Harold Maass of The Week The Best of Today's Business

NEWS AT A GLANCE

Short-selling ban cheers markets

The Securities and Exchange Commission, following the lead of its British counterpart, temporarily banned short selling in the shares of 799 financial firms. The emergency ban is immediate and will last through at least Oct. 2. (MarketWatch) Short selling, in which investors bet that a borrowed stock will fall in value, has been blamed for the sharp fall in the shares of Lehman Brothers and other financial companies. (AP in Yahoo! Finance) The British and U.S. bans on short selling, and the U.S. plan to mop up mortgage assets, helped push stocks sharply higher early today, including record jumps in Britain's and China's benchmark indexes. London's FTSE 100 was up 8.3 percent. (Bloomberg)

U.S. mega-bailout in the works

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, and leaders of Congress started work on an ambitious plan for the government to buy up toxic mortgage-linked assets from U.S. financial firms. The plan, which Congress hopes to have finalized by the end of next week, could easily be the largest bailout in U.S. history. (The New York Times) The idea of the unspecified plan is to buy up the distressed assets so that banks will resume borrowing and lending. (Los Angeles Times) Possibilities include creating an $800 billion fund to buy the toxic assets and having Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy them. "It sounds like there's going to be a giant dumpster for illiquid assets," said Mirko Mikelic at Fifth Third Asset Management. (Bloomberg)

HSBC drops Korean bank offer

Britain's HSBC dropped its $6.3 billion offer for 51 percent of Korea Exchange Bank, South Korea's sixth-largest bank. HSBC blamed the market turmoil in scuttling the long-running deal, but the move fed speculation that HSBC is looking to buy closer to home. "Maybe it's better for HSBC to look at other markets," said analyst Y.K. Lee at Core Pacific-Yamaichi in Hong Kong. "U.S. bank valuations are very depressed." (Reuters) Citigroup, also looking to take advantage of the down market, is considering a bid for Washington Mutual. (The Wall Street Journal) And Berkshire Hathaway's MidAmerican Energy unit agreed to buy Constellation Energy for $4.7 billion in cash. Constellation shares are down almost 60 percent this week. (MarketWatch)

Folgers goes for the budget gourmands

Folgers is the top-selling packaged coffee in the U.S., even though it's seen its market share eroded by higher-end brands like Starbucks and Caribou. Now, with what it calls "the biggest innovation since the launch of decaf," Folgers is making a play for coffee lovers who have fallen on harder times. Folgers, in its most expensive ad campaign to date, is touting a new roasting method -- completely drying the beans before roasting, to keep down the bitterness. If it works, the high-end market has room for poaching: a record 17 percent of Americans had a dailygourmet coffee drink last year. "People may be willing to forgo the high end but don't want to have a bad cup of coffee either," said coffee industry consultant Judy Ganes. (The New York Times)

BEST COLUMNS OF THE DAY

If you're looking to buy . . .

"Trying to call the bottom in a stock market crash is a fool's game," says Brett Arends in The Wall Street Journal. But that said, there's some "value out there in the market" now. First, avoid financial stocks, even if they look like a good value. Nobody knows what they're worth, and they probably have farther to fall. But if you screen for companies selling for less than 14 times forecast earnings and carrying dividend yields of more than 4 percent, you get a group of reasonable-looking "top quality blue chips" -- long on telecoms, oil, and utilities, but also including some tech and pharmaceutical stocks. It's folly to try and "time" the market, but if you invest in good companies at good prices, "you will usually end up happy."

You want these guys in charge of your retirement?

About now I bet you're relieved that Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and the other "financial wizards of Wall Street" aren't handling your Social Security, says Chris Farrell in BusinessWeek.com. Isn't it also worth asking: "Should Wall Street manage any of our long-term retirement savings funds?" The 401(k) is now the main vehicle for retirement savings, but how reasonable is it to expect already-stretched-thin workers to wisely allocate their retirement assets? The "democratization of stock ownership" is and has been great for growth, but retirement is different. "Many people aren't wired to invest well" and mutual fund managers tend to fleece individuals. Maybe we should explore if "the great 401(k) experiment has run its course."

GOOD DAY FOR: Capitalist gloating, as a Berlin auction house is selling off four slabs of the Berlin Wall today, for an expected price of $4,350 each. Much of the Wall, which the communist East German government built to isolate capitalist West Berlin, has already be chipped away by souvenir hunters or ground into material for roads. (Reuters)

BAD DAY FOR: Landing in hot water, after plans to expand Japan's geothermal energy industry have run headlong into millions of angry naked bathers. The owners of Japan's 7,700 spas are worried that increased use of natural hot springs for geothermal plants could dry up the spas' baths. Japan, with 10 percent of the world's active, hot-spring-feeding volcanoes, imports $183 billion worth of fuel each year. (Bloomberg)

NOTED: Dow Jones & Co. said that Kraft Foods will replace AIG in the Dow Jones Industrial Average starting Monday. AIG will not be replaced in the 30-company index by another financial firm, Dow Jones said, due to "extremely unsettled conditions." Kraft will be the only food company in the index. (The New York Times)

This column was written by Peter Weber and edited by Harold Maass of TheWeek.com.