NEW YORK (Reuters) – The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq rose on Tuesday as better-than-expected factory orders and a surge in vehicle sales at Ford Motor Co (F.N) provided more evidence of an economic recovery.
But a big decline in pending home sales, which fell in November for the first time in nine months, increased concerns about the housing market. That capped the broad market's gains and pushed the Dow industrials into the red a day after all three major U.S. stock indexes rose to their highest levels in over a year.
For the past month, stocks have advanced as investors bet on a series of better-than-expected economic indicators. Much of that optimism appeared to remain intact on Tuesday as S&P indexes for the financial, materials and energy sectors ended the day higher.
Tuesday marked a new 15-month closing high for the S&P 500 and a 16-month closing high for the Nasdaq.
"There is nothing in here to suggest that investors are backing away at all from the sentiment expressed yesterday, which is one of increased optimism about the global recovery," said Craig Peckham, equity trading strategist at Jefferies & Company in New York.
Peckham pointed to what he termed a "slow and measured march higher" in expectations for a better reading in Friday's non-farm payrolls report.
The Dow Jones industrial average (.DJI) fell 11.94 points, or 0.11 percent, to end at 10,572.02. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index (.SPX) rose 3.53 points, or 0.31 percent, to finish at 1,136.52. The Nasdaq Composite Index (.IXIC) crept up just 0.29 of a point, or 0.01 percent, to close at 2,308.71.
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Ford Motor Co (F.N) surged 6.6 percent to $10.96, hitting a 4-1/2-year closing high following its report that its December sales shot up 33 percent year-over-year, ending a tumultuous 12 months when rivals GM and Chrysler collapsed into bankruptcy. Earlier in the session, Ford's stock climbed to an intraday high of $11.23.
Earlier Tuesday, the government said U.S. factory orders rose more than expected in November. The report, which suggested the manufacturing sector will continue to support a recovery, was released one day after the Institute for Supply Management's index of manufacturing activity beat estimates.
Financials, energy, materials and consumer discretionary stocks gave the biggest boosts to the S&P 500 in a muted rerun of Monday's rally free insurance quotes.
The S&P financial index (.GSPF) led the wider market higher, rising 1.7 percent, with Citigroup ending up 3.8 percent at $3.53 on the New York Stock Exchange.
HOME SALES SWING BOTH WAYS
Pending home sales from the National Association of Realtors fell 16 percent in November compared with economists' expectations for a 2 percent drop.
But stocks of most home builders rose, sending the Dow Jones home construction index (.DJUSHB) up 1.8 percent. Some analysts said the home sales numbers may have been skewed due to confusion caused by the government's home tax credit, which was set to expire in November, but it was eventually extended to April.
"I think people are more willing to shake off these November pending home sales numbers and focus more on that factory orders number," said Marc Pado, U.S. market strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. in San Francisco.
The U.S. dollar edged up 0.15 percent against a basket of major currencies (.DXY), curbing gains in the materials and energy sectors. The S&P materials index (.GSPM) advanced 0.5 percent, while an S&P energy index (.GSPE) rose 0.8 percent.
U.S. oil futures rose 0.32 percent, or 26 cents, to settle at $81.77 a barrel, the highest closing price since October 9, 2008. This marked the ninth day of gains for oil futures prices.
The Dow's top performer was Kraft Foods Inc (KFT.N), which gained 4.9 percent to $28.77 after Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway (BRKa.N) voted "no" on the company's proposal to issue 370 million shares to help finance its proposed purchase of British chocolate candy maker Cadbury Plc (CBRY.L).
Volume was light on the New York Stock Exchange, with 1.19 billion shares changing hands, below last year's estimated daily average of 2.18 billion. On the Nasdaq, about 2.39 billion shares traded.
Advancing stocks outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by a ratio of 3 to 2. On the Nasdaq, the opposite trend prevailed, with five stocks falling for every four that rose.
(Reporting by Edward Krudy; Editing by Jan Paschal)
NEW YORK – The new year could be brighter for luxury retailers, as improving stock markets and economic conditions pave the way for a potential recovery, an analyst said Monday.
