularly in corporate and international portfolios,” Standard & Poor’s analysts said in a Tuesday report prepared for clients. “We think the pace of reserve building will continue to slow, allowing for an earnings improvement in 2010.”

The S&P analysts raised their Citi earnings estimate 2010 by 7 cents, to breakeven, but kept their share-price target price at $4.50, labeling that level “a premium to projected tangible book value, but a discounted multiple to peers.”

Citigroup shares responded initially by retreating 3% in early trades Tuesday. Read more about share price in MarketWatch First Take.

On an adjusted basis, excluding the $6 no fax needed payday loans.2 billion after-tax loss associated with TARP repayment and exiting a loss-sharing agreement, the fourth-quarter net loss was $1.4 billion, or 6 cents a share, the company said. Analysts polled by Thomson Financial had, on average, had expected the company to lose 33 cents a share in the quarter.

Citi said fourth-quarter net credit losses fell by about $800 million from the third quarter to $7.1 billion, marking a second straight quarter of improvement.

It said it added $700 million to its loan-loss reserve, down from roughly $800 million in the prior quarter.

Grooming the ‘dogs’ for a comeback

Despite lackluster recent performance, the Dogs of the Dow investment strategy still has fans. And this year’s roster may be kinder to investors.

The total allowance for loan losses at the end of 2009 was $36 billion, or 6.1% of total loans, compared with $36.4 billion, or 5.9% of total loans, in the third quarter, the bank said.

At year-end, the Tier 1 capital ratio was 11.7%. Tier 1 common ratio was 9.6%, up from 2.3% a year ago. Tier 1 common was $104.6 billion, up from $22.9 billion a year ago.

Citi sees higher credit costs in first quarter of 2010

Citigroup forecast higher credit costs in the first quarter of 2010 as loan losses continue in its the mortgage and credit-card businesses.

However, the financial-services heavyweight said that there could be improvement after the first quarter, depending on the direction of the U.S. economy. The company was also optimistic about its overseas businesses.

Citi shares went on to reverse their morning losses, and then some, climbing 3.2% to $3.54.

“Credit looks much better than we expected,” Jeff Harte, an analyst at Sandler O’Neill, wrote in a note to investors. “Credit improvement seems more pronounced in Citi’s international businesses.”

Citi’s $7.6 bln loss hits Wall Street target

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Stocks suffered the worst one-day decline of 2010 so far, led by the financial sector, which slid after J.P. Morgan Chase’s announcement of weaker-than-expected revenue and a glum outlook.

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The Dow Jones Industrial Average , which hadn’t posted a daily decline of more than 37 points in January before Friday, ended down 100.75 points, or 0.9%, at 10,609.80.

The average racked up a triple-digit point loss in the first hour of trading and never quite recovered, hurt by selling across every sector.

Twenty-seven of the Dow’s 30 components were lower, with financial companies suffering the worst losses. Bank of America Corp. was off 3.3% and J.P. Morgan Chase fell 2.3% after it announced its results prior to the opening bell. The bank’s fourth-quarter earnings quadrupled, exceeding forecasts, but its revenue came in below analysts’ estimates.

Chief Executive James Dimon warned the banking giant is cautious about the future, noting “consumer-credit costs remain high, and weak employment and home prices persist.”

That message was the opposite of what traders have been hoping to hear since the start of the broader fourth-quarter reporting season on Monday.

While participants have welcomed improving corporate bottom lines in the last few quarters, improvements in revenue have been hard to come by.

Dow component Intel Corp. , which released its earnings report late Thursday, was off 3.2%. The chip maker’s fourth-quarter profit surged nearly 10-fold from the depressed year-earlier period, as revenue jumped 28% payday loans. However, analysts and investors are wondering whether there’s more room for the stock to climb after its most profitable quarter in history.

Some participants have similar concerns about the market as a whole, considering that major indexes entered trading Friday at 15-month highs despite lingering weakness in the U.S. economy.

Hot Stocks: Financials Weak After J.P. Morgan

J.P. Morgan Chase’s retreat sets bearish tone for the banking sector. Bank’s report of higher profit is overshadowed by CEO Jamie Dimon’s cautious remarks. Greg Morcroft reports.

“To have two marquee-name companies like J.P. Morgan and Intel put out their earnings and have the market react like this is a very bad sign,” suggesting that a broader correction may be in store, said strategist Bill King, of M. Ramsey King Securities. “The flow of institutional money into the market has really dried up; no one wants to be buying at these levels.”

The technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 1.2%. The Standard & Poor’s 500 fell 1%. All its sectors fell, led by a 2% pullback in financials.

Economic data did little to offset investors’ earnings jitters. A new reading of consumer sentiment was worse than expected, though data on manufacturing in the New York region were surprisingly strong. Readings of consumer prices and industrial production were in line with Wall Street’s forecasts.

The dollar was higher against the euro but lower against the yen. Treasurys edged higher, with the 10-year note up 16/32 to yield 3.682%. Crude-oil futures slipped to $78 a barrel and gold futures also moved lower.

Market Snapshot: Stocks post worst one-day drop of 2010