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The Motorola Droid 2 and the BlackBerry Torch went on sale Thursday — and the demand for the two new top-of-the-line smartphones was decidedly un-iPhone like.

When the iPhone 4 launched in late June, it was the single biggest consumer electronics product launch in history, according to the research firm Yankee Group, with nearly 2 million customers lining up at stores across the country to snap one up. Retailers like Wal-Mart (WMT, Fortune 500), Best Buy (BBY, Fortune 500) and RadioShack (RSH, Fortune 500) quickly blew through their inventories, with Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) stores following suit soon after. AT&T’s preorders for the device were so massive that it didn’t even offer iPhone 4s in its stores for walk-in customers until a week after launch.

There were no lines to speak of for the Droid 2 and Torch. Calls to a handful of Best Buy locations, Verizon (VZ, Fortune 500) stores and AT&T stores showed that stock of the new devices was generally plentiful.

"We’ve got lots of them, come on by," said a Verizon store employee of the Droid 2 supply at the Atlantic Terminal location in Brooklyn.

The Droid 2, which is available exclusively on Verizon’s network, and the Torch, only on AT&T, are high-end smartphones with a lot to prove.

The Droid 2 is replacing the original Droid — a phone that quickly became a sensation when it went on sale in November 2009. The first 74 days of Droid sales outpaced that of the original iPhone, according to analytics firm Flurry.

But the Droid 2 isn’t just competing with the iPhone and other networks’ top devices, like the HTC EVO 4G on Sprint. It’s also going toe-to-toe with its Verizon Droid counterparts, the Motorola (MOT, Fortune 500) Droid X and the HTC Droid Incredible — both of which sell at the same $199 price point (with a new two-year contract). The original Droid was slower and had a far worse keyboard than the new Droid 2, but otherwise it was the same phone — and it had sold for $150 since the Droid X was unveiled in June.

The Droid 2 has a physical keyboard and ships with the latest version of Android, which will attract some users, but it’s heavier and clunkier than its peers, and it lacks their screen size, camera quality and video capturing capabilities.

The BlackBerry Torch is a different story. It’s clearly the best BlackBerry that Research In Motion (RIMM) has ever made, with a touch screen/slide-out keyboard combo and a new operating system that will make BlackBerry lovers go ga-ga.

But non-committed smartphone customers who wander into an AT&T (T, Fortune 500) store will be faced with the dilemma of paying $199 for a Torch or $199 for an iPhone 4 — with the same data plan and same [insert adjective describing your opinion of AT&T] network.

That brings us back to the issue of availability. One key thing that both the Torch and the Droid 2 have going for them is that they’re actually available for purchase. Many stores are backordered on the iPhone 4 and other Droids, and Sprint’s (S, Fortune 500) EVO can’t be found anywhere.

Online, it’s even worse: The iPhone 4 takes three weeks to ship, the Droids take one to two weeks to ship, and the EVO is completely sold out with no mention of when it will be available.

But the Droid 2 and the BlackBerry Torch ship today.  

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It’s spring, the eternal season of rejuvenation.

And that has some hoping, at last, for a rebirth of the housing market.

It has been a rough two years, with buyers and sellers battered by a wave of foreclosures, tight credit and uncertain job prospects. Government support — in the form of tax credits and federal backing for mortgages — has helped keep sales moving. But now those supports are ending, making this spring a key test of whether the housing market can walk on its own again.

"The next 60 days, they should tell us where we’re going," said Letty Demay, president of the St. Louis Association of Realtors. "Hopefully we’re going to see a good year."

Despite the long, grim slide, there are reasons for optimism: Chief among them is the fact that, for people with cash and confidence in their jobs, it is a good time to buy a house.

Between low prices, rock-bottom interest rates and the tax breaks for first-time homebuyers, housing is as affordable as it has been in years. Prices in St. Louis are back at 2004 levels, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and data tracked by Wells Fargo say the number of St. Louisans who can afford to buy is near 18-year highs.

That is driving a surge of interest this spring. Area real estate agents are busier than they have been in quite some time, Demay said. Phones are ringing. Houses are getting shown.

