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Despite signs that the global economic free fall may be over, conditions in the commercial real estate sector remain extremely stressed. A financing drought and declining property fundamentals are pushing up both "maturity" and "performance" defaults on commercial mortgages, threatening to undermine the economy's longer term ability to create jobs and grow, according to The Real Estate Roundtable's latest quarterly survey of senior commercial real estate executives.

A new Javelin Strategy & Research (www.javelinstrategy.com) report finds that more individuals are paying bills at bank or credit union web sites than at individual biller web sites. The report also indicates financial institutions need to be aware that consumers sensitive to fees are prone to switching banks.

Over a quarter (28 percent) of IT executives surveyed are planning to deploy private cloud in 2009, according to a survey of delegates by Platform Computing at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC'09) in June 2009. This planned adoption of private cloud within High Performance Computing (HPC) is being driven by the increased workload demand of applications and the need for IT to cut costs at the same time. As the leader in grid and cloud computing software, Platform Computing has been tracking adoption of private clouds and this level of intent to deploy reflects steadily changing attitudes in IT departments.

Global public relations leader Porter Novelli today released "The Future of News," an in-depth exploration of how citizen journalism, empowered and emboldened by social media and the Internet, is changing the future of traditional news. The report, the latest in the agency's acclaimed Intelligent Dialogue series, offers one of the most comprehensive and in-depth analyses to date of how social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and blogging are impacting the role and even the very definition of news in modern society.

Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index: Score Drops 20 Points; Credit Availability and Cash Flow Also Among Contributing Factors

Small business owners’ optimism recently dropped to its lowest level in the six years of the Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index history. Covering a survey period July 7 – July 14, 2009, the score now stands at negative 21 (-21), down 20 points from the previous survey (April, 2009), and 135 points lower than the Index high of 114 (November, 2006). This is the third consecutive quarter with a negative (below zero) Index score. A score of zero indicates that small business owners, as a group, are neutral -- neither optimistic nor pessimistic -- about their companies’ situations.

The Journal of Commerce-Economic Cycle Research Institute index of global industrial prices moved into positive territory for the first time in almost a year in its most recent week, signaling an improvement in global demand for the raw materials that go into industrial production, The Journal of Commerce reported.

Hong Kong's stock market will trend upward with high volatility in the second half of 2009, according to Mr. Liang (Michael) WEN, Chief Investment Officer of CSOP Asset Management Ltd. ("CSOP"), an asset management joint-venture between China Southern Fund Management Co. Ltd. and Oriental Patron Financial Group. Approved by the China Securities Regulatory Commission ("CSRC"), CSOP is the first overseas subsidiary company set up by a Chinese asset manager.

The IPO pipeline stood at 28 registrants as of June 30, 2009, down 36 percent from the 44 registrants as of Q1 (March 31, 2009), according to the quarterly Ernst & Young LLP US IPO Pipeline study. This reflects both renewed IPO activity and the aging of older registrants.

The volume of United States (US) initial public offerings (IPOs) continued to remain low in the first half of 2009. For the first six months, there were only 14 IPOs that raised $2.3 billion, a significant drop from the 43 offerings that generated $27.7 billion for the same period in 2008. The first half of 2008 saw the largest US IPO in history, the $ 17.9 billion Visa Inc. IPO, which skewed the amount of proceeds raised during that period. By comparison, the largest IPO in the first half of 2009 was the $720 million Mead Johnson Nutrition Co. IPO.

American and global depositary receipt (DR) trading volume increased 14% to a record 72.1 billion DRs during the first six months of 2009 according to The Bank of New York Mellon, the world's leading depositary bank. As expected, DR trading value was significantly lower than records set one year ago. During the first six months of 2009 $1.3 trillion of DRs traded on U.S. and non-U.S. markets and exchanges.