Filed under: Press releases, Products and services, Pfizer (PFE), Procter and Gamble (PG)

This is why Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG) is one of my favorite stocks that I don’t currently own. In a recent press release, the consumer-products giant speaks about Americans and its quest not to become ill via bacterial/viral infections. And, as you can envision, the company offers up a solution, one that sounds care about it will become yet another viable brand extension to its vast portfolio of popular products.

The product being promoted in the release is Vicks Early Defense Foaming Hand Sanitizer. The claim here is that it can afford germ-protection for a few hours after use. It sounds like an interesting item, but I must state, the press release is not only hilarious, but it’s downright frightening, especially to someone like myself; yes, I admit it — I am a germaphobe. I carry Pfizer’s (NYSE: PFE) Purell everywhere I go, and I have emergency stashes in my car and jacket pockets; I wipe down keyboards, faucets, the whole bit (I even do this at my workplace in a proactive manner). I use nearly an entire bottle a day. The release talks about people refusing to shake hands and even being so frightened of sickness that some go so far as to avoid kissing!

Let me tell you — I am one of those people who hates doorknobs and shaking hands with others, so I think P&G has hit upon a nice product here; it’s very marketable, at least. And again, this is why I love P&G and believe it to be a great long-term play — it’s all about a great product portfolio driving dividend increases over time. Companies like Clorox (NYSE: CLX), Colgate-Palmolive (NYSE: CL), and Kimberly-Clark (NYSE: KMB) also are worth a look, but P&G is definitely an icon in this sector.

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Filed under: Products and services, Management, Industry, India, Economic data, S and P 500, DJIA, Small business, Technology, Recession, NASDAQ

My colleague, Aaron Katsman, and I’ve been discussing a web project recently. We decided to farm it out for bids on the web to a firm called Elance. Elance is an outsourcing marketplace bringing together people who need work done with service providers around the world. Participants are engaged in labor arbitrage, a practice of sending work where work is cheapest. We received one bid back from an Indian partner that was outrageous. It would have been cheaper to do the work locally in the U.S.

Which brings me to my point. With the dollar’s decline and the growing affluence abroad, it’s getting cheaper and cheaper to do the work domestically — which might spell the end of Indian outsourcing.

Professor Mark Perry had an interesting post recently entitled just that, The Coming Death of Indian Outsourcing? While the title of the post ended in a ‘?’, Perry sounds pretty dour on the future of the disparity between Indian labor and that in the U.S.

The moneyline: “Assuming a 15% year-to-year salary hike rate, and a 2007 cost advantage of 1:3 in favor of India, if U.S. wages remain constant, India’s cost advantage disappears by 2015. Then what?”

While there will always be international labor arbitrage, the U.S. might be in the early stages of seeing some of the business it’s lost to overseas providers the past couple of years come back to it.

Can you envision Silicon Valley cheaper than Bangalore?

Zack Miller is the managing editor of IsraelNewsletter.com and a former equity analyst for a leading multinational hedge fund.

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Filed under: Products and services, Launches, Industry, Intel (INTC), Research in Motion (RIMM)

Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) is introducing a new set of ultra-small chips [subscription required], some of them to power mini-computers that are unusually portable for consumers. According to The Wall Street Journal, “One chip, previously known by the code name Silverthorne, is designed to be the calculating engine for pocket-sized gadgets that Intel calls MIDs, for mobile Internet devices.”

Contrary to Intel’s hopes, the market might be a tiny opportunity. Smartphones are already taking on most of the functions that could be found on a mini-computer. They have e-mail, navigation, web access and texting capacity. Some grant for the download of documents and other data. For most effects, Research-In-Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM)’s Blackberry and high-end smartphones coming to market from a number of handset companies already serve the large majority of the needs of people who want a portable computing device.

Intel might be entering a market that’s already very crowded and has little interest in adopting its technology.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

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Filed under: Forecasts, Consumer experience, Economic data, Commodities, Oil, Housing, Federal Reserve, Recession

Over the past six or eight months we’ve heard more and more chatter about the dreaded “R” word. The dreaded “R” word being recession, and depending on who you listen to, you’ve either been laughing at the possibility of America sliding into a recession, or you have been preparing for the inevitable.

Well, now, trusted billionaire Warren Buffett has come out and said that America is already “essentially” in a recession. Buffett is basing his stance on numbers he has seen from his retail business that show a significant slow down in spending. While he has stated that we have basically already entered into recessionary times, he stopped short of predicting just how bad things would get.

While we might not be technically in a recession period, according to Buffett, we are in the middle of a commonsense recession. Not only does he see retail spending on the decline, but also pointed to the fact that an untold millions of Americans have had the misfortune of watching their homes shrink in value, a scenario that has yet to reverse.

So what’s the source of the recession confusion? Well, technically speaking, in order to qualify as a recession, America must have back to back quarters of negative GDP growth. This definition does not hold true at the current time. Last week, we were given economic figured for the fourth quarter of last year, which showed that for the 3 months ending December 31, the economy grew at a measly 0.6% rate. Not a pretty picture, but definitely breaks the technical definition of a “true recession”.

What are the rest of the “market experts” out there thinking about the current situation? In a recent poll, around 45% of economists polled by National Association for Business Economics are operating under the impression that the economy will definitely fall into a recession during this calendar year.

Adding more concern to economic growth has been the current surging of oil prices, which surpassed previous inflation adjusted highs this day. Oil prices and the economy are in a vicious cycle right now. Oil has been rising as inflation concerns have led many to believe that America is going to have to continue to cut rates to fight off a recession, which would lower the value of the dollar and push oil higher. At the same time, the higher oil goes, the more of a drain on the economy it will become, which led U.S President Bush to plea for OPEC to lift its output earlier this year… a plea that OPEC didn’t allow the American President.

