IBT Staff Reporter

Countrywide Financial Corp led shares of U.S. mortgage companies lower on Friday as investors received fresh reminders that a shortage of liquidity might crimp profits.

The last time the U.S. markets experienced such wild swings as they have in the past week, Wall Street warriors in their 20s and 30s were trading baseball cards and lunchbox snacks, not stocks and bonds.

Wall Street economists do not foresee an imminent interest rate cut from the Federal Reserve despite a credit squeeze that is pressuring financial markets and forcing central banks to funnel liquidity into the system.

Wall Street's roller-coaster ride, triggered by the meltdown in subprime mortgage lending, is spreading pain through financial markets -- but has not hit Main Street yet.

Central banks probably will halt their monetary tightening campaign and the Federal Reserve may start cutting interest rates to ward off a global credit crunch, financial market dealers said on Friday.

Jeffrey Blitz does not want his work stuffed into a neat little Hollywood box, which is one reason the director of Rocket Science has jumped from documentaries to feature films to television and back again.

J.K. Rowling and her French publisher said on Thursday they were worried about organized groups of translators, not individuals, after a boy was arrested for posting a translation of the last Harry Potter book online.

Elvis, the man, has passed away. The legend - and the marketing - live on.

Vivendi's Universal Music Group, the world's largest music label, on Thursday said it will test the sale of songs from artists such as Amy Winehouse, 50 Cent and the Black Eyed Peas, without customary copy-protection technology.

Electronic Arts Inc. and Hasbro, Inc. on Friday said they have made a licensing agreement to create electronic versions of some of Hasbro's most popular games including Monopoly, Scrabble and Yahtzee.

The top three U.S. wireless service providers said on Friday they would start selling the successor to Motorola Inc's Razr phone, which includes a 2 Megapixel camera and a music player.

'Galactic Suite,' the first hotel planned in space, expects to open for business in 2012 and would allow guests to travel around the world in 80 minutes.

Internet companies, retailers and the government must do far more to protect people from the dangers of the lawless Wild West of cyberspace, an influential group of British Members of Parliament said on Friday.

Yahoo Inc. President Susan Decker purchased about $1.1 million of the Internet company's shares this week just after the stock hit a three-year low.

Infrared thermometers that take a person's temperature with a sweep of the forehead may not be as accurate as old-fashioned measures, a study suggests.

South Korea may be ready to offer billions of dollars to rebuild the failing North Korean economy when leaders meet for only the second ever summit between the enemy states later this month, analysts said.

Homes and farmland drowned in increasingly severe floods are affecting some 500 million people a year and straining relief efforts, a senior U.N. official said on Thursday.

Chinese-made toys are overwhelmingly safe and the number of unsafe products is dwarfed by the total export value, state media said on Friday, a week after Mattel pulled goods because of fears about lead in paint.

Seventy-seven percent of Indians -- about 836 million people -- live on less than half a dollar a day in one of the world's hottest economies, a government report said.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown reassured farmers on Friday that an outbreak of foot and mouth was restricted to a limited area of Britain and promised swift compensation for those hit by the livestock disease.

The Bush administration said on Friday it would increase scrutiny and impose heftier fines on U.S. businesses that employ illegal immigrants as it sought to step up enforcement despite Congress's failure to reform immigration laws.

News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch has said he might make the Wall Street Journal's Web site free, a shift that could compel Britain's Pearson to do the same with the online version of its Financial Times.

Central banks around the globe pumped billions of dollars into banking systems on Friday in a concerted effort to beat back a widening credit crisis, and pledged to do more if needed. n all, central banks in Europe, Asia and North America have pumped out more than $300 billion over 48 hours in an effort to keep money flowing through the arteries of the global financial system, hoping to prevent a credit market seizure that could imperil economies.

After a wave of initial public offerings in recent years, the total market value of stocks listed on two major Chinese stock exchanges surpassed the country’s GDP for the first time on Thursday.

NBC Universal and News Corp have reached a preliminary deal with a private-equity firm to sell a stake in their online joint venture for $100 million, a source close to the deal said on Friday.

Shares of graphics chip maker Nvidia Corp. plunged nearly 7 percent on Friday afternoon, after company comments late Thursday that it could face supply constraints outshined a better-than-expected quarterly report.

British billionaire Richard Branson declined to rule out a stock market listing for Virgin Atlantic in the event that his Virgin Group bought out its Singapore partner in the airline.

Tighter credit, broad deterioration in the housing market and skittish consumer spending will lead to a slower U.S. economy than earlier estimated, according to the most closely watched forecast by U.S. economists.

U.S. retail sales excluding cars rose a modest 0.2 percent in July, as declining gasoline prices reined in overall sales growth, according to data from SpendingPulse released on Friday.