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Those who cannot drive are going online. Cruising to the mall, if it is 20 or 30 miles away, is no longer a cheap trip. With gas at $4 a gallon, some potential shoppers may not go to the mall at all.

Thank goodness for the internet. More and more people are getting online to buy the things they need. In an economy where many people feel poor, the average online shopper may not be spending big, but he is spending.

According to The New York Times, retailers "are experiencing double-digit sales growth at their shopping Web sites, creating a surprising bright spot during an otherwise gloomy time for sales in brick-and-mortar stores." The paper adds that Gap (NYSE: GPS) "had an 11 percent decline in same-store sales in the first quarter, but a 21 percent increase in online sales."

While the news is a silver lining, it probably does little to save the earnings of large retailers. Internet sales are still a relatively small portion of total revenue for companies that have to support the real estate and personnel costs at significant numbers of large stores. E-commerce traffic may lift numbers a bit, but they do not bring down the expense base that represents most of the problem for retail profitability.

Until the internet sales are 15% or 20% of total sales for a company like Gap, investors should not look at online revenue as a reason to buy retail stocks.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

Carl Icahn just got more bad news. His bid for Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) seems to be losing it momentum, and it should. Legg Mason, which owns 4.4% of the portal company, will support the current board.

According to The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), "We believe the current board acted with care and diligence when evaluating Microsoft's offers," Legg Mason Chairman Bill Miller said.

Other large investors may decide to back the status quo ahead of the Yahoo! Annual Meeting on August 1.

Icahn has made two significant mistakes. The first is that he overplayed his hand with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) by saying that he had more support from Steve Ballmer for a deal to takeover Yahoo!'s search business than he actually had.

The more profound problem is the Icahn has not taken the time or the effort to show Yahoo! shareholders how he would operate the company if he cannot strike a deal with Redmond. In essence, he has not made it clear how he can make Yahoo!'s shares rise from their current level if the company has to be run as a standalone business.

Icahn will lose his proxy fight for Yahoo!. He has not offered anything beyond a break-up or M&A event. Why would anyone support something so thin?

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

It has been widely anticipated that the EU would bring new antitrust charges against Intel (NASDAQ: INTC). The FTC and other US authorities are chasing the largest chip company in the world for similar reasons. South Korea has already fined Intel for anti-competitive behavior.

The theory behind the charges is that Intel induced PC companies and their retailers to use its chips and not those from rival AMD (NYSE: AMD). According to The Wall Street Journal, "The European Union launched new antitrust charges against Intel Corp., saying the chip giant paid rebates to a major retailer to encourage it not to carry computers using chips from smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc ."

If the charges are true, it shows the extent to which a company of real size, like Intel, can be its own worst enemy. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) ran into similar problems a decade ago for being too aggressive killing off competition in the browser and media player markets.

The irony of Intel's legal bind is that it almost certainly did not need to pressure or give incentives to keep AMD in a distant second place. It had the balance sheet to keep margin pressure on AMD and the engineering prowess to offer better chips.

Arrogance and carelessness often go with being in first place. This time it appears that it has caught up to Intel.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

Wall Street analysts have said that Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE) would not be able to get by without raising money. Its losses from the current mortgage crisis have simply been too great. At one point it looked like the Fed would open its doors to provide the company loans and Treasury would buy stock in the company.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Freddie "is considering raising capital by selling as much as $10 billion in new shares to investors."

After a sharp sell-off in its stock, Freddie has watched its shares move up over 50% in two days because investors believed the government help would keep the firm from becoming insolvent. Now that the value of the stock is somewhat higher, it may turn out to be a good time to get some cash in the barn.

But, the company's shareholders are likely to take a brutal beating. Freddie's market cap is only $6 billion, so the dilution of bringing in $10 billion would be stupendous. The move could certainly push the stock down to the $4 level over time, unless the company can post results well above what analysts expect and push the current share price way up.

Of course, the shareholders are not to blame, but they will be left holding the bag. Freddie management bet that it could get better returns on its portfolio by getting into risky investments and were burned like most banks and brokerage houses.

No matter how poor their judgment was, management will probably keep their jobs. Maybe they will even get a fat bonus for raising the new capital.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

Merrill Lynch (NASDAQ:MER) is down over 5% on poor earnings.

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is down 8% on disappointing earnings.

AMD (NYSE:AMD) is down 7% on poor earnings.

UAL (NASDAQ:UAUA) is up over 8% on an anlyst upgrade.