While shoppers remained budget conscious in 2009 and flocked to discount retailers, Randal Konik of Jefferies & Co. said luxury retailers like Tiffany & Co. and Ulta Salon, Cosmetics & Fragrance Inc. will be among those that could see improved business in 2010.
The analyst upgraded both Tiffany and Ulta to "Buy" from "Hold."
Konik also said in a client note that increased cost pressures will push down operating leverage during the second half of the year guaranteed payday loan. Operating leverage is a measurement of the degree to which a company relies on a combination of fixed and variable costs.
That would leave retailers that rely on sales growth to look for other ways achieve higher earnings in order to prop up their business.
The analyst cut American Eagle Outfitters Inc., Chico's FAS Inc. and Gap Inc. to "Hold" from "Buy" and reduced AnnTaylor Stores Corp., Ross Stores Inc. and TJX Cos. to "Underperform" from "Hold."
NEW YORK, Jan. 2 (Xinhua) -- A recent New York Times/CBS News poll has found that more than half of Americans said they are spending less money in stores and online.
A New York Times report available on its website Saturday quotes the poll as saying that nearly half of Americans said they were spending less time buying nonessentials.
"Some are working longer hours, but a larger proportion are spending additional time with family and friends, gardening, cooking, reading, watching television and engaging in other hobbies," says the report.
The report also quotes the U.S. Department of Labor's time-use survey as showing that compared with 2005, Americans spent less time in 2008 buying goods and services and more time cooking or taking part in "organizational, civic and religious activities."
However, people spent more time on cultural events last year, says the Times. "While one new study shows that attendance at museums and cultural events dropped from 2002 to 2008, it has climbed in 2009 at many major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago instant credit report. Movie attendance was also up 5 percent in 2009."
"It's a different kind of recession," the paper quotes Richard Florida, the author of several best-selling books about the economics of cities as saying. "It's not like in the '30s when people stopped going to concerts. Now people seem to be keeping up with experience consumption and cutting back on other necessities."
There are, of course, potential problems as the United States drops old habits of consumption, says the paper. "On the macro level, economists worry that it could undermine a recovery."
The News Corporation and Time Warner Cable struck a deal just in time for the Sugar Bowl.
The two companies said Friday evening that they had agreed on new terms for a contract covering Fox stations in New York, Los Angeles, Orlando and other markets, averting a blackout of the weekend’s college bowl games in millions of homes. They did not disclose the terms.
The deal between the News Corporation and Time Warner caps weeks of sparring over the price that the cable company and by extension its customers should pay to watch Fox, ahead of an end-of-the-year contract expiration.
Analysts had expected that the deal would set a new high-water mark for local TV stations that want sizable subscriber fees in exchange for so-called retransmission rights.
In tense negotiations with Time Warner Cable, Fox had demanded about a dollar a subscriber per month, far more than other stations have received. Time Warner Cable thought 30 cents was more reasonable, said people briefed on the talks who insisted on anonymity because the specifics of the talks were confidential.
Most likely, the two companies reached a compromise on the price, but both refused to comment Friday on the figure.
“We’re pleased that, after months of negotiations, we were able to reach a fair agreement with Time Warner Cable one that recognizes the value of our programming,” said Chase Carey, the president of News Corporation, in a statement.
Time Warner Cable’s president, Glenn Britt, called it a “reasonable deal.”
Meanwhile, customers of another major cable operator, Cablevision, were reminded Friday of what can happen when carriage talks break down. The Food Network and HGTV were unexpectedly removed from Cablevision’s lineups in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut shortly after the stroke of midnight, sending angry customers to their keyboards and phones to demand answers. Cable and satellite operators pay media firms for the right to carry channels, and those fees are reflected in customers’ bills.
Cable operators have historically resisted paying directly for the right to retransmit stations, but they have softened their stance in recent years, and some stations now receive between 10 cents and 40 cents a month per subscriber.
Fox asserted it deserved more. Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman, has positioned the company as a leader in “creating an economic template for the future.” Every cent represents millions of dollars in monthly revenue.
