Business and Finance news

MONTREAL—Saputo is continuing to investigate the cause of a listeria bacteria contamination that prompted the Montreal-based company to voluntarily recall several lots of cheese from an unidentified Quebec plant.
Canada’s largest cheese processor said production has been redirected to another facility while it determines the cause of the contamination and takes appropriate steps to clean up […]

Oracle Corp.’s courtroom clash with archenemy SAP AG has paid off handsomely.
A jury on Tuesday ordered SAP to pay $1.3 billion _ more than half of its total profit last year _ for a subsidiary’s skullduggery in stealing a stockpile of software and customer-support documents from password-protected Oracle websites.
The German software company was caught off […]

Republicans won a smashing victory in this month’s U.S. national elections; no issue resonated more with the party’s base than President Barack Obama’s health-care legislation.
The House Republicans’ “Pledge to America” vowed “to repeal and replace the government takeover of health care with common sense solutions focused on lowering costs and protecting American jobs.” The […]

Just back from recess, Congress is staring at a deadline that will result in a dramatic cut in Medicare payments to doctors if no action is taken.
Lawmakers have implemented the so-called "doc fix" 10 times in the past eight years, four times this year alone. But what has become a routine event still attracts […]

Target Corp. is projecting a merry holiday as the discounter counts on a 5 percent discount for its credit and debit card customers and its storewide remodeling
The upbeat report comes as Target reported a 22.6 percent increase in third-quarter net income, helped by improvements in its credit card business and expansion into food.
The cheap chic […]

A Chinese consumer confidence index fell for the first time in six quarters on expectations that the price of goods and services will keep increasing.
The measure dropped to 104 in the third quarter from 109 in the previous three months, according to a statement from Nielsen Co. and the Chinese statistics bureau’s Economic Monitoring […]

The federal agency that insures the pensions of one in seven Americans says its deficit increased slightly this year to $23 billion.
The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. also said it paid $5.6 billion in benefits to participants in company pension plans that failed in the fiscal 2010 that ended Sept. 30.
The PBGC’s finances have been battered […]

Consumers in the U.S. gained confidence in November for the first time in three months, raising the odds that an improving job market and increasing wages and stock prices will lift spending.
The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan preliminary sentiment index rose to 69.3, in line with the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News […]

Chinese shares led world markets lower Friday amid mounting concerns Beijing will raise interest rates to cool its overheating economy.
Investors also found scant cheer from a meeting of global leaders in South Korea that did little to defuse currency and trade tensions and from a report that European economic growth slowed in the third quarter.
In […]

Missouri utility regulators on Wednesday approved a slight decrease in natural gas prices for Laclede Gas Co. customers.
Laclede will trim natural gas prices by a penny per therm, to 64 cents, effective on Tuesday, according to an order by the Public Service Commission.
That is 28 percent less than peak gas prices during the winter of […]