"I think overall we’ve got a stronger market than we’ve had in the last 18 months," she said.

And while that strength hasn’t yet shown up in sales numbers, which are not yet available for March, it is beginning to show in homes under contract. In the first week of April, the number of pending sales in St. Louis County — homes that are in contract but not yet closed upon — was nearly back to 2008 levels, after plunging 42 percent last year, according to data from Kelsey Cottrell Realty.

The market is strongest at lower price points, where the $8,000 tax credit has more impact and financing is easier to come by. The share of listings under $300,000 that are in contract is actually higher than it was two years ago, said the firm’s co-owner Kevin Cottrell. He said his agents were seeing something they hadn’t in quite some time: homes selling not in weeks, but in days.

"If they’re priced right, they won’t even make it to the weekend," he said.

But some of that strength comes from supports that are soon to be pulled out.

Homes must be in contract by April 30 to qualify for the $8,000 tax credit; and unlike last fall, when it was first set to expire, there is little momentum in Congress for another extension.

Meanwhile, interest rates are widely expected to rise after the Federal Reserve stopped buying mortgage-backed securities at the end of March.

So far, rate increases haven’t happened — Freddie Mac’s average 30-year fixed rate mortgage climbed from 5.08 percent to 5.21 before falling back to 5.07 a week later — but many experts think they will creep up over the next few months if the economy improves. Some predict six percent by year’s end.

That’s still low by historic standards, but over 30 years every 1 percentage point increase adds roughly 10 percent to the cost of the loan.

That, as much as anything, may push more people to buy this spring, Cottrell said, even if they don’t hit the tax credit’s timeline.

"What does your total cost of ownership look like if rates go above 6 percent?" he asked. "It’s really not about the $8,000 credit, it’s about what you’re going to spend to own the thing."

But the recovery is still tentative, and nobody is expecting the market to roar back, especially in the area that most interests sellers: price.

Prices have bounced back a bit in the past six months but are still well off their mid-decade peaks. Median prices in St. Louis have dropped 6.5 percent over the past three years, said David Stiff, chief economist for Fiserv, a financial data firm. He said he expected a roughly 1 percent decline in both 2010 and 2011. It’ll be 2014 before prices fully rebound here, he said.

"Unemployment is still quite high, and that will remain a drag on housing demand," Stiff said. "We’re expecting prices to bottom out at the end of the year. And then I think it’ll be a pretty slow recovery."

Still, he said, the housing market is on the way to recovery. There may be some stops and starts. Sales may drop again after April 30. But a recovery is coming.

"We’re far closer than we have been," Stiff said.

Just how close, we will find out soon.

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In one of his many applause lines at Wednesday night’s State of the Union address, President Obama emphasized the importance of American exports: "Tonight, we set a new goal," he said, "We will double our exports over the next five years, an increase that will support two million jobs in America." It’s no surprise that people cheered; what’s not to like? There’s just one problem: Growing exports is almost entirely out of the president’s — and even business’s — hands.

It’s not that the growth he’s calling for is impossible. Since 1960, the U.S. has seen two periods of fast, sustained growth. From 1970 to 1975, exports more than doubled, going from $56.6 billion to $132 billion. Then from 1976 to 1981, they doubled yet again, from $142.7 billion to $294.4.

More recently, the U.S. saw a 68% surge in exports between 2002 and 2007 to $1.1 trillion. (The latest figure for goods exported: $1.3 trillion.) Much of the more recent growth came from the meteoric rise of countries like China and India. The United States’ chief exports — sophisticated manufacturing items like planes and semiconductors — benefited from the countries’ need to rebuild (or, in many cases, to just build) nationwide infrastructures.

But a nation can only stock up on so many Caterpillar tractors at a time. Then the demand inevitably slowed. To get back to the mid 2000s-kind of growth, the U.S. would have to bank on other countries’ stimulus plans working flawlessly.

There are other paths to export success that involve less brute growth and more finesse. China’s trade partners have long complained about the country’s unwillingness to let the renminbi exchange rate float — right now it’s pegged to the U.S. dollar — which makes China’s exports look cheaper and U.S. imports to the country more expensive.