Analysts say the Fox station group’s aggressive stance could benefit other broadcasters. In a report last month, analysts at UBS said the current dispute was “likely a harbinger of things to come as consumers have more alternatives to cable than ever before,” giving programmers more leverage in negotiations payday loan online.
The big fee for Fox was part of a larger package of News Corporation channel renewals, which put cable channels like FX at similar risk of vanishing from Time Warner Cable systems, at least temporarily.
Fee negotiations are usually conducted discreetly, and deals are often completed close to their deadlines without viewers ever knowing. But Fox’s clash with Time Warner Cable broke out in public in November when the cable operator started a campaign to hold the line on programmer fee increases.
Some networks, it said on its Web site, “are trying to boost their bottom line by squeezing cable TV viewers like you and threatening to pull the plug on popular shows if we don’t roll over.”
Networks say the fee increases are a matter of survival or at least are necessary to keep producing quality programming.
Time Warner Cable representatives traveled to Los Angeles for talks with News Corporation early in the week. Under pressure from the government and from viewers to stave off a blackout, representatives for both sides met in a conference room on the Fox studio lot at 10 a.m. Pacific time on Thursday, and talks continued through Friday evening, said an executive briefed on the talks who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The Fox negotiators had the option to pull the plug after the contract expired early Friday morning, but they decided to keep talking.
On the other side, the Food Network and HGTV outage affected about 3.1 million subscribers in the New York metropolitan area on Friday. The owner of the popular channels, Scripps Networks, says it deserves more cash for them. “The distribution rates Cablevision pays for Food and HGTV are among the lowest in the industry,” said Kenneth W. Lowe, the chief executive of Scripps Networks Interactive.
According to the research firm SNL Kagan, distributors pay about 8 cents on average for Food Network and 13 cents for HGTV. Scripps was believed to be asking for about triple that amount, or roughly 25 cents for Food and 40 cents for HGTV.
Cablevision took a hard line in its own statement Friday, saying that it had “no expectation of carrying” Scripps’s programming again, “given the dramatic changes in their approach to working with distributors to reach television viewers.”
Scripps’s contracts with Time Warner Cable also expired on Dec. 31, but those two companies continued talking into the new year without an interruption in programming.
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- U.S. stocks slipped Thursday after better-than-expected weekly unemployment data stoked worries that a strengthening economic recovery could prompt the Federal Reserve to move more quickly to raise interest rates.
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In the last trading day of the year, the Dow Jones Industrial Average recently dropped 30 points, or 0.3%, to 10,519, but remained on track for its best year since 2003. Hewlett-Packard Co. and Caterpillar Inc. weighed on the measure, with H-P down 1.2% and Caterpillar off 1%. Walt Disney Co. was the Dow's best performer, up 0.9%.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index dropped 0.2%, while the Standard & Poor's 500 Index edged down less than 1%, shored up by a strong financial sector.
In recent weeks, strong economic data have stopped fueling further market gains, instead leaving investors fretting that the Fed may be prompted to unwind some of its financial stimulus or raise interest rates.
Thursday morning's drop in the stock market came after the Labor Department reported that weekly jobless claims fell to their lowest level in 18 months. Read more about jobless claims.
"A lot of improvement, that would force the Fed to raise interest rates, which is the No. 1 fear for traders," said Keith Springer, president of Capital Financial Advisory Services. Investors are already accustomed to seeing the labor market improve, he said online payday loans.
"What's really going to fuel the market now is earnings," Springer added.
Alan Lancz, president of Alan B. Lancz & Associates, said market watchers have already factored in a recovering economic picture, and investors tracking a "V"-shaped recovery think the market is halfway up its ascent.
"These economic numbers have to continue to be better than consensus for the market to continue to fuel further gains," Lancz said.
Still, stocks are on track to rise about 20% for 2009 after a booming 61% rally from its March 9 low -- the strongest rebound since 1933.
American Express Co. was the Dow's strongest performer in 2009, rising 120% as of Wednesday's close. Microsoft Corp. also climbed in 2009, gaining 59%. Exxon Mobil Corp. dropped 14% over the year as of Wednesday.
