Blog Posts by Chris Nichols

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas is pressing the U.S. to emphasize local banking to get traditional lending practices restored and the nation back on proper financial footing, while repeating calls for splitting apart or containing the size of "too-big-to-fail" firms.

A multipart series from the bank advocates the idea that community banks, or those with no more than $10 billion in assets, were better off in terms of loan quality than the global banking giants during the financial crisis and that they now should be encouraged to flourish rather than be encumbered by unneeded regulations.

"Financial stability rests on a level playing field that rewards sound judgment and integrity and penalizes excessive risk and complexity financed by taxpayer dollars," Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher -- who has on more than one occasion criticized the system by which enormous financial institutions have been deemed so critical to commerce that they can't be allowed to go under -- said in

Two of the best-known hedge fund managers in America are battling over supplement maker Herbalife (HLF), with Pershing Square's Bill Ackman attacking from the short side and Third Point's Daniel Loeb hitting back with the recent announcement that he's taken a sizable long position.

Who's ultimately right in terms of the stock's direction amounts to a coin flip at the moment. Both Ackman and Loeb have the capital and the stomach to wage a considerable fight over Herbalife, and neither has said anything to suggest they're in this only for the short haul.

Related: Herbalife Battle: Great Theater, Terrible Trade

Pershing Square has a massive short in Herbalife, meaning it's betting on the stock to fall -- Ackman has questioned the company's business model in which sellers of Herbalife products recruit others and profit from their sales. Third Point, meanwhile, has taken a more than 8% stake in the company, indicating Loeb's clear belief that Herbalife is a legitimate enterprise whose shares will advance when Ackman's doubts are shown to be wrong.

So who's got it right? Hitha Prabhakar, retail analyst and author of "Black Market Billions," says it's not one or the other right now.

"Really they both are winners," she tells Jeff Macke in the accompanying video. Ackman shorted the stock when it was quite a few points higher, and he benefited from a drop of more than 30%. Then Loeb, who is also a director of Yahoo! Inc., the publisher of this website, disclosed his interest, which sent the stock back to the upside.

Chain stores reporting holiday sales this week have been largely unimpressive, with GameStop (GME), Toys R Us and Tiffany (TIF) all posting lackluster results. Best Buy (BBY) said its revenue and same-store sales fell, but since even worse numbers had been feared on Wall Street, the stock soared in response.

Beyond the "but it could have been so ugly" thesis driving Best Buy sharply higher, the bigger story is that none of these well-known and found-everywhere retailers had sales in the last two months of the year that suggest consumers were overly anxious to spend their money. Yes, they spent, though not at especially heightened levels at the stores offering comments in recent days.

Much more is coming from the retail sector in the weeks ahead, including monthly retail sales data on Tuesday, but for now here's some of what we've learned in the past few sessions:

--GameStop. Sales for the nine weeks ended Dec. 29 fell 4.6% from the 2011 holidays to $2.88 billion. Same-store sales were

Tiffany (TIF) was slumping Thursday after the jewelry seller said holiday sales failed to meet its hopes for what is consistently its biggest period of the year, leading to the latest in a series of downbeat earnings outlooks issued over the past few quarters.

Normally, Tiffany records around a third of its yearly revenue in the fourth quarter, making the shopping rush of November and December critical to the New York-based merchant's full-year results. This time around, global net sales in fact rose 4% year-over-year to $992 million, but that's not a level of growth that will allow the company's revenue and income figures to meet the projections of management and analysts.

Recently, the stock was down 3.8% at $60.89, though that was actually above its lows. At its worst point of the session, $58.73, it was showing a loss of more than 7%, an unusually large single-day percentage decline for the shares.

Because of the sluggish results, earnings for the year ending Jan. 31 will probably

Two of the most powerful franchises in console gaming had new releases leading up to the 2012 shopping season, but that wasn't enough to give GameStop (GME) a big quarter to end the year.

GameStop's shares were sinking 5% to $23.57 Tuesday after the video-game seller said sales for the nine-week holiday period, which ended Dec. 29, totaled $2.88 billion, down 4.6% from the results recorded in 2011. For investors, the good news here is the stock was much weaker in the premarket, at one point showing a loss of 10%, so the damage has been mitigated as the news has been processed. The bad news is it wasn't limited to GameStop, and related game stocks were selling off.

Same-store sales for the holidays fell 4.4%, GameStop, which is planning to close 200 shops, said in a press release. In the U.S., comparable sales were off 3.5%, while international same-store sales dropped 6.4%. The Grapevine, Texas, company is now expecting fourth-quarter same-store sales to decline 4% to 7%, making for

(Updated at 11:31 p.m. ET, Jan. 1, 2013)

If the U.S. market follows the pattern that's so far building overseas, stocks look set to start the new trading year with gains.

With the Republican-led House of Representatives joining the Senate in approving a measure to avoid the tax hikes and spending reductions known as the fiscal cliff, Wall Street seems poised to welcome the news and send stocks higher, at least at the outset of the first session of 2013.

The Senate reached an agreement to avert the cliff hours prior, but the House wasn't ready to sign off. As late as Tuesday evening, it appeared that an accord might not pass both chambers of Congress before the market opened Wednesday. However, once GOP House members gave up on a wish to get new government spending cuts by way of the pact , it was only a matter of time before the deal was done and headed for President Obama's desk.

For investors, getting past the cliff isn't a guarantee that the American market will advance, but should

Gary Shilling has been a long-time advocate of bonds, and he's not changing his tune as the market heads into the new year.

Stocks, up four years running, will be trying in 2013 to extend the rally that started all the way back in March 2009. But Shilling, president of economic consulting firm A. Gary Shilling & Co., says the impending recession requires investors to be cautious about equities.

"I think you play it with a 'risk-off' kind of approach," he says in an interview with The Daily Ticker. "And that means you probably look for more appreciation in long-term Treasury bonds, which have been a favorite of mine since 1981."

Shilling has been a believer in bonds for more than three decades and he's not altering that position now.

"Stocks are vulnerable," he notes. Looking ahead, he's expecting the yield on the 30-year Treasury to decline to 2% and for the yield on the 10-year note to drop to 1% from current levels.

Related: Bill Gross: Fed's "Hot Air" Will Keep Bond Bubble Afloat

While there are dozens of measures an investor can use to judge a company's worth, we recently set out to examine whether a single corporation could be the stock market's equivalent of baseball's MVP of the past year.

Our ultimate choice was Gap (GPS), but it almost wasn't (read our full case for it here). Here's a guide to how we went about it, along with a few possibilities that didn't quite fit the bill for us.

The goal was to have a handful of finalists determined by using an array of fairly simple criteria. We started with a broad universe of more than 20,000 publicly traded securities but felt that the S&P 1,500 – the combined S&P 500, MidCap 400 and SmallCap 600 – was a fair place to go to get our winner.

We wanted to see a few things in particular: Significant share price appreciation, dividend payments – especially a raised dividend – earnings and revenue growth and positive guidance in 2012. We also studied executive pay, leaning toward compensation that wasn't excessive for