Address this in China and in other countries in Asia with similar practices, and demand for U.S. products abroad could rise. One economist, Gary Hufbauer, a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, estimates that if China were to let the RMB rise by 25%, and if Hong Kong, Singapore, and a few of China’s other neighbors were to do the same, the U.S. would see a 5% increase in goods exported.

"Heavily undervalued currencies are doing the most damage to U.S. trade and U.S. exports," says Robert Scott, director of international programs at the Economic Policy Institute. "That is really our number one unfair trade problem."

Another way to spur exports is to encourage smaller companies to send their goods abroad. According to Dan Griswold, director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, small businesses account for 30% of total U.S. exports.

On Wednesday night, Obama mentioned in passing he would create a National Export Initiative focused on helping farmers and small businesses sell their goods overseas. While the details have yet to be hammered out, Hufbauer suggests the administration needs to provide incentives to banks to allow more lending to small businesses that are pursuing greater exports.

Would that be enough? Any plan would have to account for how difficult it can be for smaller businesses to operate abroad. Even in the Skype and email era, discovering which markets will want what goods and then building relationships over long distances and countless time zones with potential buyers is enormously difficult — especially when the exporter’s production volume might not be very high.

The difficulty in aiding such small players explains why the government in the past has spent so much time and money on the largest, most capital-intensive industries.

A study by the Pew Charitable trust in November found that about 65% of the nation’s Export-Import Bank’s loan guarantees — the main arm of the government that helps promote exports — went to just one company: Boeing (BA, Fortune 500). Not surprisingly, the Aerospace Industries Association released a statement today voicing their support for Obama’s goal: "We’re very pleased that President Obama is making it a priority this year to double exports, enforce trade agreements and reform export controls consistent with national security."

In the end, the problem of creating jobs is so thorny that growing exports will only do so much. As Griswold points out, the health of the U.S. job market is determined mostly by domestic demand. If Americans aren’t spending, there will be fewer jobs here, regardless of what’s happening abroad. "[Raising exports] is not going to be a magic bullet for bringing down the unemployment rate," says Griswold. 

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Dubai’s debt crisis may not sow lasting global contagion, but it may color a 2010 investment landscape where asset managers will likely differentiate more between risks rather than embracing them indiscriminately.

The global market sell-off after last Wednesday’s Dubai bombshell on delaying debt payments from its state-owned conglomerates lasted only two days. World stocks have bounced back 2.5 percent this week.

For all the ripples this aftershock of the credit crisis will create, the direct material impact of any debt rescheduling on international banks or governments outside the region pales in comparison to an event like last year’s bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, for example.

Of the $26 billion affected by the rescheduling, analysts reckon no more than 50 percent is held by global banks, and individual lenders can absorb that sort of hit. Credit ratings firm Moody’s said on Tuesday it saw no reason to alter international bank ratings due to developments.

But while there’s little rationale for direct contagion, the implications may seep through market psychology for many months to come.

The event was a reminder of the excessive leverage the world is still trying to shed and triggered what many investors, including giant U.S. bond fund Pimco, saw as a much-needed correction to 2009’s surge in risky assets and emerging markets.

While many may see this as a good opportunity to re-enter the market, they will likely be more choosy on their return.

“Fundamentals will become more apparent again. It’s the theme that will carry on in 2010. It’s going to become much more discerning. We do appreciate next year will be turbulent for investors,” said Rekha Sharma, global strategist at JP Morgan Asset Management.

CAVEAT EMPTOR

Growth-sensitive emerging market assets were the main beneficiaries this year of the wholesale shift out of low-risk, low-yielding money market instruments that took place since March of this year.

But the liquidity and growth landscape is set to change next year as Western central banks seek to time their exits from super-cheap money policies flooding the world and as many emerging economies attempt to frustrate speculative flows with a variety of controls, taxes and state intervention.

As a result, country-specific risks are rising in the face of recent capital curbs by the likes of Brazil and Taiwan.

Reflecting these rising idiosyncratic risks, for example, Brazil has moved to the top of Swiss bank UBS’s growth surprise rankings followed by China, Korea and Poland.

