Stocks Set to Take Losses Into Day No.3
Stocks tumbled Monday for the second straight session as investors increasingly worried that Spain would need an official bailout and Greece would leave the eurozone.
But the damage could have been worse: at one point, the Dow was down 239 points. It closed lower by 101 points, the Nasdaq lost 35, and the S&P 500 gave up 12 points.
Futures Tuesday morning are flat to slightly lower. With little on the U.S. economic calendar today, investors continue to look overseas, where Moody's lowered its outlook to negative for Germany, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. That leaves Finland with the only unblemished outlook among the eurozone nations.
JC Penney (NYSE:JCP) is cashing out, literally. The struggling retailer is trying to boost its bottom line in more unconventional ways. Earlier this year, it stopped offering sales saying it would price products at sale prices every day; now, it's swapping cashiers, cash registers, and checkout counters for WiFi checkout and radio frequency identification tracking systems at all of its stores by 2014.
CEO Ron Johnson says the move will free up workers to help customers on the floor, and will save the retailer around half a billion dollars a year.
Johnson comes from Apple, where the checkout counter is more of a formality. Most customers at the tech store pay for their items with Apple representatives working on the floor using handheld devices.
One of the main issues of bringing the Apple-checkout concept successfully to JC Penney is that its customers often use cash.
And American Airlines might be bankrupt, but it's not giving up on comfort. The airline will become the first U.S. carrier to put lie-flat seats in new planes used on trans-continental flights starting next November. American will put the seats in first- and business-class sections of new Airbus A-321s that fly between New York and California. Sweet Dreams, if you can afford them.