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Boeing Co. leaders say that the U.S. military’s airlift needs are growing and that a Pentagon proposal to halt future orders for the C-17 Globemaster III cargo plane is premature.

Boeing, whose defense unit is headquartered in St. Louis, is trying to rally support for the C-17 on multiple fronts — arguing that ceasing production would erode the U.S. industrial base, costing thousands of jobs at Boeing plants and those of its main suppliers. But Boeing officials also emphasize the plane’s strategic value.

"Right now, since 9/11, the airplane has been flying at about a 15 percent higher rate than was anticipated," said Donald A. Anderson, Boeing’s C-17 program manager in St. Louis. "In addition, they’re talking about rebasing troops in the United States. They’re talking about an increase in the size of the Marines Corps and the Army.

"So it seems like the airlift requirements are growing. And you need airlifters to meet those needs."
Starting with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ announcement in early April and continuing through last week, the Pentagon has said it can get by with the 205 C-17s that are either in service or on order. The Air Force also uses the Lockheed Martin C-5 Galaxy to transport weapon systems, cargo and personnel to overseas locations.

Republican Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond and Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, both of Missouri, have written letters supporting more orders of the C-17, and Machinists Union officials have traveled to Washington to show their support for a program that supports 900 jobs in St. Louis.

"This is high political theater," said analyst Richard Aboulafia of The Teal Group in Fairfax, Va. "The bottom line is I don’t think the line is threatened. But it is up to everybody from Department of Defense to Congress to Boeing to the unions to make it look as though it were."

The Defense Department has not sought funding for the C-17 in the last three years. But Congress has stepped in to add funding for more of the $202 million planes through supplemental defense appropriations bills.

Bond and Boeing officials have asked why Gates would halt C-17 orders while there is a study under way into the military’s future air-mobility needs. The results are expected this fall.

"But yet we’re making that decision now to stop the airplane," Anderson said. "So it seems somewhat premature fast payday loans."

Bond said shutting down production of the C-17 is a "dangerous gamble" and warned that the U.S. can’t afford to "lose the capability to transport safely our troops and equipment to anywhere in the world."

In a letter to President Barack Obama, McCaskill said the U.S. is "literally flying the wings off these planes," and added "this is not the time to end its production, especially in light of projected global mission sets for the U.S. military."

Both legislators also have gone to bat for Boeing’s St. Louis-built F/A-18 Super Hornet, whose future was placed in limbo under the latest Pentagon spending plan.

The C-17 is assembled at a plant in Long Beach, Calif. But the cargo door, cargo ramp, landing-gear pods, nose and engine pylons are built in St. Louis.

A November 2008 report by the Government Accountability Office recommended "careful planning to avoid shutting down the C-17 line prematurely." Both Boeing and the Air Force believe shutting down and restarting production "would not be feasible or cost effective," the report found.

The GAO cited the high costs of hiring and training a new work force, reinstalling equipment to proper working condition and re-establishing a supplier base.

Boeing has delivered the C-17 to other countries, including Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. The United Arab Emirates has announced its intent to buy four of the planes, and Qatar has ordered two and exercised an option on two additional C-17s.

But Anderson said international sales alone are not enough to sustain the C-17 line. Boeing officials say maintaining C-17 sales to the U.S. Air Force is necessary to keep the price of the planes competitive in the international market.

Defense analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., said the C-17 is the best strategic airlifter ever built and "a very cogent case" can be made that terminating production at 205 planes would be too early. At the moment, he said, its future will be dictated by Congress.

"Here’s the bottom line to C-17," Thompson said. "If Congress doesn’t add money, there won’t be any more."

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The board that sets U.S. accounting standards on Monday moved to end companies’ use of a device that allowed them to park hundreds of billions of dollars in loans off their balance sheets without capital cushions and has been blamed for helping stoke banks’ losses in the housing boom.

The change will tighten the use of so-called "qualifying special purpose entities" by requiring companies to report to regulators the loans contained in them and to increase their capital reserves in proportion as a cushion against potential losses.

It was the lack of disclosure and absence of capital to support ballooning subprime mortgage loans in these special entities that aggravated the massive losses sustained by banks, regulators say.

The change could result in about $900 billion in assets being brought onto the balance sheets of the nation’s 19 largest banks, according to federal regulators. The information was provided by Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and 17 other institutions during the government’s recent "stress tests payday loans in 1 hour."

