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The nation's retailers are ushering in the traditional start of the holiday shopping season with expanded hours and deep discounts on everything from toys to TVs to lure crowds of shoppers.

A number of stores, including Walmart and many Old Navy locations, opened on Thanksgiving, hoping to make the most of the extra hours. Toys R Us opened most of its stores at midnight Friday.

Online sellers also pushed to grab a piece of the action, pushing deals on Thursday and even earlier in the week.

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The Great Pumpkin Crisis of 2009: Bad for Libby's, good for organic growers

By Bruce Watson | Nov 26th 2009, 1:00PM EST Filed Under: Technology, Economy, Media

By the time you read this, disaster may have already struck. You're either looking forward to a Thanksgiving meal with the warm, reassuring taste of pumpkin pie -- or staring down the barrel of a substitute sweet potato pie while trying to pretend that everything is hunky-dory. Either way, any warnings I can offer will surely be too late.

As the history books will one day note, the Great Pumpkin Crisis of 2009 began back in August, when heavy rains in Morton, Illinois, left the fields boggy and wet, delaying the harvest. Morton, also known as "Pumpkin Capital of the United States," soon found itself with field after field of moldy, rotten orange gourds that were useless for cooking and canning. This was hardly an isolated problem: Morton supplies Nestle with its pumpkins and Nestle (NSRGY), through its Libby's subsidiary, supplies the country with 85% of its canned pumpkin. Thus, as goes Morton, so goes Thanksgiving.

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Gift cards: How the new plastic economy is becoming a tool for hidden charity

By Bruce Watson | Nov 26th 2009, 11:00AM EST Filed Under: Technology, Economy, People, American Express

Sales of gift cards fell last year, and they're expected to fall again this year. They're still one of the most popular gifts items, but as unemployment and inflation have transformed everyday indulgences into unjustifiable luxuries, gift cards have changed, too. Once an invitation to impulse purchases, they're becoming a strategy for gift-givers to help friends and family weather economic storms.

As my DailyFinance colleague Matthew Scott recently noted, the gift-card economy has shifted over the past year from retailer-branded cards to cards that function as cash or credit cards. Part of this may be a holdover from last year's parade of bankruptcies; as Linens & Things and The Sharper Image crashed and burned, their cards suddenly became worthless. Visa (V) and American Express (AXP) gift cards may lack a store's branding appeal, but they're far more likely to survive a downturn.

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A flurry of scams accompany Black Friday shopping

By Tracy Coenen | Nov 25th 2009, 3:20PM EST Filed Under: Economy, McAfee

You can be very careful when shopping but you will still be at risk. Each time you hand your credit card to someone or transmit your credit card number over the Internet, you're putting yourself at risk. The Privacy Rights Clearing House tracks data breaches, reporting publicly on incidents of merchants and vendors exposing your private data to identity thieves. Millions of consumers are put at risk because of data breaches each year.

And during the holiday season, you're at even greater risk. No longer are consumers forced to wait in gargantuan lines to get deals on Black Friday. The Internet has become a safe-haven of those who don't like crowds, but still want to get in on the deals.

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No Thanksgiving for investors: Dubai's debt woes rattle stocks around the globe

By Peter Cohan | Nov 26th 2009, 9:27AM EST Filed Under: Economy, Investing, Earnings, Real Estate

Thursday is one of those days when I wish I could be reincarnated as Jon Stewart. I am certainly hoping that when he returns to live broadcasts, he can find the funny in the media's obsessive coverage of the State Dinner crashers. And if he does this, he should note that while the media salivated over the Salahis, it ignored a far more important story -- Middle Eastern petro-state, Dubai, was defaulting on its debt.

Problems with Dubai's finances are not a big surprise. As I posted in February, I first got wind of the potential for a huge collapse there back in 2005 when I read an article in the New Yorker which discussed Dubai's world record breaking pace of commercial real estate development as its government sought to diversify away from oil.

And Dubai is perhaps just one extreme example of a bigger problem. As I've posted, the $6.7 trillion commercial real estate lending industry has been dangling out there as the potential cause of a double dip economic contraction. But I did not anticipate that Dubai's inability to repay its debts would be the straw that would break the back of commercial real estate.

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Two stocks to be thankful for: Tenet Healthcare and AES Corp.

By Peter Cohan | Nov 26th 2009, 8:00AM EST Filed Under: Ford Motor Co., Goldman Sachs , Whole Foods, Tenet Healthcare

With millions unemployed as Thanksgiving approaches, I can't think of many people who are counting their blessings these days, except maybe Goldman Sachs Group (GS) employees who are getting a chunk of the investment bank's $23 billion bonus pie. But that's only 31,700 people out of 305 million Americans.

