Wall Street opened lower Monday after stock markets around the world tumbled further on worries about the global economy.

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A weekly listing of property transfers and building permits in and around Charlottesville.

When the U.S. bailed out the agriculture sector in the early 1930s, it forever changed the business of farming. While today’s banking industry interventions are different in many ways, economists say it is worth noting that “emergency” Depression-era measures meant to protect farming families from short-term market swings have become near-permanent support at taxpayer expense

The proposal for privatizing Social Security is simple but elegant. Allow younger workers to deposit part of their Social Security taxes into a private account. If it produces a better retirement than Social Security, they can refuse Social Security and keep the private account. Otherwise they can take Social Security. Given my expected rates of return, putting just a tiny fraction of my withholding into a private account will do better than getting a negative rate of return in Social Security, even using the poor rate of return to where the market bottomed.

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Wall Street headed for a higher open Monday as investors cheered signs that global credit markets are thawing even as they awaited a batch of quarterly earnings to see how companies are weathering the financial crisis.

Wall Street was gearing up for another surge following the Dow Jones industrial average’s historic 936-point jump, with investors encouraged by the U.S. government’s plans to spend $250 billion on buying stock in private banks.

Wall Street snapped back from last week’s devastating losses after major governments announced further steps to support the global banking system, including plans by the U.S. Treasury to buy stocks of some banks. All the major indexes rose well over 6 percent, and the Dow Jones industrials gained 500 points.

“With the economy what it is, people are looking for value and service,” Seminole Square Giant store manager Soumera Sayasithsena.. “Whoever provides that best, that’s where people are going to shop.”

By TIM PARADIS
AP Business Writer

A weekly listing of property transfers and building permits in and around Charlottesville.

Local business announcements

If you think the $700 billion bailout of the mortgage crisis was expensive, wait until we need to bail out Social Security. Between 2037 and 2075 the Social Security program is projected to run deficits totaling $30 trillion. And annual shortfalls are projected to start as soon as 2017.

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Wall Street extended its devastating decline Friday as investors, still seeing no resolution to the credit crisis, sold frantically and propelled the Dow Jones industrials to their eighth straight day of losses and worst week ever. Stocks gyrated in the opening minutes as a burst of buying in financial stocks spread to other sectors, but all the major indexes were down more than 5 percent by midafternoon.

From Jan. 1 to Sept. 30, there were 1,962 houses sold in the region. There were 2,506 homes sold during the same period in 2007.

News that the Bush administration is considering taking part ownership in a number of U.S. banks helped restore a relative calm over global financial markets Thursday.

Citigroup and Wells Fargo have agreed to extend their legal standstill in the fight for Wachovia until Friday morning.

“The dollar today is what the penny was to the grandparent’s generation,” said Marshal Cohen, an analyst for the research firm NPD Group. “When you can get something for a dollar and it works, people get excited.”

When a hurricane threatens, making a plan and gearing up for emergencies is imperative. Economic emergencies happen too, but it may be less obvious how to prepare. Here are seven steps you should take to weather any financial storm.

A weekly listing of property transfers and building permits in and around Charlottesville.

Local business announcements

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A battle broke out for control of Wachovia Friday as Wells Fargo signed a $15.1 billion agreement to buy the Charlotte, N.C.-based bank, while Citigroup and the federal regulators backing its earlier deal insisted that Citi’s takeover bid go forward.

U.S. employers slashed payrolls by 159,000 in September, the most in more than five years, a worrisome sign that the economy is hurtling toward a deep recession.