In general, companies transfer assets from balance sheets to special purpose entities to insulate themselves from risk or to finance a large project. Under the change, many qualifying special purpose entities will have to be moved back to a company’s balance sheet.

Outside investors often take interests in those entities, for example, making an investment in a bank’s holdings of mortgage loans in exchange for payments from borrowers.

Under the new standard, companies must bring back any entity in which they hold an interest that gives them "control over the most significant activities," according to the Financial Accounting Standards Board. Companies must perform analyses to determine that.

In cases where companies have "continuing involvements" with entities off the balance sheet, they will have to provide new disclosures.

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U.S. homebuilder sentiment jumped to its highest level in eight months in May, a private survey showed on Monday, supporting views that the three-year housing slump might be close to an end.

The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index rose to 16 from 14 in April, in line with market expectations.

The NAHB attributed the second consecutive monthly increase in the gauge — which measures builder confidence in the market for newly built, single family homes — to “the best home buying conditions of a lifetime.”

“This continued increase indicates that home builders feel we’re at or near the bottom of the market and that positive signs lie ahead for builders and potential home buyers, provided that builder access to production credit significantly improves,” said NAHB chief economist David Crowe online pay day loans.

Other housing indicators have recently shown a sharp slowing in the pace of the market’s decline, raising optimism a bottom was not too far away.

The collapse of domestic house prices and the subsequent global credit crisis were the main catalysts for the U.S. recession, now in its 17th month.

The report also showed two out of three subindexes of the Housing Market Index rising in May. The current sales conditions gauge climbed two points to 14, while the sales expectations measure for the next six months rose three points to 27. The traffic of prospective buyers index was unchanged at 13 in May.

(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Andrea Ricci)

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At some point, the message that Jeff Rubin wanted to give began to diverge from the message he was expected to deliver as CIBC’s chief economist.

You could see it in his research reports over the past 18 months – talk about the urgent need for energy conservation, the inevitability of carbon pricing, oil at $225 (U.S.) a barrel by 2012, and how the high cost of transportation as a result of peak oil will throw the machinery of globalization into reverse.

His conclusions were frequently controversial and certainly unconventional, particularly in a country so dependent on the global trade of its oil and other natural resources.

Ask Suncor Energy chief executive Rick George about Rubin’s prediction of $200 oil and a dismissive smirk follows. "Is he an economist or an entertainer? I guess if you live long enough you’ll see anything."

So while it came as a surprise when Rubin, in late March, suddenly resigned from CIBC World Markets after 20 years at the bank’s investment arm, it wasn’t really a shocker to those who knew the maverick economist best.

"It was only a matter of time," one colleague reflected.

Rubin had just completed a new book, Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, much of it based on his research at the bank. An ambitious book tour was being planned, and Rubin had to choose between Bay Street and Main Street.

"It didn’t really mesh with what the bank was doing so I said, `See ya!’" Rubin explained from his unexpectedly modest home in Toronto’s Riverdale neighbourhood. Now a free agent, Rubin, 55, is gearing up to spread his message following the May 23 launch of his book.

Its basic premise is simple: Nearly everything we do, purchase and eat is "inextricably bound" to oil, and as the price of black gold increases, so too does the cost of growing, manufacturing, processing, packaging and transporting the goods we consume – whether they be apples from Australia or dollar-store trinkets from China.

In other words, the higher oil prices get, the more expensive distance becomes. And oil prices, argues Rubin, are going nowhere but up.

"The world’s oil wells are running out of the stuff that keeps the whole system going," he writes, adding that the only supply available to replace it is dirty, hard to find, and for that reason increasingly expensive. The oil sands are a case in point. "We are getting closer to the bottom of the barrel."

Eventually, he says, the transportation costs of importing products from far-off countries will erase other advantages, such as low-cost labour. It will become, he argues, "the largest barrier to global trade."

This will lead to more dense communities, less driving, and a reliance on what we produce locally. World trade will revert back to the patterns we saw in the 1970s, when tariffs slowed the global movement of goods and trading was more regional. Economic growth will come to a crawl and inflation will rise.

Look no further than the current recession for proof, he says. In chapter 7, Rubin lays out in detail how high oil prices, which peaked near $150 in July 2008, led to inflation and rising interest rates that triggered the U paydayloans.S. mortgage crisis and sent the economic dominoes, including global trade, falling.

