financial

Back in April, Credit Suisse issued a report stating that YouTube stood to lose $470M this year. But now it looks like the financial services company was overly pessimistic (and, really, they’re probably just used to that, with the economy the way it is). New estimates from research company RampRate puts the losses for the most popular video website in the world far more conservatively:

Despite the global recession, revenues from streamed mobile music services and full-track downloads are expected to exhibit strong growth over the next 5 years, according to a new report from Juniper Research.

Analysts and investors were ready for just about anything this afternoon, with predictions of what Google's first quarter would look like ranging from complete failure to yet another blow-'em-out-of-the-water success.  The real numbers landed somewhere in between, but - to most people's relief - rather more on positive side. 

Does Carol Bartz have the magic touch?  It's either that or she inherited something less than a complete mess from Jerry Yang, anyway, because as Yahoo's new CEO presided over her first earnings report, many of the numbers weren't at all bad. 

Former controversial New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who was forced to resign amid a call girl scandal, will now have a new job writing a column for Slate.com about finances and the economy.The column is called "The Best Policy," and will run every other week. In his debut column for Slate titled "Too Big Not To Fail" Spitzer takes the U.S. government to task for trying to bailout financial institutions.

There's no escaping it: News Corp had a rough quarter.  Rupert Murdoch thinks times will be tough for a while, too.  But even as the media giant posted some bad numbers, it turned out that at least a couple of its online properties are working well, with MySpace and WSJ.com making impressive amounts of money.

TechCrunch today has no treats—and no joy, no, not even Almond Joy—for Facebook in reporting about its projected financial woes. For a company once valued at $15 billion, things are looking grim as the cash supplies may dwindle long before Facebook is ready or willing to go to IPO.

Two occupations that for sure won’t be experiencing unemployment troubles during the financial crisis: politician and lawyer. Politicians will be busy pointing fingers and looking clueless while lawyers will be bracing for a boon in litigation stemming from the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. A survey of 360 in-house counsel in the UK and US show small businesses and major corporations alike are preparing for a busy lawsuit season expected to affect pretty much every sector.