“We have, since October, been in a decidedly different phase of the recovery where differentiation increasingly matters. Recent events will only serve to intensify the market’s scrutiny,” Morgan Stanley said in a note to clients.

“If March-September was a beta trade — buy anything and it will go up — now it’s all about picking your spots. The run-on risks have increased as the scrutiny on sovereign balance sheets has intensified.” 

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Citigroup Inc. hired Willem Buiter, a former Bank of England official who has criticized the Federal Reserve for being too close to Wall Street, as its chief economist.

Buiter, 60, will join the bank in January and fill the position left vacant by Lewis Alexander’s move to the U.S. Treasury eight months ago, New York-based Citigroup said in a statement today.

The appointment by the bank, which is 34 percent owned by the U.S. government, puts an academic known for his outspokenness in its most senior economics position. In 2008, Buiter told the Fed’s annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, that it pays an “unhealthy and dangerous” amount of attention to the concerns of the biggest U.S. financial institutions.

“As one of the world’s most distinguished macroeconomists, Willem’s deep knowledge of global markets and economies, and emerging markets economies in particular, will be invaluable to our clients,” Hamid Biglari, Vice Chairman of CitiCorp, said in the statement.

Buiter, currently a professor of political economy at the London School of Economics, has been unafraid to speak his mind about former or potential future employers.

CDO Comments

“In August 2007, several CEOs of major cross-border banks admitted they didn’t know what a CDO was,” Buiter said at the European Banking Congress on Nov. 20 in a discussion on the role of collateralized debt obligations in the financial crisis. “Most members of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee didn’t either.”

Buiter called Citigroup “a conglomeration of worst- practice from the across the financial spectrum,” in an April posting on his blog, posted on the Web site of the Financial Times.

In June, he wrote in the blog that the appointment of former Citigroup Chairman Winfried “Win” Bischoff to help oversee a report on the future of U.K. international financial services was “the most ridiculous appointment since Caligula appointed his favorite horse a consul.”

Citigroup spokeswoman Danielle Romero-Apsilos declined to comment. A message left for Bischoff at Lloyds Banking Group Plc, where he is now chairman, wasn’t returned. Felix Salmon of Reuters reported Buiter’s comments on Citigroup and on Bischoff earlier today.

Founding Member

Buiter was one of the founding members of the U.K. central bank’s rate-setting panel when he joined in June 1997. In March 1999, he voted for a 0.4-point interest-rate cut, the only attempt in the MPC’s history for a move that wasn’t in a quarter-point multiple.

In 2008, Buiter turned his fire on his hosts when the Fed invited him to its annual retreat in the Teton Mountains.

“The Fed listens to Wall Street and believes what it hears,” Buiter told an audience of central bank officials from the Fed and around the world. “This distortion into a partial and often highly distorted perception of reality is unhealthy and dangerous.”

Fed Governor Frederic Mishkin said at the same event that Buiter’s paper fired “a lot of unguided missiles,” and former Vice Chairman Alan Blinder “respectfully disagreed” with his analysis of the central bank’s crisis management.

Dubai Views

Buiter has been a consultant to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. since 2005, according to today’s statement. He has a bachelor’s degree from Cambridge University and a doctorate from Yale University.

Questioned on Bloomberg Television today about government- controlled Dubai World’s request for a standstill agreement with creditors, Buiter said that they shouldn’t expect a full state- backed rescue.

“This is a business that’s fallen on hard times and its creditors and bondholders simply have to take their lumps and not expect a sovereign bailout,” he said.

Buiter was chief economist for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development from 2000 to 2005. He has been an adviser to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, according to the statement.

Alexander, who had worked at Citigroup since 1999, left in March to become a counselor on domestic finance issues to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. He was paid $2.4 million by Citigroup in 2008 and the first months of 2009, according to his financial-disclosure form filed with the Treasury. In December 2007, he predicted the U.S. would probably avoid a recession.

Buiter is married to Anne Sibert, an economics academic who was appointed as a member of Central Bank of Iceland’s five- member Monetary Policy Committee earlier this year, according to a Web log posting on his site.