Yet it's possible that some Americans could have bought shares in 10 stocks that have had a great 2009 so far. And two of those 10 could give you reason to be thankful when Thanksgiving rolls around again in 2010. Thanks to SeekingAlpha, we have the top 10 stocks in the 10 sectors of the Standard & Poor's 500 Index, which was up 20% from the beginning of 2009 to Nov. 17. Before getting into the best performing stocks in each sector, let's look at the 10 top performing sectors (with the average percentage stock price increases of each sector's top 10 companies through Nov. 17):

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A long business soap opera ends: AIG and Greenberg settle

By Douglas McIntyre | Nov 26th 2009, 7:45AM EST Filed Under: Company News, People, American International Group, INC.

Maurice R. "Hank" Greenberg did not start AIG (AIG), but he might as well have. Greenberg took over as head of the insurance company in 1968, the only CEO other than its founder C.V. Starr. Greenberg turned AIG into the largest insurance firm in the world. In 2005 he left during an accounting scandal, then shortly after his departure, problems with toxic assets on the firm's balance sheet nearly took the company under. A series of government investments totaling $180 billion kept AIG in business. Washington was worried that a collapse of AIG would bankrupt a number of other large companies that had relationships with the firm.

On Nov. 25, AIG and Greenberg agreed to settle all of the outstanding legal issues between them. According to an 8-K filed with the SEC, Greenberg and AIG's former CFO will receive reimbursement of their legal fees of up to $150 million. AIG also dropped a $1 billion claim against Greenberg. Some of Greenberg's property, much of it from his old office, was returned to him. He will also have access to some AIG files "to write his memoirs."

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Chinese banking stocks continue to slip and Japanese carmakers slide

By Lauren Cooper | Nov 26th 2009, 7:05AM EST Filed Under: Economy, Investing

Shares in Asia tumbled Thursday. In China the Shanghai Composite index plunged 3.6%, ending the day at 3,171, and in Hong Kong, the Hang Seng Index dropped 1.8% to 22,210. In Japan the Nikkei Index lost 0.6% to close at 9,383.

Chinese banks sank lower again Thursday as investors and the Chinese authorities await plans as to how banks will raise capital to support the massive loans they have made this year. In addition, Yin Zhongqing, deputy head of the finance and economic committee announced that the amount banks are predicted to lend in 2010 will fall to $730 billion to $1.2 trillion. That's far lower than the estimated $1.4 trillion loaned in 2009. "A level higher than 8 trillion yuan will pose serious inflationary pressure," he told Reuters. "I think five to eight trillion yuan in new loans next year would reflect the appropriately loose monetary policy."

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Google hits a snag in China as world's largest carrier hijacks Android

By Alex Salkever | Nov 25th 2009, 6:30PM EST Filed Under: Google , China Unicom, China Mobile

Google is famous for touting its adherence to open standards and for developing on top of Open Source software platforms such as Linux. Launching Android, Google (GOOG) stated its new operating system would be open sourced -- that is, the software code would be free to download, modify and change. Such a laissez faire approach does make it possible for others to develop versions of Android that are not completely compatible. Thus far, this has not been a problem, with one enormous exception: China Mobile (CHL).

China Mobile, the world's largest mobile phone company with over 300 million subscribers, took Google at its word and decided to adopt the core software of Android for its own OMS operating system. China Mobile is now well on its way to building a code base that is different from the versions of Android being built by Google itself. And more than any other carrier on Earth, China Mobile can cause a code fork problem that could short circuit Android growth in the Middle Kingdom -- by far the largest mobile market on Earth.

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Is Dollar Tree's stock as cheap as its prices?

By Dan Burrows | Nov 25th 2009, 5:00PM EST Filed Under: Investing, Earnings, Stock Picks

It's no secret that cash-strapped consumers have been flocking to discounters and dollar stores for more than a year. A bit more surprising is that even after a 50% rally off their 52-week low, shares in Dollar Tree Stores (DLTR) still look as cheap as the retailer's wares.

The company posted yet another impressive quarter of profit, sales and operating margin growth Tuesday. Dollar Tree's third-quarter earnings rose 58%, beating Street estimates by an almost embarrassing (for the analysts) 10 cents a share. Sales rose 12%, exceeding expectations by more than $4 million and same-store sales -- a key retailer metric -- grew 6.5%. The company has a nice habit of exceeding analysts' average expectations, by the way, having done so for more than eight consecutive quarters, according to Thomson Reuters.

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Senators blast Obama's secret trade talks as Fox head calls for '3 strikes'

By Sam Gustin | Nov 25th 2009, 4:40PM EST Filed Under: Technology, Economy, Media

The CEO of News Corp.'s (NWS) Fox Filmed Entertainment this week called for a U.S. "three strikes" law, similar to one just passed in France that would cut off suspected Internet pirates' Web connections and could land them in jail. Speaking at a press conference in Athens, Fox's Jim Gianopulos called internet piracy the single greatest threat facing Hollywood and said it was internet providers' responsibility to police their users for illicit activity. "If we can do that, it would be a big victory against piracy," Gianopulos said.

The Hollywood executive's comments came as Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Sherrod Brown of Ohio wrote to the Obama administration, expressing their concern over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which the world's top nations are negotiating, largely in secret talks.

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