Business & Finance
Analysts will be watching closely for signs of change as trading resumes Monday on the New York Stock Exchange. The Dow Jones Industrial Average opens at 7,986 after dropping 3.9 percent last week. Thursday's and Friday's closes were the first time in two months that the Dow has been below 8,000. The Nasdaq Composite Index and Standard & Poors also declined last week, losing 5.4 percent and 4.9 percent, respectively. Tomorrow's meeting of Federal Reserve policymakers is of key interest, analysts said. No change in record-low rates is anticipated.
Although Citibank is negotiating to avoid them, securities fraud charges may be filed as early as today against its Salomon Smith Barney unit and former analyst Jack Grubman, The Wall Street Journal reported. The expected filing by the National Association of Securities Dealers would mark the first civil action by federal securities regulators probing allegations that stock researchers gave overly rosy assessments of companies with which their employers sought to do investment-banking business. The case involves Winstar Communications Inc., which filed for bankruptcy last year.
In layoff news:
Confirming reports that surfaced back in June, Alcatel said it will cut 10,000 more jobs and warned that sales likely would not begin to rebound until year's end. Once the layoffs are complete, Europe's largest maker of telecommunications equipment will have cut almost 45,000 jobs since early last year. Alcatel is based in Paris.
CIENA Corp. announced it will cut 17 percent of its workforce, or 450 jobs. The Linthicum, Md.-based company makes multiplexing systems for such telecommunications giants as Sprint and Qwest.
Another 300 job cuts, all of them in the US, are planned by Dresdner Bank, one of Germany's largest, the Financial Times reported. The newspaper said the layoffs are a fraction of those involved in a shakeup of the company by its parent, the giant Allianz insurance group. As many as 3,000 employees ultimately could be let go under a program expected to be detailed at a news conference Thursday, it said. Last week, 270 jobs in the bank's investments division in London were cut. Dresdner Bank reported just under $1 billion in losses in the year's first half.
