Shares of Ford were up 7 percent at $8.58 before the bell after senior company executives said the automaker was on track to post its first monthly sales increase in two years.

In banking news, Barclays PLC reported an 8 percent rise in half-year profit, while HSBC Holdings PLC said its first-half profit halved from a year ago, but the results were better than the analyst consensus forecast.

“The greatest difficulty has been in financials, so the gains in HSBC and Barclays (are) adding to optimism and (suggest) that the worst may be over,” said Andre Bakhos, president of Princeton Financial Group, in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

“It’s comforting to see that we are in a global rebound in earnings.”

The Select Sector SPDR Financial ETF was up 2.2 percent before the bell.

A rise in oil prices was also poised to underpin the broader market, with U.S. front-month crude up 2.4 percent, or $1.65, to $71.10 a barrel.

S&P 500 futures rose 10 points and were above fair value, a formula that evaluates pricing by taking into account interest rates, dividends and time to expiration on the contract. Dow Jones industrial average futures climbed 74 points, and Nasdaq 100 futures were 17.00 points higher.

The rise in U.S. stock index futures suggested that indexes will open up about 1 percent or more. The benchmark S&P 500 <.SPX> could begin trading at a 9-month high, very close to the psychologically important 1,000 level, after registering its best five-month winning streak since 1938 on Friday.

In Europe stocks were up more than 1 percent.

3M Co shares rose 2.4 percent to $72.22 before the bell after Goldman Sachs upgraded the Dow component to “buy” from “neutral.”

Ford, due to report its July sales later in the day, is among the primary beneficiaries of the federal government’s “Cash for Clunkers” incentive program that took effect on July 24.

The Senate on Monday is due to vote on extending the program to stimulate auto sales after the U.S. House approved $2 billion for it on top of an initial $1 billion in June.

The economic calendar includes the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing index due at 10 a.m. (1400 GMT). A Reuters poll of economists forecast a July reading of 46.2 from 44.8 in June.

NEW YORK, Aug 3 (Reuters)

• Sources close to the matter told Bloomberg News that President-elect Barack Obama may name Steven Rattner as “car czar,” a top-level position that would oversee the conditions of which bailout money is given to U.S. auto companies, Bloomberg reported. Rattner co-founded private-equity firm Quadrangle Group LLC in 2000.

• Barclays plc is planning to cut more than 2,100 jobs from its investment banking and investment management units, sources told Reuters. About 1,300 jobs would be lost from Barclays Capital. About 500 from Barclays Wealth. And about 370 from Barclays Global Investors.

• Great Britain energy titan, BG Group plc, plans to invest between $4 billion and $5 billion to develop oil fields in Brazil through 2012. “We’re confident that these developments can be made economic at lower oil prices, but we’ll need to ensure the efficiency of the investment. Oil prices we see today are much more realistic,” Chief Executive Officer Frank Chapman told Bloomberg.

• Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. (PFE) said it plans to slash 800 research jobs, a reduction of 5% to 8% of its research workforce. Most of the cuts will come from labs in California, Connecticut and England, and are in addition to the near 10,000 jobs cut companywide since early 2007, Reuters reported.

• Crude futures halted a weeklong price slide yesterday (Tuesday), as light, sweet crude for February delivery rose 19 cents to settle at $37.78 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Futures briefly touched $36.10 a barrel, a new low for the year, earlier in the day.

• Commercial banks borrowed more while investment banks borrowed less from the U.S. Federal Reserve’s emergency lending program over the most recent week. The Fed report said commercial banks averaged daily borrowing of $87.9 billion during the week that ended last Wednesday. That was an increase from the $86.6 billion in average daily borrowing for the week that ended Dec. 31. Investment firms borrowed nearly $36 billion over the past week, USA Today reported. That was down from the average of $38.5 billion for the week that ended Dec. 31, the newspaper reported.

• U.S. companies may have to contribute $109 billion to their corporate pension plans this year to fill funding gaps caused by turmoil in the financial markets, consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide Inc. (WW) said yesterday (Tuesday). Watson Wyatt expects companies also will have to contribute more than $102 billion in 2010. Both of these figures are up significantly from the $38 billion that companies were required to contribute to the plans last year.

Source: Global Investment News Roundup Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

Jim Rogers, a best-selling author who co-founded the famed Quantum Fund with George Soros back in 1970, told Bloomberg News Thursday that the global credit crisis caused by the subprime mortgage meltdown is nowhere near over.

“I doubt that we’re half way through the financial crisis,” Rogers stated at a Barclays PLC (BCS) news conference Thursday in Singapore, where he now lives with his family. “We certainly haven’t hit the bottom as far as I’m concerned.”