"You can liberalize trade all you like, but it won’t make a difference if no one can afford to ship the things you want to sell," he writes.

His prediction: Manufacturing jobs are going to return to North America over time. There will be a revival in regional agriculture. Urban farmers’ markets will become more plentiful. Travel will be local and certainly not by plane. Dining out will be replaced by cooking in.

Not such a bad thing, he suggests. "We will soon become far more attentive custodians of our own little worlds, and that is likely to make our neighbourhoods better places."

The message is sometimes taken to the extreme, particularly in the final two chapters. But the book is an easy, intelligent read for anyone seeking insight into the relationship between energy and the economy, and it brings perspective that has so far been absent from the peak-oil debate.

Rubin only occasionally touches on environmental issues such as climate change and he downplays the impact of clean technologies, calling electric cars and biofuels "head fakes." It’s here where he occasionally exhibits a shallow knowledge of green innovation.

Still, the book meshes well with other recent works, such as Thomas Friedman’s bestselling Hot, Flat, and Crowded, and it sets the stage for a summer of like-minded efforts, including Forbes reporter Christopher Steiner’s $20 Per Gallon, out in July.

Why should anyone believe Rubin? He accurately predicted oil’s rise to $50, then $100, and most recently $150. In 2005 he said the Canadian dollar would reach parity with the U.S. dollar, and it did.

But he’s had some big misses, too, including the forecast of an economic recovery in the mid-1990s, which never happened. He also predicted the S&P/TSX would hit 15,000 by the end of 2007 and 16,200 by the end of 2008. Wrong on both counts. He even failed to predict the oil-influenced recession explained so well in his book that sent the index below 7,600 and oil below $40 a barrel.

Rubin acknowledges in the book that many considered him "out to lunch" when oil plunged back down to earth. He reminds, however, that it wasn’t that long ago that oil was considered expensive at $40, and that it will shoot back up once the economy begins to recover and fast-rising demand bumps up against slow-moving supply.

Easy, cheap oil is gone, regardless of what the oil giants tell you. One thing he’s learned, he writes, "is that it is pretty much impossible to convince anyone of something they just don’t want to believe."

More are believing. Analysts at Raymond James said earlier this month that global production of petroleum actually peaked early last year. They called it a "paradigm shift of historic proportions" and urged society to "get ready to live in a peak-oil world."

Time to brush up on those gardening skills.

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Documents made public on Wednesday confirm former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson gave nine major banks no choice but to allow the government to take equity stakes in them as the Bush administration moved to address turmoil in the financial industry.

The documents, obtained by the public interest group Judicial Watch under a Freedom of Information Act request, include “talking points” used by Paulson at the October 13, 2008, meeting with the banks’ CEOs in Washington.

The details of the meeting had been widely reported at the time, but the documents offer a first-hand account of what transpired behind closed-doors.

“We don’t believe it is tenable to opt out because doing so would leave you vulnerable and exposed. If a capital infusion is not appealing, you should be aware your regulator will require it in any circumstance,” the document said, citing Paulson talking points.

U.S. regulators recently completed stress tests of the U.S.’s 19 largest banks and have determined that 10 of them need to raise a combined $74.6 billion to provide a buffer against potential lawsuits should the economy continue to weaken.

The U.S. Treasury, however, has said it would welcome the return of taxpayers’ funds from the strongest banks as long as it didn’t weaken the sector as a whole.

According to the documents released by Judicial Watch, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, FDIC Chair Sheila Bair and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke co-hosted the October meeting with Paulson free car insurance quotes.

Suggested edits of the “talking points” by Geithner, then-New York Fed president, were withheld by the Treasury Department, Judicial Watch said.

The CEOs wrote by hand the names of their institution and multibillion dollar amounts of “preferred shares” to be issued to the government, the documents show.

“These documents show our government exercising unrestrained power over the private sector,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said in a statement.

The CEOs present were Vikram Pandit of Citigroup, Dimon of JP Morgan, Richard Kovacevich of Wells Fargo, John Thain of Merrill Lynch, John Mack of Morgan Stanley, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Robert Kelly of Bank of New York Mellon Corp, and Ronald Logue of State Street Bank.

