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Fourth Quarter Results to be released next week

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Everybody is bracing themselves for an undoubtedly disastrous set of fourth quarter corporate results.

“Analysts still haven’t ratcheted down their earnings expectations enough, so we’ll probably see a lot more negative surprises than positive ones,” said Timothy Whiskey, chief investment officer at Solaris Asset management. “But offsetting this will be optimism about the new (Obama) administration.”

Nobody is going to be surprised to see any negative surprises. Companies have been laying off people faster than bloggers on the internet’s can even keep up. It seems every new ping on my Google reader is about some massive lay off, national and local.

180 companies are supposed to give their results this week. A few housing reports are scheduled as well. Some bigger names that will are on deck to release their records are Johnson & Johnson, IBM, United Technologies, Apple, eBay, Google, Microsoft, and General Electric.

It is expected that four-quarter earnings will have fallen more than 20% from a year ago according to Thomson Reuters. This is the sixth consecutive quarter where the S&P 500 index has shrunken.

John Butters, a Thomson Reuters senior research analyst said “What’s different this time is that the weakness is spreading.” Where the problem was once with the financial and the consumer discretionary sector, it is now expected that 7 out of 10 of the economic sectors will post declines.

Find out which ones by keeping tuned to Employment Crossroads.

Fourth Quarter Results to be released next week by
Authored by: Harrison Barnes