Stocks drop Monday
NEW YORK, March 5 (UPI) -- Stocks slid Monday after the Commerce Department said factory orders in the United States dropped by 1 percent in January.
The decline in factory orders was not as harsh as economists expected. The consensus prediction had pointed to a decline of 1.5 percent.
The pace of growth in the U.S. service sector gained ground in February, the Institute for Supply Management said. But the non-manufacturing business index rising from 56.1 percent to 57.3 percent did not put the market into a bullish mood.
By close of trading on Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average was off 14.76 points, 0.11 percent to 12,962.81. The Standard & Poor's 500 index gave up 5.30 points, 0.39 percent, to 1,364.33. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index shed 25.71 points, 0.86 percent, to 2,950.48.
On the New York Stock Exchange, 1,231 stocks advanced and 1,817 declined on a volume of 3.2 billion shares traded.
The benchmark 10-year treasury note lost 11/32 to yield 2.017 percent.
The euro rose to $1.3215 from Friday's $1.32. Against the yen, the dollar fell to 81.55 yen from 81.81 yen.
In Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 index lost 0.8 percent, 78.44 points, to 9,698.59.
In London, the FTSE 100 index lost 0.61 percent, 36.31, to 5,874.82.
Lawmakers: CFTC soft on speculators
WASHINGTON, March 5 (UPI) -- Seventy lawmakers in Washington on Monday accused the Commodity Futures Trading Commission of being too soft on oil speculators.
In a letter letter put together by Sen. Bernard Sanders, Ind-Vt., members of the House and Senate said, "It is one of your primary duties -- indeed, perhaps your most important -- to ensure that the prices Americans pay for gasoline and heating oil are fair, and that the markets in which prices are discovered operate free from fraud, abuse, and manipulation."
The Los Angeles Times reported Monday that the CFTC approved of commodity trading restrictions in October, as directed to do so by the Dodd-Frank financial system overhaul bill of 2010.
However, the new restrictions have not been put into effect. The letter from Capitol Hill accuses the CFTC of being soft "owing to industry opposition."
"Although the CFTC has adopted initial position limits, they are not strong enough and not yet in force owing to industry opposition, delays in swaps oversight and data collection. This is simply unacceptable and must change," the letter says.
In addition, it says, "We have a responsibility to ensure that the price of oil is no longer allowed to be driven up by the same Wall Street speculators who caused the devastating recession that working families are now experiencing."
Tablets giving PCs a run for the money
SAN FRANCISCO, March 5 (UPI) -- Computer industry analysts from the United States and elsewhere are predicting sales of hand-held tablets will someday surpass personal computer sales.
Tablets started out as, more or less, a novelty item, but came into their own when sales of Apple's iPad took off after its launch in 2010, The New York Times reported Monday.
But Apple's new Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said recently, "From the first day it shipped, we thought -- not just me, many of us thought at Apple -- that the tablet market would become larger than the PC market, and it was just a matter of the time that it took for that to occur."
Cook's predecessor at Apple Steve Jobs, who died in October, made the same prediction -- even though the forecast might have appeared outlandish at the time.
Industry analysts at Canalyst, a research firm, said personal computers or PCs outsold tablets 20 to one in 2010. But PC sales have been stagnant for the past two years, while table sales have jumped.
The current ratio of PC to tablet sales is six to one.
If that wasn't eye-opening enough, consider the results at Apple. The firm sold 15 million iPads in October through December of 2011, generating $9.15 billion in revenue in that period.
"Tablets are on fire, there's no question about that," said former Microsoft executive Brad Silverberg, who is now a venture capitalist in Seattle.
At Piper Jaffray, analyst Gene Munster has said 2017 is the year tablet sales would surpass PC sales. At Asymco, a research firm in Finland, analyst Horace Dediu said that prediction was four years too late, pointing to 2013 as the year tablet sales would eclipse PCs.
One reason to suspect sales will continue to soar is the introduction of Amazon's Kindle Fire, which was launched in the fall and is poised, with a sales price of $199, to compete well with the iPad.
In addition, Microsoft's touch-screen operating system Windows 8 will be installed in several competing devices soon.
Mets owners ordered to pay back $83M
NEW YORK, March 5 (UPI) -- A federal judge ordered the owners of the New York Mets baseball club Monday to return $83 million to victims of Bernard Madoff's historic Ponzi scheme.
The owners, Saul Katz and Fred Wilpon have been fending off a claim made by court-appointed trustee Irving Picard that $386 million should be returned, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The judge ordered the $83 million payment in advance of a trial he ordered for Katz and Wilpon.
A jury will decide whether they will pay another $303 million, the balance of the money sought by Picard.
At issue is whether the Mets owners were aware that Madoff was running a scam investment business.
Picard has said the Mets owners were "willfully blind" to the fraud, given they were reaping steady rewards from their investments.
Some of Madoff's closest associates did extremely well investing in his firm but hundreds of other clients lost tens of billions of dollars.
Madoff is serving a 150-year prison sentence. He pleaded guilty to fraud in 2009.