The documents include an email showing a public relations effort, run in part out of the Bush White House, to tamp down public concerns about nationalizing the banks, Judicial Watch said.

The Fed, the Treasury Department and the FDIC called the bank rescue “necessary to strengthen the financial system and protect U.S. taxpayers and the U.S. economy.”

(Reporting by JoAnne Allen)

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U.S. online auctioneer eBay Inc won final approval from South Korea’s antitrust watchdog for its planned acquisition of Gmarket Inc, subject to conditions such as a commission freeze for the next three years.

The approval clears the way for eBay to emerge as a leading player in South Korea’s online shopping market by taking control of its key competitor.

Last week, eBay offered to buy South Korean online retailer Gmarket for up to $1.2 billion, a move that sets up the company for growth in Asia. A majority of Gmarket shareholders, including South Korean retailer Interpark Corp and Yahoo Inc, have agreed to the cash tender offer.

South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission said in a statement on Thursday that the impact of eBay’s acquisition on the local online shopping market would be limited and could be digested over time.

Nasdaq-listed Gmarket is the biggest South Korean operator of customer-to-customer marketplaces and has more than 10 million registered users in the country online payday loan. It has competed with eBay’s South Korean unit, Internet Auction Co, and “11st,” a unit of SK Telecom, the country’s top mobile carrier.

When combined, Gmarket and the eBay unit will have a 87.5 percent share of the South Korean customer-to-customer market and 36.4 percent of the entire domestic online shopping market.

The FTC banned the companies from raising sales commissions for the next three years and asked them to limit increases in advertising and other fees to below the local inflation rate.

The regulator also ordered them to come up with measures to protect small-sized sellers in marketplaces that may suffer from higher fees and commissions without free competition.

(Reporting by Rhee So-eui; Editing by Jonathan Hopfner)

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Montgomery County has launched a green task force of lawmakers, bureaucrats, educators, entrepreneurs and utilities to help shape the county into a destination hotspot for the clean technology industry.

The new Green Economy Task Force is working with local consulting firms to come up with a strategic plan by this summer to create a business atmosphere to lure environmentally friendly companies, widely seen as the next growth sector for the country.

“Montgomery County is really ideally situated to replicate what it did 25 years ago in the biotechnology sector … and become a real leader” in green technology, said Dick Wegman, chairman of the task force and attorney with Garvey Schubert Barer law firm.

The county is one of eight jurisdictions nationally devising such a green economy strategy through the Climate Prosperity Project, launched in 2007 by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and coordinated by Global Urban Development. It’s also in the running to house Maryland’s first-ever clean energy center, pitching Universities at Shady Grove in Rockville as an apt location for what will be a clearinghouse and incubator for the state’s green technology companies.

Sustainable Design Group, a Gaithersburg firm contracting with the county to inventory its current energy businesses and draft a 10-point plan to draw more, has counted 223 green technology companies in the county so far, nearly all in the category of green services and product providers no credit check payday loan.

But all acknowledged much of the challenge is defining what a green job is, and how to measure how many of them there are. For example, how does one assess a manufacturer of green products that operates in a non-environmentally conscious way? Or a non-energy company that’s just greening its internal operations?

“We’re not creating a separate sector like the biotech sector,” said John Spears, president of Sustainable Design Group. “We’re trying to green the whole economy … and that will create demand for the jobs and goods and services that we’re talking about.”

Last month, a sustainable working group appointed by County Executive Isiah Leggett released a report with 58 recommendations on making Montgomery County more eco-friendly, saving both energy consumption and costs in the long run.

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The tentative deal to settle a dispute between Charter Communications Inc. and the parent of KMOV (Channel 4) will settle a long-standing dispute that’s kept CBS’ high definition channel from this market.

Charter and Dallas-based Belo Corp. said they have nearly completed a deal that will allow Charter to continue broadcasting KMOV’s signal after Dec. 31. The deal, first reported Sunday, also covers Charter’s relationship with Belo in 10 other markets, including Houston, New Orleans, Seattle and Dallas payday cash advance.

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The global recession is re-exposing fissures in U.S.-China relations that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson spent more than two years smoothing over.

Heightened tensions between China and the U.S. may worsen a contraction in world trade that already threatens to deepen and prolong the economic downturn. The friction comes as President- elect Barack Obama readies a two-year stimulus package worth as much as $850 billion that will require the U.S. to borrow more than ever from China, the largest buyer of Treasury securities.