Micrososft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is down over 5% on poor earnings.

Stocks may trade differently in the pre-market than they do the regular session.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

RBC downgraded Best Buy (NYSE:BBY) to "outperform" from "top pick", according to Briefing.com. The news service also reports that JP Morgan upgraded United Airlines (NASDAQ:UAUA) to "overweight" from "underweight".

Coca Cola (NYSE:KO) removed from Goldman Sachs Conviction Buy List, according to 24/7 Wall St.. The financial site also reports that EBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) Cut to Neutral from Buy at Goldman Sachs.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

Hector Ruiz, the CEO who almost ruined AMD (NYSE: AMD), is gone, moved up to the chairman's role. and replaced by the company's COO Dirk Meyer. According to The New York Times, "Mr. Meyer, president and chief operating officer, is widely respected and admired by other A.M.D. technical employees and also has the confidence of Wall Street analysts." AMD lost another $1.2 billion in the latest quarter making the move almost essential to the firm's survival.

During the time Ruiz has been CEO, AMD has fallen behind Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) in the power and efficiency of its chips. While Intel made it to market with dual and quad-core processors, the AMD "Barcelona", meant to be their dog in the fight, was delayed.

Ruiz's colossal mistake was buying graphics chip company ATI and pushing his company's debt up to $5 billion. AMD now struggles to make its debt service.

Shareholders have been calling for Ruiz to step down for over a year. The AMD share price was above $40 just over two years ago. Now, it often trades below $7.

Ruiz will be remembered as a poor strategist who pulled his company into a precarious position. He is best gone. And, wont be missed.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

This post is part of a series on celebrity spokespeople who ended up doing serious harm to the brands they were hired to promote, or vice versa. See how we rank the 20 top spokesperson fiascos.

A lot of people, including me, thought that actor James Garner gave up the ghost some time ago. Doing the "Rockford Files" TV series must have taken a lot out of him. Then there were all those times he was shot playing Western gambler "Maverick." He was so good at it, he even got a role in the movie version.

Garner's one Oscar nomination was for "Murphy's Romance," in which he played an old man chasing a younger woman, a role for which he seemed particularly well suited.

In April 1988, Garner underwent quadruple by-pass surgery.That worked out OK for him, but he happened to be at that time a spokesman for The Beef Industry Council of the Meat Board and the Cattlemen's Beef Board. Fatty meat was being blamed for a great deal of the cholesterol that was clogging arteries and leading to heart attacks. Garner was not considered much of an effective front man for red meat once the news about his health got out.

Ironic as it may seem, lean meat is now recommended as the protein portion of many diets. Maybe the beef people could bring him back to talk about that.

Read the entire series

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 24/7 Wall St.

The video pay-per-view business would probably be pretty good if almost every company in the world was not already in it. Starting with Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and running across a wide spectrum of firms all the way to the telecom companies and cable, video-on-demand subscription services are available to consumers in bunches.

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), which already has a foothold in the business, is about to go back for more. According to The New York Times, "Customers of Amazon's new store will be able to start watching any of 40,000 movies and television programs immediately after ordering them because they stream, just like programs on a cable video-on-demand service." In other words, the customers will not have to wait for the files to download, which does not take all that long on most good high-speed connections.

The launch seems like an odd way to waste the time of Amazon's management. It really has nothing special to make its service stand out among all the others. So, why bother?

Amazon has had some skill doing well in businesses where others have not. It moved from selling books to offering everything from consumer electronics to DVDs online and has profited well from it. A number of other companies who have tried to get into the niche have failed.

Amazon may simply be launching a new VOD service because it can. It may be something that strengthens it bond with customers, but nothing more.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

Even if growth in the U.S. and Europe slowed, China would be there to pick up the slack, or so the thinking goes. Now it looks, though, like that may not be working out. According to The Wall Street Journal, "Gross domestic product for the quarter was 10.1% higher than in the same period of 2007." Last year that number was almost 11%. Much of the drop is blamed on falling exports because economies have fallen off a log in the West.

To almost anyone else, a GDP growth rate of over 10% would be a dream, but to China it is probably more of a problem. Inflation rate in the country is rising at over 7%, and for commodities like food, the rate is closer to 20%. The increase in the number of Chinese middle class who can be consumers of much of the economy's local output and imports from other countries relies on rising wages. But a 50% drop in the Chinese stock market is already making many citizens in the nation feel pinched.

