Market Insider: Economy's Illness Keeps Spreading

Like anxious relatives in a hospital room, investors have been watching the economy get sicker and sicker with new symptoms surfacing daily.
That trend is likely to stick in the week ahead, and the stock market should stay volatile as it reacts to economic news, including Friday's retail sales report. The economic calendar though is fairly light, but there are earnings reports from major retailers. Those numbers should only confirm that the holiday shopping season is shaping up to be one of the weakest in years.Many economists have been expecting the current quarter to show this recession's biggest decline in GDP. A batch of weak data and growing unemployment has made it seem especially bleak.

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Dow Jones okays $5 bn sale to News Corp

Rupert Murdoch is set to achieve his decades-long dream of running the venerable Wall Street Journal after Dow Jones & Co Inc's board agreed to News Corp's USD 5 billion buyout bid on Tuesday.

The board decided to accept the offer at a meeting Tuesday evening, according to a source familiar with the matter, shortly after News Corp's board approved the deal.

The 76-year-old media mogul spent the past three months courting the Bancroft family, which has controlled Dow Jones for more than a century.

Read more in The Financial Express

Oil Prices Rise Above $75 a Barrel

Oil prices rose Friday, reversing some losses from the previous session when crude fell nearly $1 a barrel on worries a slowing U.S. economy would cut petroleum consumption.

Light, sweet crude for September delivery rose 60 cents to $75.55 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange by midday in Europe.

The contract had dropped 93 cents to settle at $74.95 a barrel Thursday as global stock troubles deepened. Street suffered one of its worst losses of 2007 amid worries about the U.S. mortgage and corporate lending markets, and the Dow Jones industrials closed down more than 310 points.

Some analysts said the market was concerned that the plunge could hurt oil demand.

Read more in Financial Express