“The American economic slump is running into the Chinese economic slump,” says Derek Scissors, a research fellow at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation. “It's creating the conditions for a face-off between Beijing and the U.S. Congress, possibly leading to destabilization of the world's most important bilateral economic relationship.”

Paulson, 62, who visited China 70 times during his career on Wall Street, made improving ties a priority when he arrived at the Treasury in 2006. He advocated diplomacy instead of confrontation, establishing a twice-yearly “strategic economic dialogue” with officials in Beijing, aimed at cooling tensions and deterring Congress from taking up trade sanctions.

The approach produced some results, including a pledge to share data on food safety and agreement to allow foreign mutual funds to invest in China's stock market. The value of China's currency, the yuan, rose 21 percent versus the dollar from 2005 levels to redress what U.S. officials saw as an unfair price advantage for Chinese products.

Shelved Sanctions

Paulson refrained from labeling China a currency manipulator and hailed an end to tax rebates on Chinese exports as a sign of improving trade relations. Congressional leaders, though dissatisfied with the pace of progress, shelved sanctions legislation.

Paulson “achieved some success, but it was much more difficult to get the Chinese to restructure their economy,” says Myron Brilliant, vice president for Asia at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington. Now, Brilliant says, the economic crisis has prompted China to turn back to “export-oriented policies that could lead to an increase in the trade imbalance” and new tensions with the U.S.

China's exports declined in November for the first time in seven years, and economic growth may slow by more than half to as little as 5 percent in 2009, according to Royal Bank of Scotland Plc. That has prompted China's leaders to increase tax rebates on thousands of exported products; meanwhile, the yuan's steady rise against the dollar stalled in July, and the currency has barely budged since. It was trading at 6.8462 a dollar at 1:33 p.m. in Shanghai today, from 6.8414 on Dec. 26.

A Harder Line

In the U.S., business and labor groups, along with lawmakers, are pushing the new Obama administration to take a harder line with China than President George W. Bush did.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, plans legislation that would raise tariffs on dumped imports from China and other nations. And newly elected Democratic congressmen such as Larry Kissell of North Carolina and Dan Maffei of New York have pledged actions to stop jobs from being shipped to China.

Lawyers representing companies such as Nucor Corp., the second-largest U.S. steelmaker, NewPage Corp., a maker of coated paper, and smaller textile and steel pipe makers say they are considering new trade complaints against China. During the presidential campaign, Obama promised groups including the National Council of Textile Organizations and the Alliance for American Manufacturing that he would take a tougher stance on China's currency policies.

Pushing Back

Officials in Beijing will push back, says James McGregor, chairman of Beijing-based research firm JL McGregor & Co. and author of the book “One Billion Customers,” about doing business in China. Chinese leaders “will do whatever they need to protect their interests and to say to the U.S., 'Do not mess with us on this one,'” he says.

Paulson, before leaving for talks in Beijing this month, told business representatives his biggest concern was that China was changing course and reversing moves it had made during the past year to cut aid to exporters and stimulate domestic consumption cash advance.

China's five-year plan through 2010 seeks to rebalance growth away from exports — so far, without significant result. Household consumption slumped to slightly more than 35 percent of China's gross domestic product last year from 45 percent in 1993. By contrast, consumer spending represents more than two-thirds of the U.S. economy.

Low Consumption

“What separates China from the rest of the world is its incredibly low level of consumption relative to GDP,” says Brad Setser, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. “What can China do that would most directly help the world economy during a period of very severe weakness? Get its consumption back up to 40 percent of GDP.”

Policies in both countries are shaped by the need to cope with steep declines in employment. More than 10 million migrant workers lost their jobs in China during the first 11 months of this year, Caijing Magazine reported Dec. 17, citing a Labor Ministry official.

The total will likely grow in 2009. The World Bank forecasts that global trade, which grew 6.2 percent in 2008, will shrink by 2.1 percent next year, the first such contraction since 1982.

The collapse in overseas demand is exposing China's years of overinvestment in industries such as automobiles and telecommunications.

Sitting on a Stockpile

China's steel industry, the world's largest, is sitting on a stockpile of 63 million metric tons, equivalent to about 13 percent of annual production, and Baosteel Group General Manager He Wenbo said in November that his company was facing the “most difficult” period since it was founded 30 years ago.