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The Hawaii Medical Assurance Association reported a $55,046 profit in the third quarter of 2009, compared to a $2.3 million profit during the same period last year.

The state’s fourth-largest health insurer said it collected $23.4 million in premium revenues during the third quarter, down from the $28 million it collected during the same period in 2008.

The health plan spent $20.8 million on hospital, medical and administrative expenses, up slightly from the $18.8 million it spent during the same period last year guaranteed online payday loans.

Investment income totaled $97,867 for the quarter, compared to an investment loss of $217,990 in the third quarter of 2008.

The health plan’s reserves totaled $19.3 million, up slightly from $19.2 last year.

HMAA has 25,923 members, down from 29,719 members during the same period in 2008.

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The dollar was mixed against major rivals on Thursday following better-than-expected economic data about inflation and jobless claims.

The dollar surged 1.32% against the yen to ¥90.60, but slid against the euro and the pound to $1.4932 and $1.6260, respectively.

"Even though equities turned sour [earlier] today, strong economic data fueled the recovery story and risk appetite in the U.S. and drove the dollar lower against high yielding currencies," said Kathy Lien, director of currency research at Global Forex Trading. "Whenever you factor in risk appetite, investors take money out of lower currencies." Equities advanced in the afternoon and finished high, with the Dow closing above 10,000 for a second day in a row.

The government released a tame inflation report on Thursday, which showed that although the Consumer Price Index is down, the core CPI, which excludes food and energy prices, edged slightly higher than expected.

The Labor Department’s report on initial jobless claim showed a surprise drop in the number of U.S. workers filing new claims for unemployment insurance.

Despite the better-than-expected data, Lien said the dollar will continue to remain under pressure.

"There are more reasons to sell the dollar than buy it, and all of the reasons will hold through the end of the year," Lien said, adding that dollar has been declining because the Federal Reserve has kept interest rates near zero and "it’s more and more likely that the Fed will be the last central bank to tighten monetary policy."

Lien added that the dollar fell aggressively last month, and over the last decade, the dollar has continued its September trend 70% of the time in the three months following. 

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Computer maker Dell announced on Wednesday that it will close a plant in Winston-Salem, N.C., and will cut 905 jobs as a result.

Dell said that 600 plant workers will be laid off in November, and the remaining 305 employees will be cut by January 2010, when the plant is scheduled to close. The cuts represent about 1% of the company’s 78,900 employees.

"This is a difficult decision, especially for our North Carolina colleagues, but a necessary one for Dell customers and our company," said Frank Miller, vice president of Dell, in a statement. "The efforts of our team members there have been significant and we’re committed to helping them through their transition."

The Winston-Salem plant was used to make desktop computers. The company said the plant closing is part of a larger effort to simplify Dell’s operations and improve its efficiency. Dell began cutting back staff and closing plants in January, but a company spokeswoman wouldn’t comment on the total number of job cuts the company has made so far cheap pay day loans.

In late September, Dell bought tech services provider Perot Systems (PER) for $3.9 billion as part of an effort to seek an additional source of revenue. Until the Perot deal, Dell has strictly been a hardware company, selling PCs and servers to its customers.

But businesses have relied less on hardware recently, buying fewer computers and outsourcing their servers during the recent economic recession.

Consumers also made fewer desktop and laptop purchases during the downturn. That cut into Dell’s sales and profit in recent quarters and sent the stock down to an 11-year low in March before rebounding in recent months.

Shares of Dell (DELL, Fortune 500) fell more than 1% Wednesday. 

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Koenigsegg’s chief executive said on Saturday the Swedish luxury sports car maker still aimed to finalize a deal to buy Saab Automobile from General Motors by the end of October.

Koenigsegg Chief Executive and part owner Christian von Koenigsegg also told Reuters that there was good progress in talks to secure Swedish state guarantees for billions of crowns of loans from the European Investment Bank (EIB).

“Our deadline for the deal still remains the end of October as we have previously said,” he said.

One of Koenigsegg’s main owners was quoted by a newspaper on Saturday as saying the company could pull out of its planned purchase unless steps to secure loans were in place by Wednesday.