In other markets, the dollar rose against both the yen and the euro. The U.S. dollar index , which represents the greenback against a basket of six other currencies, was up 0.1%.
Oil futures and gold futures rose, while Treasurys sank. The 10-year note was recently off 13/16 to yield 3.896%.
Among stocks in focus, American Tower Corp. rose 0.2% in recent trading after the operator of wireless communications sites began talks to acquire a controlling stake in India's Essar Telecom Infrastructure, in a deal valued at around 20 billion rupees ($429.1 million).
Trading volume is expected to remain light throughout the day. Markets will be closed Friday for the New Year's Day holiday.
Cupping their hands near holes drilled for cable routing, workers at the Boeing Company’s four-acre data processing site near Seattle noticed this year that air used to keep the computers cool was seeping through floor openings.
Mindful of the company’s drive to slash electricity consumption by 25 percent, they tucked insulation into holes there and at five similar sites. The resulting savings are projected at $55,000, or some 685,000 kilowatt hours of electricity a year.
Yet Boeing’s goal is not just to save money. The hope is to keep pace with other companies that have joined in a vast global experiment in tracking the carbon dioxide emissions generated by industry.
Boeing and other enterprises are voluntarily doing what some might fiercely resist being forced to do: submitting detailed reports on how much they emit, largely through fossil fuel consumption, to a central clearinghouse.
The information flows to the Carbon Disclosure Project, a small nonprofit organization based in London that sifts through the numbers and generates snapshots by industry sectors in different nations.
By giving enterprises a road map for measuring their emissions and pointing out how they compare with their peers, experts say, the voluntary project is persuading companies to change their energy practices well before many governments step in to regulate emissions.
Scientists estimate that industry and energy providers produce nearly 45 percent of the heat-trapping emissions that contribute to global warming. While some governments are convinced that reining in such pollution is crucial to protecting the atmosphere, a binding global pact is not on the immediate horizon, as negotiations in Copenhagen showed this month.
Until broad regulation is at hand, many investors and company executives say, voluntary reporting programs like the Carbon Disclosure Project may be the best way to leverage market forces for change.
They say the project sends a message that a company that moves to curb emissions now is girded for the future and therefore worthy of investment.
“With the regulatory framework changing, how companies handle carbon is a core risk factor,” said Jack Ehnes, chief executive of Calstrs, the California teachers’ pension fund. “Smart companies will take C.D.P. information and realign their strategies.”
Mary Armstrong, Boeing’s vice president for environment, health and safety, traces her company’s energy focus back to 2007, when she first saw the forms that companies fill out for the disclosure project.
“The questions take you through and say, ‘Do you have environmental performance targets?’ We didn’t, but now we do,” she said. The companies’ individual responses are posted at the project’s Web site.
In contrast to the United States, European Union countries already regulate carbon dioxide emissions from their most energy-intensive industries through a cap and trade program, and Japan polices energy consumption itself.
Paul Dickinson, the founder and chief executive of the Carbon Disclosure Project, is quick to acknowledge that his group is no substitute for muscular government regulation. But he argues that the voluntary project offers a frictionless path toward reining in emissions, even in relatively unregulated markets like China’s and India’s. Emissions are expected to soar in those fast-growing economies in coming years as new coal-fired plants go online.
Yet even as the Carbon Disclosure Project has established itself as the standard for emissions measurement methods, it has stirred some skepticism. Critics say that the emissions figures do not have to be verified through external audits, as financial figures from publicly traded companies must be.
And some argue that the project rewards companies that would have cut their carbon dioxide output anyway, and has no influence over polluting companies that refuse to take part.
Nonetheless, 2,500 of the world’s largest companies completed at least part of the project’s questionnaire last year, from the energy conglomerate Gazprom in Russia to Huaxin Cement in China.
In the United States, where almost only the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index were solicited by the disclosure project, some 330 filled out forms this year. Some companies do not answer all of the questions. But the most detailed reports specify not only how much energy a company consumes, and how, but also ticks off ways in which it might be vulnerable to climate change flooded stores, for example.
