BofA cuts
Bank of America is expected to lay off up to 4,000 employees in its capital markets busi nesses, or 30 to 40 per cent, starting this week, the FT reported. Most of the cuts are expected to be in New York.
Car crash?
UAW President Ron Gettelfinger said a mid- February deadline for GM and Chrysler to complete their restruc turing plans may be “al most unattainable” and he hopes it “wasn’t set up to intentionally fail.”
Intel price
Intel cut the price of some processors by as much as 48 percent as it confronts slumping de mand and new lower- cost chips from Ad vanced Micro Devices. The price of the Celeron 570 processor, designed for laptops, dropped 48 percent to $70, Intel said on its Web site.
‘Net ads
Spending on US Intern et-search ads dropped 8 percent in the fourth quarter as the recession curbed demand for online marketing, according to Efficient Frontier Inc. Re tailers were the only group with an increase, at 9 percent.
Restaurants
Overall restaurant openings offset closures in 2008 and unit growth stopped for the year after rising 2.0 percent in 2007, market research company NPD Group said. Fast- food chains such as McDonald’s, Subway and Panera Bread increased their number of outlets by about 1.0 percent from 2007 to 2008, according to NPD’s ReCount census of restaurants in the US.