Software giant Microsoft Corporation (MSFT), has agreed to sell its interactive ad agency Razorfish to French marketing group Publicis Groupe SA for $530 million in cash and stock.

The agreement (.pdf) was announced on Sunday afternoon in Paris, France, where Publicis, one of the world’s largest advertising companies, is based. The French company, which beat WPP of Britain and Dentsu of Japan in the final bidding for the Microsoft unit, will pay the Redmond, Wa-based Microsoft a combination of cash and 6.5 million shares of Publicis stock.

Time Warner (TWX), the world’s largest media conglomerate, informed the Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC] on Monday of its plan to spin off its struggling Internet unit AOL Holdings LLC. The media giant said in a regulatory filing it intends to list AOL common stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “AOL.”

While the filing doesn’t provide any details in terms of timing or share distribution for the spin-off, it says that once the proposed separation is complete, Time Warner shareholders will own all of the outstanding interests in the online unit.

Joseph W. Saunders, Chairman and CEO of Visa (V), announced late Monday that President John C. (Hans) Morris will step down as part of the company’s new reorganization process.

According to a statement posted on the company’s Web site, Mr. Morris, who led Visa Inc.’s five geographic operating regions since joining in July 2007, including all sales and marketing functions, will remain with the retail electronic payments network until the end of the year in a different capacity working with Mr. Saunders and helping to ensure a smooth transition to the new structure.

Trading at 15 times [x] its forward earnings MasterCard Incorporated (MA) is undervalued and may be a better play than its rival Visa (V) in an economic recovery, the weekly newspaper Barron’s said in a report released Monday.

According to the paper, while Visa’s dominant market position in handling 60% of the world’s card swipes in more than 170 countries worldwide gives it the competitive edge over MasterCard ; MA shares are less expensive and trading only at 15x its earnings, compare to Visa’s which trade currently at about 19x the earnings forecast for 2010. If MA shares, notes Barron’s, begin trading at a forward P/E of 16 (fye 31-Dec-10), its stock could soar above $200.

Commercial real estate [CRE] delinquency rates are exhibiting severe deterioration and may soon bulldoze the ‘green shoots’. Since October of last year monthly delinquencies rates have increased at a pace that is without precedent. According to the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP), a group of academics focused on corporate and CRE lending, the coming wave of defaults on loans to developers of condominiums, office buildings and malls could do considerable damage to the already fragile and deflating U.S. economy.

From Time: That was the overwhelming concern expressed at a public hearing of the COP [this week] that focused on corporate and commercial real estate lending.
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Richard Parkus, an analyst at Deutsche Bank, said he thought two-thirds of all commercial real estate loans due in the next few years — hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth — could go bust. Jeffrey DeBoer, president of trade group the Real Estate Roundtable, fretted that problems in the lending business could cost the nation thousands more construction and real estate jobs. Next up, Congressman Jerrold Nadler of New York expressed worry that the country was headed for a lost decade of economic stagnation.
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A number of the panelists thought the government’s TALF and PPIP programs meant to boost lending were helpful but not the answer. Parkus said he thought extending the terms of commercial loans set to default would only delay the problem and make it worse. As more and more bad loans pile up, he predicted, it will become progressively harder for any of them to get refinanced.

Top Obama administration officials are close to proposing that Congress create a single regulator to oversee and detect activities that could pose risks to the banking sector and the entire financial system, The Wall Street Journal reported late Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

From WSJ: The new agency is expected to be a major plank in a proposal that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and White House officials send Capitol Hill in a few weeks with the goal of overhauling supervision of financial markets.

Interview with William Thies, Ph.D., Chief Medical and Scientific Officer of the Alzheimer’s Association.

In this exclusive one-on-one Dr. Thies reveals:

The markets move up and down seemingly without rhyme or reason most of the time. The short-term is random. The long-term, however, is much more about growth and broad shifts in economic forces.

Of course, that doesn’t stop pundits from finding “reasons” why the markets move up and down. For instance, when the Dow opened up under 8,000 on Tuesday, swine flu was the natural scapegoat.

Forbes has been able to obtain the full text of Steve Jobs’ sworn deposition given on March 18, 2008, to the Securities and Exchange Commission (119-pages) over Apple’s (AAPL) options backdating scandal.

In the deposition, Jobs told SEC lawyers that after being paid a $1 per year salary since his return at the helm of the company, combined with the deteriorating value of his stock options in the dot-com bust, he felt unfairly compensated for his work. He was also unhappy with the fact that his board of directors never approached him with a stock option reward without his prompting.

Goldman Sachs (GS) on Monday raised its Chinese stock index forecasts for exchanges in the mainland and Hong Kong as stimulus measures revive the economy.

In a note released today, Goldman projected China’s CSI 300 Index (which tracks stocks traded on the two mainland exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen) to reach 2,600 pts by year-end, up from an earlier forecast of 1,980. The Hang Seng China Enterprises Index prediction was raised to 10,300 from 8,900 and the shares were upgraded to “overweight.”

The declines in equity values in the past year, along with the massive interventions by global central banks to stabilize credit markets, has helped after 17 months to make equities look attractive again as the major averages continue to sustain gains and uptrend.

However, executives and insiders at U.S. companies are taking advantage of this situation by unloading shares at the fastest pace since the start of the financial crisis in late 2007.

USA Today reports that Verizon Wireless (VZ) and Apple (AAPL) are considering developing an iPhone for Verizon’s network with the goal of introducing it as early as next year, according to people familiar with the situation.

The unidentified sources said the two companies entered “high-level” discussions a few months ago when CEO Steve Jobs was still overseeing Apple’s day-to-day business.