Industry is a broad and varied category, of course, covering everything from cement and chemical makers, which emit an enormous amount of carbon dioxide, to data-driven businesses like financial services, which emit little by comparison payday advances.
The disclosure project has response rates of at least 60 percent for most industry sectors in the United States. But it has even higher rates for utilities, which are highly regulated, and materials companies, which include cement and chemical makers. It has received responses from energy titans like Chevron and chemical companies like DuPont.
To drum up more and better reporting, the project has enlisted major investors like Calstrs, the nation’s second-largest pension program, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch to co-sign letters from the project encouraging companies to take part.
Mr. Dickinson said the project writes letters on behalf of 475 investor groups representing $55 trillion in funds worldwide.
Some American companies have argued that reporting is cumbersome and could allow competitors to learn too much about their manufacturing processes. But proponents counter that the monitoring could give some of them a competitive advantage as early adopters.
In September, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it could require the nation’s biggest power plants and industrial operations to report greenhouse gas emissions as early as 2011. The United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers have firmly opposed such regulation, saying that it would be legally and technically burdensome, drive up fuel costs by promoting renewable sources and send job overseas.
But nations that have already pressed ahead with regulations are prodding the United States to match their efforts. The European Union has been monitoring and limiting carbon dioxide emissions from its most energy-intensive sectors since 2005 through a cap and trade program.
Since 2003 Japan has required companies of any size to report energy consumption to the government and what they are doing to reduce use. Mr. Dickinson argues that disclosure could prove a means of currying investor favor in international markets as the global awareness of industry’s role in climate change deepens.
“I have real confidence that the corporations of the world are going to outperform government in terms of dealing with climate change,” he said. “In fact, they are already.”
His vision for carbon transparency dates back to 1997, when he entered a master’s program on responsible business practices at the University of Bath School of Management taught by Anita Roddick, the founder of The Body Shop.
After graduating, he solicited philanthropists, including Ted Turner, and went about developing reliable ways to measure output. Then he reached out to large investors to co-sign letters demanding that companies fill out the project’s forms. Until 2002, the forms spoke only of “the perception” of climate change because global warming was still “too controversial,” he said.
Some analysts now laud the program as an innovative way of encouraging investors to factor industry emissions into assessments of corporate performance.
Abyd Karmali, global head of carbon markets for Bank of America, likens the disclosure project to the advent of general accounting principles, which enable investors to compare financial performance and move dollars accordingly.
“It is very difficult to translate carbon-related risk into standardized disclosure, so it is a fantastic contribution,” he said.
But others have their doubts. “There is disclosure, and then so what?” said Hewson Baltzell, the co-founder of Innovest, a financial research firm that gathered figures for the disclosure project the first several years. “They’ve dipped their toe in the water on asking companies about performance, but not very far.”
Mr. Dickinson counters that the project has added evaluations that rate companies by concrete steps taken to cut their emissions. It now also asks companies to calculate emissions of their suppliers, in the hope of leveraging the power that a giant like Wal-Mart might have over those that are otherwise unwilling to report.
Rob Bernard, chief environmental strategist for Microsoft, which is helping the project make its data more accessible to the public, says the impact of the reports is growing.
“With each year we are able to compare performance on greenhouse gas information with new levels of granularity,” he said. “Now we just have to hope that more people read it and care.”
TOKYO — Australian shares rose on Tuesday, helped by gains in oil and metals and by merger activity, but stock markets elsewhere in Asia lagged as year-end activity dwindled, and the dollar’s rally ran out of steam.
Oil held below $79 a barrel after setting a five-week high on Monday on expectations that colder weather in the United States and signs of economic recovery would help demand, while copper prices surged.
In Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 average was flat after briefly four-month high, while the MSCI index for Asia excluding Japan edged up 0.2 percent but was still some way off matching the 2009 high hit in November.
Shares in Australia outperformed, rising 1.2 percent to a nine-week peak as the farm chemicals group Nufarm agreed to sell a stake of up to 20 percent to Sumitomo Chemical Corp. of Japan for around $590 million. BHP Billiton, the world’s biggest miner, gained about 1.4 percent to its highest in nearly 18 months and Newcrest Mining, Australia’s largest gold miner, rose 0.6 percent.
