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

NEWS AT A GLANCE

Builder sounds an alert

Toll Brothers, the leading luxury-home builder, warned that the era of rocketing home prices appeared to have ended. Americans have been shaken by recent hurricanes and spiking energy prices, and many are putting off buying new houses. Toll Brothers said it still expected record profits this year, but predicted sales would dip in 2006. The news sent the company’s shares down 14 percent, and the rest of the industry followed. (The New York Times, free registration required)

Big Oil gets grilled

Oil executives go before senators today to explain why prices rose so high after Hurricane Katrina, and why the industry reaped record profits. Even some Republicans are now considering a windfall profit tax. Industry leaders have chalked up high prices and profits as a natural response to a sudden dip in fuel supplies. Lee R. Raymond, chief executive of Exxon Mobil, said the industry is as concerned about consumers as politicians are. “After all,” Raymond told senators in a statement, “our customers are your constituents.” (The Washington Post, free registration required)

China’s fuel guzzling slows

China’s thirst for oil is easing, which could help cool global energy markets. Thanks to an unexpected jump in demand, China accounted for 30 percent of the world’s new oil consumption last year, but analysts say that was “an aberration.” For one thing, power shortages last year forced Chinese factories and other big customers to buy oceans of diesel fuel to run generators. Electricity supplies are more reliable now. (The Wall Street Journal, paid registration required)

Gates confronts a changing industry

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates recently warned his troops that Microsoft must completely transform itself to compete as the technology industry shifts to Internet-based software and services. One step came with the news last week that Microsoft is launching Windows Live and Office Live, Web-based services designed to compete with Google and Yahoo. In an Oct. 30 email, Gates likened the push toward these offerings to the “Internet tidal wave” of a decade ago. “The next sea change is upon us,” Gates wrote. (Associated Press via Los Angeles Times)

BEST COLUMNS OF THE DAY

Refco’s ho-hum collapse

“Call it outrage fatigue,” says Mark Gilbert in Bloomberg.com. Refco Inc., formerly the nation’s fourth largest futures broker, collapses in a bad-debt scandal and there’s hardly a hint of anger in the air. Apparently the nation’s outrage was spent on scandals and colossal foul-ups at Enron, Parmalat, Freddie Mac and others. But this “suggests our moral compasses are now too warped to register disturbances in the ethical forces that should, however weakly, provide boundaries to corporate behavior.”

Scapegoating oil executives

The “Party of Reagan” is suddenly “cross-dressing as the Party of Nader,” says Jerry Taylor in National Review Online. The Republican-controlled Congress is threatening to slap the oil industry with a windfall profit tax simply because a supply shortage has temporarily pushed up the industry’s profits. Has Washington forgotten that the last time it stepped in to “protect consumers from ‘Big Oil’” – with price controls in 1971 – filling stations ran out of gas and motorists had to wait in “staggeringly long lines”?

GOOD DAY FOR: An ounce of prevention, as KFC prepared to shoot TV commercials to assure customers it would still be safe to eat fried chicken if there were a bird-flu outbreak. “We’ll keep them on the shelf,” a spokesman said, “and hope not to use them.”

BAD DAY FOR: Confusion, as Inc. magazine reported that there are now 7,500 sales tax jurisdictions in the U.S. So many of them overlap that consumers could encounter some 70,000 possible sales-tax combinations at the checkout counter.

NOTED: Forty percent of Americans get a new cell phone every two years, according to a survey by the non-profit Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corp. Twenty percent replace their old one every year. (Investor’s Business Daily)