CNBC’s Jim Cramer tells the Ohio State Lantern his interview on the Daily Show last month “was a complete and utter ambush” and that the popular comedian Jon Stewart pulled a fast one on him and did not “comport himself as a gentleman.” From The Lantern:

He told my staff that it was going to be fun, convivial, no clips, but [it] doesn’t matter, he’s a comedian, he can do whatever he wants.

Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz writes in The New York Times that Treasury Geithner’s $500 billion or more proposal to fix America’s ailing banks, described by some in the financial markets as a win-win-win situation, it’s actually a win-win-lose proposal: the banks win, investors win — and taxpayers lose.

The Treasury, argues the professor of economics at Columbia Univesity - hopes to get us out of the mess by replicating the flawed system that the private sector used to bring the world crashing down, with a proposal that has overleveraging in the public sector, excessive complexity, poor incentives and a lack of transparency.

Speaking to the Forecasters Club in New York, the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank President Janet L. Yellen said Wednesday that the Federal Reserve must continue to boldly use all available tools to fight a deepening recession, and warned that in terms of unemployment, the “worst of the contraction is not expected to occur until next year.” In addition, the San Francisco bank president, who is a voting member of the U.S. central bank’s policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee in 2009, stressed that “for some time to come, disinflation, and even deflation, will represent greater risks than inflation,” and predicted a sluggish economy for several more years. Here are some excerpts from Yellen’s speech.

After recognizing the fact that predicting the course of the economy has for sometimes now become an hazardous occupation, Fed Yellen said that her confidence in the expressed optimism of most professional forecasters - in terms of the economy beginning to grow again within the next several quarters - “is greatly diminished by the nearly unprecedented set of circumstances we face, circumstances that severely challenge our ability to use historical economic relationships to anticipate future developments.”
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“While there are good reasons to think the economy could begin to recover fairly soon, I’m far from confident,” she said, “and thus don’t want to press the case too strongly.” Indeed, in all humility, most of us have failed to anticipate the depth of this downturn and have had to mark down our forecasts repeatedly.

In a speech today before a group of executives at small U.S. banks in Phoenix, Ariz., the Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke stressed the need for the government to develop safer procedures to shut down major nonbank financial companies without destabilizing the entire financial system. Mr. Bernanke spoke of “extremely unpleasant and difficult choices” that the government has had to make in rescuing financial firms, and reiterated that a $1 trillion Fed program to unfreeze markets for securities backed by loans may expand to include mortgage-backed debt. In his speech, Mr. Bernanke also called for better and more effective regulation of the financial system that would address the problem of companies deemed “too-big-to-fail.” Here are some excerpts from his speech:

Many of you likely are frustrated, and rightfully so, by the impact that the financial crisis and economic downturn has had on your banks, as well as on the reputation of bankers more generally. You may well have built your reputations and institutions through responsible lending and community-focused operations, but nonetheless, you now find yourselves facing higher deposit insurance assessments and increasing public skepticism about the behavior of bankers–outcomes that you perceive were largely caused by the actions of larger financial institutions. Many of you managed your businesses prudently and shunned more exotic instruments and activities. And many of your customers–households and businesses–avoided excesses and are able to meet their financial commitments on a timely basis.

Many Republicans are getting closer to asking for Treasury Secretary Geithner’s resignation. Geithner’s call to AIG Chairman Edward Liddy last Wednesday where he ’supposedly’ demanded that Liddy renegotiate AIG’s current bonus structure is raising questions about Geithner’s credibility.

The burgeoning bonus controversy raged Tuesday as Sen. Richard Shelby, ranking Republican on the Banking Committee, charged that Geithner had known about the AIG bonus payments before they were made and failed to stop them.

The insurance giant American International Group (AIG), who has received so far $173.3 billion (far more than has been offered to any other financial firm) in taxpayer bailout money from the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve - has plans to dole out more than $1 billion in bonuses and retention pay to employees. About $450 million - according to WSJ - will go to executives in the same business unit that wrote trillions of dollar’s worth of credit-default swaps that protected investors from defaults on bonds backed in many cases by subprime mortgages which later (Sept ‘08) brought the insurer to the brink of collapse.

Those payments are in addition to $121.5 million in incentive bonuses for 2008 that AIG will start making this month to about 6,400 of its roughly 116,000 employees. AIG is also making over $600 million in retention payments to over 4,000 employees.

The following excerpts are from a piece written today in Boston Globe. Reading through a well-written article one cannot help but notice and recognize the unfortunate and rather shocking facts of our government’s level of negligence, incompetence and shortsightedness.

Last week the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation [FDIC], the insurer of our nation’s bank deposits, asked for emergency powers to temporarily borrow as much as $500 billion until the end of 2010 to take over failed banks if the Federal Reserve, Treasury Secretary and White House agree such money is warranted. However, the FDIC is now facing a potential major shortfall in part because it collected no insurance premiums from most banks from 1996 to 2006.

Heavily criticized for its ineffectiveness in missing the subprime debacle and the commercial mortgage-backed securities mess, the world’s most utilized firm for credit ratings, research and risk analysis - Moody’s Investors Service (MCO), published on Tuesday a list called the ‘Bottom Rung’, detailing the companies that Moody’s says are most likely to default on their debts.

Wall Street Journal: With 283 companies, the list holds nearly every sector of the economy. The dominant industries on this at-risk list include much of the U.S. auto industry, the casino sector, and many retail chains, newspapers and broadcast-TV and radio-station networks. Energy firms, airlines and restaurant chains appear often.