“There were some gains in gold and oil prices and so that’s giving a little bit of momentum to the market,” said Juliana Roadley, a market analyst at Commonwealth Securities in Sydney.
Spot gold fell to $1,102.55 an ounce from New York’s notional close of $1,105.60.
Copper prices rose to their highest in 16 months as trading in London Metal Exchange contracts resumed after a four-day holiday, chasing gains made in Shanghai over the break. The gains came after a fall in exchange stocks and threats to supply in Chile.
In Japan, shares of exporters that had led recent gains ran out of steam, while trading houses like Mitsui & Co Payday Loan for Bad Credit. climbed as commodity prices rose.
“Caution will also be necessary as we head into the new year. It’s hard to think the market will just keep rising as there’s still a chance it could very well test another trough,” said Yutaka Miura, a senior technical analyst at Mizuho Securities.
Twenty years ago, around the peak of Japan’s asset price bubble, the Nikkei marked a record high of 38,915.87, nearly four times the current level. The benchmark hit a 26-year closing low last March but has clawed back about 50 percent since then.
Japan Airlines plunged more than 9 percent after people with knowledge of the situation said a state-backed turnaround fund may seek to put the struggling airline through bankruptcy court as part of restructuring efforts.
Shanghai shares were flat. Shares in the Chinese train maker CNR Corp., which raised $2 billion this month in an initial public share offering, rose 3 percent in a weaker-than-expected debut.
“The weak debut is actually good for the market, as it sends a warning for future IPOs, forcing companies to think twice before they set sky-high IPO prices,” said Chen Huiqin, a senior stock analyst at Huatai Securities in Nanjing.
The dollar held firm at 91.72 yen and $1.4360 per euro but failed to push on with its rally of the past few weeks.
Traders said upward pressure on long-term U.S. Treasury yields was providing it with support, after the benchmark 10-year note yield rose to its highest in nearly five months.
Reuters
Hot News: Japan retail sales down 1.0% in Nov.
BEIJING — Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China struck a defiant note Sunday about the country’s exchange rate policy, saying the government would not give in to foreign demands that it let the renminbi rise in value.
Mr. Wen said in an interview with Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, that the currency was facing growing pressure to appreciate, but he insisted that China was committed to keeping it stable, having virtually pegged it to the dollar since the global financial crisis worsened in the middle of last year.
“We will not yield to any pressure of any form forcing us to appreciate,” he said. As I have told my foreign friends, on one hand, you are asking for the yuan to appreciate, and on the other hand, you are taking all kinds of protectionist measures.” The renminbi is known informally as the yuan.
The true purpose of these calls is to contain China’s development, he said.
The renminbi has fallen against the currencies of most of China’s trading partners this year because it has been fixed to the weakening dollar, while China’s economy has bounced back strongly. U.S. senators have asked for an investigation into whether current renminbi policy represents a subsidy that would justify tariffs on Chinese imports.
Mr. Wen also repeated an oft-made declaration that the stable renminbi had contributed to the global economic recovery.
He gave a cautious outlook for the domestic economy in 2010, saying that it was too early to pare down the government’s stimulus policies but that officials needed to be attentive to surging real estate prices and incipient inflation bad credit cash loans.
Although China will continue to encourage citizens to buy homes for their own use, differentiated interest rates will be used as a tool to fight property market speculation, Mr. Wen said.
He was apparently referring to a proposal that China keep offering preferential mortgages — at a discount of as much as 30 percent from benchmark lending rates — for people buying their first homes but eliminate such mortgages for additional home purchases.
More broadly, Mr. Wen warned of rising imbalances from too much bank lending while defending China’s use of a stimulus package worth 4 trillion renminbi, or $586 billion, to limit the effects of the global economic crisis.
“Parts of the economy are not balanced, not coordinated and not sustainable,” Mr. Wen said, repeating previous statements. He added that it would be better if lending by Chinese banks were not on such a large scale.