Have we passed the point of no return? It seems like all the signals are pointing to a full blown recession later this year, but will we get to the point of a truly technical recession? Or will we just continue to “walk the line” between pulling ourselves out of these hard times and just dropping off the edge?

Only time will tell. What are the thoughts of our BloggingStocks readers? Do you concur with Buffett that we’ve already started a recession, or do you think Buffett is just over-reacting? And if you think we’re still not in a recession, do you see one coming before the end of the year?

Let us hear your thoughts on this!

Michael Fowlkes has worked as a stock trader for seven years and spent the last four years working as an analyst for the online investment advisory service Investor’s Observer.

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Ponca City, We Love You writes “In the past few years, scientists have looked to viruses as potential allies in fighting cancer. Now researchers at Yale University have found a virus in the same family as rabies that effectively kills an aggressive form of human brain cancer in mice. Using time-lapse laser imaging, the team watched vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) rapidly home in on brain tumors, selectively killing cancerous cells in its path, while leaving healthy tissue intact. ‘A metastasizing tumor is fairly mobile, and a surgeon’s knife can’t get out all of the cells,’ says Anthony Van den Pol, lead researcher and professor of neurosurgery and neurobiology at Yale. ‘A virus might be able to do that, because as a virus kills a tumor cell, it could also replicate, and you could end up with a therapy that’s self-amplifying.’ It’s not yet clear why VSV is such an effective tumor killer, although Van den Pol has several theories. One possible explanation might involve a tumor’s weak vascular system. Vessels that supply blood to tumors tend to be leaky, allowing a virus traveling through the bloodstream to cross an otherwise impermeable barrier into the brain, directly into a tumor.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Filed under: Bad news, Economic data, Housing, Recession

U.S. construction spending declined 1.7% in January 2008, as private builders continued to pull-back amid the housing slump, the U.S. Commerce Department announced Monday.

Economists surveyed by Bloomberg News had expected construction spending to decline 0.7% in January 2008. Construction spending is down 3.3% on a year-over-year basis.

Meanwhile, the December 2007 construction spending statistic was revised downward, to a 1.3% decline, from the earlier announced 1.1% decline, the Commerce Department said.

In January 2008, private residential construction declined 2.9%, public construction dropped 0.2%

Spending on private construction totaled a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of $827.4 billion, 2.2% (plus/minus 1.1%) below the revised December 2007 estimate of $845.7 billion. The estimated seasonally-adjusted annual rate of public construction spending was $294.1 billion, 0.2% (plus/minus 0.8%) below the revised December 2007 estimate of $294.7 billion.

Economic Analysis: Another negative data point for the U.S. economy. The telling stat: a 3.3% year-over-year decline in construction spending. Further, the January 2008 private construction statistic contained declines in nearly each category, which recommends that building continues to contract across-the-board. Further, the 2.9% decline in private residential construction indicates that builders continue to retreat from the housing sector, a statistic that’s consistent with other recent data indicating slowing home sales and rising inventories.

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Filed under: Bad news, Economic data, Housing, Recession

It is hard to believe that economists could get more down-in-the-mouth, but that’s exactly what is happening. The National Association for Business Economists did a poll of members over the first half of this month. According to Reuters, “Of the members polled for the NABE semiannual Economic Policy Survey, 52 percent said the combined threat of subprime mortgage defaults and heavy debt was their No. 1 concern, up from 32 percent in August.”

Concerns about inflation weren’t even close.

The information is part of a growing body of concerns from experts watching the housing and financial markets that things could get much, much worse as the year goes on. The fact is that mortgage rates haven’t come down much because banks don’t want to take on more lending risk. The government’s program to help troubled homeowners is still locked in a fight between the Administration and Congress.

On top of these housing problems, default rates on credit cards are starting to grow, a sign that consumers are now overwhelmed by debt and can no longer tap the equity in their home for a cushion.

If these things are true, financial instruments based on subprime mortgages and consumer credit will continue to lose value. Banks, brokerage companies and insurance firms will be faced with more write-offs, perhaps much greater than those they took in 2007.

The mess might be so great that there will be no recovery for housing and the financial sector this year.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

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WirePosted writes “A CDC research study released this past week indicates that the physical and mental health of many Americans is being adversely affected by a lack of sleep. According to the study, a part of the organization’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, one in ten US citizens are consistently failing to get enough sleep every night. Almost 40% of the people surveyed didn’t get enough sleep for more than a week every month. The article notes that this trend can have far-ranging implications for health beyond easy fatigue.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Timmy writes “Wired Science has picked ten of the ideal videos from YouTube and their own show on PBS to highlight the wonderful things chemistry can do. Only four of them involve fire or explosions. The rest range from music videos about the polymerase chain reaction to reactions that repeatedly change color. One shows how to pour sodium acetate stalagmites. Another shows Chris Hardwick giving instructions for building a glow stick while making absurd comments.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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electrostatic writes “In a Nature.com oldie-but-goodie, a physicist states he has solved a problem that costs airlines millions each year: what’s the quickest way to get passengers aboard an aircraft? Boarding is a serious issue for airlines, particularly those operating short flights that run several times a day, yet boarding times have steadily increased for decades. Back in 2005 Jason Steffen of the Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois stated the method used by many airlines to this day is almost the worst. ‘The ideal way to board, according to the researchers, would be a row-by-row, seat-by-seat, strict order. That would mean everyone lines up, row 25 first. I can’t imagine fliers will go for that. Next best, they state, would be boarding all the window seats first, followed by those in the aisle. Obviously that’s not practical, at least for couples or families traveling together.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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