| Dow Gains Again as Investors
Good news about Iran, oil and employment offset more disappointment about economic strength, and stocks managed to push closer to their February highs. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 19.75 points, or 0.16%, to 12530.05. It is up less than 1% this year but now is less than 260 points from its record 12786.64 finish on Feb. 20. Many stock traders had expected more volatility after the indexes' late-February swoon, and they said the gradual rebound since then has come ... .
RPM Reports Record Sales and Net Income for Fiscal 2007 Third Quarter
MEDINA, Ohio, April 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- RPM International Inc. (NYSE: RPM) today reported record sales, record net income and record diluted earnings per share for its fiscal 2007 third quarter ended February 28, 2007. Strong sales momentum in the company's larger industrial segment continued, while consumer segment sales and earnings increased significantly over the third quarter a year ago. Third-Quarter Results RPM's record net sales of $679.5 million were up 10.9% from the $612.5 million reported in the fiscal 2006 third quarter. Organic sales growth accounted for 8.3% of the increase, with 1.3% of that amount representing net foreign exchange gains. Net acquisition growth was 2.6% of the total. Record net income for the quarter was $10.1 million, compared to a $2.7 million loss a year ago, while record diluted earnings per share were $0.08, compared to a loss of $0.02 in the year-ago third quarter.
Website on re-denomination out
The Bank of Ghana has launched a website to educate the public on the re-denomination of the cedi, which comes into effect on July 1, 2007.
The website - www.ghanacedi.gov.gh has features that give a regular update on the re-denomination exercise through menus.
A statement issued in Accra on Wednesday and signed by Esi Hammond, Head of the Central Banks Public Affairs Unit, said visitors to the website could subscribe to the news and events alert that automatically send information updates to the subscribers e-mail.
There are news highlights on reports carried in the newspapers about the re-denomination and currency converters that convert the Cedi to Ghana Cedi and vice versa and another that converts the cedi or Ghana cedi to foreign currencies and vice versa.
A Fixed Interest Income Bond Market Shock Looms
First it was the NASDAQ stocks in 2000, then real estate prices, and now the third leg of this asset price correction is at the threshold. Recent salvos from China and our own commerce secretary may be the catalysts for this correction. We have been in a multi-decade bull market in bond prices. From September of 1981 to June of 2003 the yield on the two year Treasury note fell from 16.46% to 1.23%. Likewise from October '81 through June '05 the 30 year bond has declined from 14.68% to 4.29%. Since then, the two and thirty year yield has risen to 4.5% and 4.85% respectively. According to Bloomberg, treasuries are now 1.56 percentage points lower than the 6.21% average of the past 20 years. That means even if you discard the high rates of a quarter century earlier into your calculation, treasuries yields are still about 32% below average!
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