China’s overall lending situation improved in the second half of the year, when banks drastically slowed their pace of credit issuance after a record surge in the first half, Mr. Wen said. Chinese banks are on course to lend an unprecedented 9.5 trillion renminbi this year, double the total of the previous year.
Reuters
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Koss Corp (KOSS.O) fired its vice president of finance after she allegedly embezzled more than $20 million from the headphones maker for a multi-year shopping spree of expensive clothes, jewelry and other personal items.
The executive, Sujata "Sue" Sachdeva, who is in her mid-40s, held the position at Koss since 1992.
Koss, which reported first-quarter sales of $10.8 million, also said on Thursday financial statements at least since the end of its 2006 fiscal year should no longer be relied upon.
The Milwaukee, Wisconsin company also said it placed two members of the accounting staff, who served under Sachdeva, on unpaid administrative leave.
Sachdeva allegedly used company funds to pay down her personal credit card bills, which totaled more than $4.5 million between January 1, 2008 and December 19, 2009, according to a criminal complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney's Office in a Wisconsin federal court.
Preliminary estimates indicate that the amount of unauthorized transactions since fiscal year 2006 may exceed $20 million, Koss said. Sachdeva's total compensation for fiscal year 2009 was $173,734, according to a regulatory filing.
Sachdeva racked up bills that often ran into hundreds of thousands of dollars, including spending nearly $1.4 million at Valentina Boutique, a high-end shop in Mequon, Wisconin, the complaint showed.
A reviewer on Yelp, a local search and review provider, says the store's selection of clothes, jewelry and accessories are "like exquisite works of art, but not in that weird, unwearable way -- more in that 'I've been dreaming about this dress, necklace, whatever and didn't know it existed!' way."
"Oh lord if I had five million dollars I would high tail it over to Valentina and go NUTS," the reviewer, identified as Katie W fast cash without a hassle. of Chicago, wrote in a December 5, 2007 entry.
Sachdeva spent liberally elsewhere as well. Among her other bills were: a $670,000 tab at women's clothing store Au Courant in Milwaukee; $649,000 from Zita Bridal Salon in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin; and $255,000 in purchases from Karat 22 Jewelers in Houston, Texas.
The alleged fraud was discovered when American Express noticed that a customer's personal card account balances were being paid via several large wire transfers, originating from a Koss bank account.
Amex told the company's chief executive, Michael Koss, who found credit card statements in Sachdeva's name and "several large piles of women's clothing, with the price tags still attached," in her office.
Sachdeva acknowledged to the FBI that she had been using her position at Koss to authorize wire transfers to pay her personal credit card bills, and that she falsified the balance in Koss's bank account to hide the fact, according to the complaint.
Sachdeva's next court hearing is set for January 11, her lawyer, Michael Hart, said on Friday.
Hart declined to comment further, saying it would be "inappropriate for me to comment at this juncture."
Koss' internal investigation, supervised by an independent committee of the board, is continuing, as are efforts to recover merchandise related to the unauthorized transactions, it said.
(Reporting by Paritosh Bansal, editing by Leslie Gevirtz)
MEXICO CITY, Dec. 24 (Xinhua) -- Food prepared by Mexicans at traditional Christmas parties will cost 12 percent more than a year earlier, far outstripping the general inflation of 3.8 percent, said a study published by Mexican media Thursday.
The study said a meal of turkey, leg of pork, cod and apple salad generally costs some 1,930 pesos (150 U.S. dollars).
The dish that has risen most is cod, up 16 percent in price this year.
From the list of ingredients, the sugar used in the apple salad has risen the most, with a 79-percent price gain.
Potatoes, which are cooked alongside turkey and pork, have risen 51 percent, while olives, used in the stuffing, are 41 percent more expensive payday loans for people with bad credit.
Meanwhile, turkey is 35 percent more expensive compared with a year earlier.
The National Poultry Farmers' Union estimates 2.8 million birds will be consumed between Dec. 24, the traditional start of the Christmas holiday, and Dec. 31. The week accounts for 95 percent of the demands for the bird in Mexico, according to the Union.
Inflation of Mexican Christmas meal 3 times higher than general
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