BUSINESS BRIEFS
Reports due on quarter earnings
By Advertiser Staff and News Services
The next few weeks could be gut-check time on Wall Street as investors deal with the lowest earnings growth in five years.
First-quarter earnings reporting season kicks off tomorrow with aluminum giant Alcoa, and if analysts are right, Standard & Poor's 500 companies will deliver year-over-year growth averaging 4.9 percent, S&P says.
That's a letdown after one of the biggest booms in corporate profit growth in history. The expected first-quarter growth is about a third of the 14 percent average quarterly earnings growth the past two years and the slowest since the first quarter of 2002.
NEW ORLEANS, STATE SEEK $277B
New Orleans and Louisiana, swamped when the city's storm protections failed during Hurricane Katrina, demand the federal government pay a damage bill that is more than double the entire cost of the massive Gulf Coast rebuilding effort.
Among the more than 70,000 damage claims filed is one for $200 billion by Louisiana's attorney general and another by New Orleans for $77 billion.
Those two alone are more than double the $110 billion Congress approved for Florida and the Gulf Coast after Katrina and two other hurricanes struck in 2005.
ISUZU MAY OPEN ALABAMA PLANT
Isuzu Motors Ltd., Japan's largest maker of light-duty trucks, bought land in Alabama as it considers resuming production in the U.S. for the first time since 2002 to spur sales in the world's largest vehicle market.
"We acquired the land that was used as a Del Monte Foods Co. factory," spokesman Tadashi Ioka said by phone yesterday.
Isuzu may build a plant in North America if sales in the region reach 50,000 units a year, President Yoshinori Ida said in December.