Norwegian businessman Bard Eker, who owns part of Koenigsegg through his holding company, told Swedish business daily Dagens Industri that progress was needed on the EIB loans that Koenigsegg needs to finalize the Saab deal.

“If everything is not in place before Wednesday we are out. We give up,” Eker was quoted as saying.

Von Koenigsegg played down the comments, saying he saw no risk the deal would fall through and that there was no crucial deadline for the negotiations in the coming days faxless cash advances.

The Swedish government has not yet said if it will pledge the state guarantees needed in order for the EIB to approve loans to Saab Automobile. The debt office is handling the negotiations on the guarantees on behalf of the government.

“It feels like we are taking positive steps week by week,” von Koenigsegg said. “We are getting closer all the time.”

Koenigsegg, backed by U.S. and Norwegian investors, struck a deal this year to buy GM’s loss-making Saab Automobile business, but its ability to finance the purchase had remained in question.

This month, Koenigsegg said state-run Beijing Automotive Industry Holdings would take a minority stake in the luxury carmaker as part of its planned purchase of Saab, potentially solving some of the financing issues.

The two companies had gone through most of the points in the due diligence process, von Koenigsegg said.

(Reporting by Niklas Pollard; editing by Sue Thomas)

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Lawmakers took the Securities and Exchange Commission to task Thursday for failing to prevent Bernard Madoff from perpetrating one of the largest financial frauds in U.S. history.

"Because the SEC failed to do its job, Madoff stole $50 billion," said Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. "There can be no excuse for that colossal failure."

Dodd’s remarks came at the beginning of the committee’s second hearing to investigate the SEC’s shortcomings in the Madoff case and how to improve the agency’s performance in the future.

Madoff, 71, was convicted of operating a Ponzi scheme and defrauding thousands of investors. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 150 years in prison in June. Prosecutors have said it was the largest investor fraud ever committed by a single person.

The hearing comes one day after officials in Massachusetts released transcripts of a phone conversation in which Madoff lectured colleagues on how to avoid being scrutinized by the SEC.

Senators heard testimony from David Kotz, the SEC’s inspector general, whose office released a scathing report last week that said the commission overlooked "more than ample" evidence, including six complaints, that red-flagged the massive fraud.

The inspector general faults the SEC for a "culture" of discounting tips from outsiders such as Harry Markopolos, an investment analyst who repeatedly contacted the SEC with concerns about Madoff’s illegal activities.

Kotz said the SEC relied too heavily on junior staffers and examiners that lacked the specialized knowledge required to spot unconventional frauds. The agency also failed to independently verify Madoff’s statements and never took the necessary steps to determine if he was operating a Ponzi scheme, he said.

"Had these efforts been made with appropriate follow-up… the SEC could have uncovered the Ponzi scheme before Madoff confessed," Kotz testified.

Markopolos, who also testified Thursday, said he doesn’t believe the SEC was guilty of "criminal activity." But he criticized the agency for its lack of diligence, saying "the SEC staff was not capable of finding ice cream at a Dairy Queen."

John Walsh, director of the SEC’s office of compliance, acknowledged the criticisms and pledged to continue his efforts to improve the agency’s track record.

"We all sincerely regret that we did not detect the Madoff fraud," Walsh said. "We are working diligently to address the problems that contributed to this failure."

As in a classic Ponzi scheme, Madoff accepted funds from his investors and stole instead of investing it. He used fresh funds to make payments to other investors. The amount he stole, which is still being tallied, was likely in the billions of dollars.

The inspector general offered recommendations intended to improve the SEC’s ability to uncover future frauds and better police the financial markets.

Among those were increasing the agency’s resources and staffing levels, ensuring that investigators have adequate training to identify sophisticated new types of fraud and consulting with the private sector to stay current on complicated financial products.

"As our markets have evolved, the SEC has not kept pace," said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. "Frankly, the SEC is out gunned."

Schumer said he will propose legislation to allow the SEC to keep all of the fees it collects from publicly traded companies, which it can then use to invest in technologies needed to monitor the markets.  

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