Not only did Rogers’ comments contradict those put forth this week by the heads of several Wall Street investment banks, they even ran counter to statements made by former partner Soros, who said this week that he believed the “acute phase” of the worldwide financial crisis was nearly done – meaning the U.S. economy might soon start displaying the benefits.

Rogers’ downbeat outlook also ran counter to some upbeat observations made by Ronald J. Peltier, the chairman and chief executive officer of investing guru Warren Buffet’s HomeServices of America Inc. real estate company, who told CNBC-TV that the beaten-up U.S. housing market has leveled out and is poised for a move to higher ground.

“I think the real truth is the market has been in a phase of correction,” Peltier said Thursday morning during an interview on the popular financial cable channel. “We are seeing some light at the end of the tunnel.”

So who’s correct?

Rogers, currently the chairman of Rogers Holdings and the author of the new investment bestseller, “A Bull in China,” seems to think that’s a pretty easy question to answer. After all, big global securities firms and commercial banking enterprises have taken about $319 billion in write-downs since the start of 2007 and have slashed away 65,000 jobs in the past 10 months as the financial crisis spread across the globe, Bloomberg reported.

And there’s more to come.

“Most of the European banks and Asian banks haven’t taken a huge write-off yet,” Rogers said. “I suspect there are more write-offs to come in Europe and Asia.”

Echoing comments he made two months ago during an exclusive interview with Money Morning Investment Director Keith Fitz-Gerald, Rogers told listeners in Singapore Thursday that he’s avoiding financial stocks and is betting that the share prices of U.S. investment banks have a lot further to fall. He also sees continued major problems for U.S. homebuilders that very often doled out mortgages that did not require documentation regarding assets or income, and for government-sponsored mortgage financier Fannie Mae (FNM). That’s why he’s expecting housing stocks and Fannie Mae’s shares to decline even more than they already have as investors avoid all but the safest assets – such as U.S. Treasury debt.

Such ongoing uncertainty and fearfulness can’t help but cause overall stock-and-bond prices to fall even further, Rogers told reporters.

Indeed, during his recent exclusive interview with Money Morning’s Fitz-Gerald, Rogers said it’s even possible that the U.S. Federal Reserve could ultimately fail.

As if to defy his gloomy predictions, stocks have rallied since mid-March, when JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), the No. 3 U.S. commercial bank, agreed to buy The Bear Stearns Cos. Inc. (BSC), in a central-bank-sponsored bailout deal. In fact, the MSCI World Index has gained 10% since touching a one-year low on March 17, Bloomberg reported.

While HomeServices’ Peltier agrees that was a problem – a “lot of people bought ahead of themselves,” and speculators damaged the market even more – he told CNBC that he now believes the U.S. housing market has actually returned to its pre-boom times, with home sales running at an annual rate of about 5 million.

“I think that’s a normalized market and I think that’s a sustainable level,” he told an interviewer. But he also divided the market into two distinct parts:

• The primary market of discretionary sellers.
• And the distressed market, which includes some of the regions that experienced the “meteoric” rise in housing prices – and which now are suffering the fallout.

Even after that, however, it’s clear that “housing prices are still within 8% to 10% of all-time highs,” Peltier said. “The markets that have fallen off the most are actually the markets that were the most overheated.”

As the housing market returns to its more-normal operation, Peltier believes stability will return and that prices and sales numbers will return to a point that was sustainable.

There is one wild card that has the executive concerned, however: Will the pressures of soaring fuel costs and a tight credit market put an inordinate amount of pressure on consumers who are attempting to work out their housing problem – as opposed to just walking away?

“A lot of people bought ahead of themselves,” Peltier said in the interview. “Frankly, I think to some degree the lending industry, the mortgage business, lost its moral compass in terms of providing the proper credit standards and qualifications.”

Speculators proved to be the real troublemakers: From 2001 to 2006, a full 25% of sales were made to buyers who believed they could turn a quick profit, and not to people who were planning to live in the houses and make them into a home.

In retrospect, Peltier said it’s clear the U.S. housing market got way ahead of itself from a price standpoint, with the flames of speculation getting fanned by unscrupulous appraisers and lenders who ended up putting lots of consumers into houses that they couldn’t afford.

Industry officials “knew it was an overheated market,” Peltier said. “There were people for the first time ever having opportunity to buy part of the American dream under credit conditions and credit guidelines that were very, very shaky at best … And they were buying at the peak of the market with very low teaser rates, not fully understanding the implications of that adjustable-rate mortgage [re-setting at a much-higher rate] sometime in the future, and the probability that they could not afford that home under the new reset conditions. That’s a travesty, because there are a lot of people that got hurt.”

He called on Congress to find a workable solution to the housing crisis, something that has been elusive as the legislators and President Bush spar over who should benefit from pending legislation.

On the broader political landscape, Peltier said the housing industry generally does better when Republicans are in office, though he did not endorse a specific candidate in the presidential race.