China cannot pay its workers more so that they can continue to become a consumer nation and cover the costs of rapidly inflating prices if income from exports is not there to drive GDP relentlessly higher. As odd as it may seem, a "recession" in China might happen even if the growth rate would be considered outstanding in any of the older industrial nations like the U.S.

GDP growth is only a relative indication of strength, and in China, the strength looks weak.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

Most investors probably think that PC sales in the U.S. are a bit slow these days because of the recession. Now, they can sleep better because industry figures for Q2 show they are right. According to The Wall Street Journal, "Gartner Inc. said world-wide PC shipments grew 16% in the period, with U.S. shipments growing 4.2%."

The only real warning sign in the data is that units sales growth is slowing some in Asia. Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) still have the largest market shares worldwide while Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) shipments grew 38% in the U.S. during the period.

The important news is that Asia may not be able to make up for slowing U.S. sales growth. If formerly hot markets like China and India are not doing terribly well, the entire PC industry is in for a choppy time.

The data contradicts information from the recent Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) earnings. Not only is the company doing well, it said the rest of the year looked bright. Someone must be doing OK selling PCs and servers somewhere. The Gartner research appears to say otherwise.

For investors in PC and chip companies, it appears the information about how the industry is doing has become confused. Now they can join shareholders in almost every other sector of the market where no one seems to have a handle on what is happening.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

JP Morgan (NYSE:JPM) is up over 4% on better-than-expected earnings.

Nokia (NYSE:NOK) is up almost 8% on a strong quarter.

Ebay (NASDAQ:EBAY) is off 9% on a weak forecast.

Yum Brands (NYSE:YUM) is down 5% on numbers lighter than Wall St. expectations.

Stocks may trade differently in the pre-market than they do the regular session.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editro at 247wallst.com.

UBS downgraded Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) from "neutral" from "buy', according to Briefing.com. The new service reports that Citigroup initiated Genentech (NYSE:DNA) at "buy" with a $91 price target.

Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA) raised to Buy at Goldman Sachs, according to 24/7 Wall St. The financial news site also said that Starwood Hotels & Resorts (NYSE: HOT) Raised to Outperform at Wachovia.

When Countrywide fell apart, the government moved in and began to examine the company's loan practices for fraud. Perhaps history is repeating itself. The FBI has set up an office at IndyMac (OTC: IDMC) to investigate whether its loan practices were above board.

According to The Wall Street Journal, "Failed lender IndyMac Bank is among nearly two dozen banks under scrutiny by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for possible mortgage fraud." Both the media and the bank were thin on details, very thin.

The matter, and questions at Countrywide, raise the issue of where regulators were when these firms operating as normal, standalone businesses making hundreds of thousand of home loans each year. Consumers are not terribly well-served if the FBI or any other government agency gets into the act once all of the damage has been done.

If the FBI finds any wrong-doing, what then? Is there a way to make reparations to people who may have lost their home or paid mortgage rates and additional fees which were much too high? Management at some of these lending operations may get into trouble, but the victims are unlikely to be helped.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

Often the source of a rumor is as important as the rumor itself. Some sources simply have more credibility than others. Reuters has reported that talks to make either Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) or Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) the new owner of Time Warner (NYSE: TWX)'s AOL are heating up.

Now, The Wall Street Journal say that negotiations between Time Warner management and Microsoft brass have become more urgent.

The paper writes, "Microsoft Corp., seeking an alternative to a deal with Yahoo Inc., is planning to meet executives from Time Warner Inc.'s AOL today to advance discussions on a possible tie-up."

Of course, the rumors has the strength of making sense. For Microsoft or Yahoo! to get bigger in display advertising and have more online consumers using their search services, AOL is the only other really large internet property available. And Time Warner management has strongly hinted that it would like to find a home for the portal company.

One thing is certain. Yahoo! will not be AOL's buyer. The likely proposal from Yahoo! would be for it to buy AOL by giving Time Warner a big piece of ownership in the combined company. That would leave TWX with perhaps a third of the public stock in Yahoo. Selling off a stake of that size would be nearly impossible. Time Warner might as well keep AOL under those circumstances. Also, Yahoo! management has been so maladroit at running its own affairs that Time Warner should have very little confidence that the group could run a larger operation.

Time Warner will look at Microsoft as AOL's buyer for two key reasons. First, it has cash; and second, it will not allow AOL to fall into Yahoo!'s hands to give the. No. 2 search company the advantage of improving its position in that part of the online industry.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 24/7 Wall St.