The government is considering measures including buying unsold inventory and raising export rebates to help steelmakers weather the slowdown, Minister of Industry and Information Li Yizhong said Dec. 12.

In the U.S., factory payrolls have shrunk by 4 million during the eight years of the Bush administration, and total job losses this year may top 2 million.

“China-bashing will only intensify in a softer economic climate,” says Stephen Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley's Asia division in Hong Kong. “Bipartisan congressional support for anti-China trade legislation has been gathering in intensity.”

Obama's Pledges

Obama made specific pledges on the campaign trail to take a tougher approach to China than the Bush administration did. He has said the failure by Bush and Paulson to label China a currency manipulator was “unacceptable,” and he endorsed legislation to let U.S. companies seek import duties to compensate for the advantage an undervalued currency gives their Chinese competitors.

Obama also pledged to reverse course from Bush and consider petitions seeking higher tariffs on specific Chinese products.

American businesses, labor unions and lawmakers are already gearing up to force Obama's hand. Steelmakers, paper producers and textile companies are preparing trade complaints that could lead to increased tariffs. Unions and lawmakers plan to push measures to force China to raise the value of its currency.

McGregor says Obama's China policy will require a balancing act “fundamentally different” from what his predecessors faced: Obama's Treasury will need to fund a budget deficit heading for $1 trillion this year and “you don't scream at your banker.” China's holdings of U.S. Treasury securities, at $653 billion, are the world's largest.

That means an increase in trade tension “is very easy for China to handle,” says Guan Anping, a managing partner of Beijing-based law firm Anjin & Partners and a legal adviser to former Vice Premier Wu Yi until 1993. “China can react by reducing its purchases of U.S. government bonds.”

Even so, the Obama administration may not need much prodding to take a harder line on the currency issue, says William Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council and a former Clinton administration trade official.

“There will be consequences,” he says. “But they will do it anyway, if only to distinguish themselves from Bush.”

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NEW YORK — Most stocks gained Friday, extending a second straight weekly advance, as President George W. Bush’s rescue plan for carmakers eased concerns about the industry’s collapse and the loss of jobs.

General Motors Corp. rallied 23 percent as Bush announced $13.4 billion in emergency loans for the largest U.S. automaker and rival Chrysler LLC. Ford Motor Co. rose 3.9 percent, while car parts supplier ArvinMeritor Inc. climbed 5.9 percent. The Dow Jones industrial average erased a 182-point advance as Citigroup Inc. slid 5.5 percent after its debt ratings were cut, while Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. retreated almost 3 percent as oil tumbled below $33 a barrel.

The Standard & Poors 500 index added 2.60, or 0.3 percent, to 887.88. The Dow fell 25.88 points, or 0.3 percent, to 8,579.11. The Nasdaq composite index gained 11.95, or 0.77 percent.

The S&P 500 extended its five-day gain to 0.9 percent, capping its first back-to-back weekly advance since September. The Dow slipped 0.6 percent in the week.

GM rallied 83 cents to $4.49, trimming its 2008 decline to 82 percent. Ford Motor Co. added 11 cents to $2.95.

ArvinMeritor climbed 19 cents to $3.42. BorgWarner Inc. climbed 4.4 percent to $21.79.

Citigroup Inc. fell 41 cents to $7.02. The bank’s senior debt was cut to A2 from Aa3.

Research In Motion Ltd pay day loan lenders. gained 11 percent to $42.83. The BlackBerry smart-phone maker forecast sales of $3.3 billion to $3.5 billion for the current quarter, topping estimates of $3 billion.

Oracle Corp. added 7 percent to $17.78.

Crude oil for January delivery fell $2.35, or 6.5 percent, to $33.87 a barrel in New York. Exxon shares fell 2.6 percent to $75.02, while Chevron declined 3 percent to $70.85.

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Darden Restaurants Inc. climbed 19 percent to $28.55.

Brinker International Inc., the owner of the Chilis Grill & Bar chain, rallied 30 percent, the most since the shares began trading in 1984, to $11.18, after its sale of Romano’s Macaroni Grill chain to Golden Capital was completed.

Weyerhaeuser Co. fell 9.5 percent to $33.59 after cutting its dividend by more than half.

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