Retail's Bleak Friday

The offers seem too good to be true: big, flat-screen TVs for less than $400, diamond earrings from Macy's for 65 percent off. Black Friday bargains? Think again. Retailers have been furiously discounting their goods well before the "Super Bowl" of shopping days, the New York Times reports this morning, as panic sets in that this could be the worst Christmas in memory. Retailers are betting that if they can cut to the bone, they just might salvage the season. Many news outlets predict this Christmas season could see the deepest discounts ever. "For many retailers, their survivability depends not only on having the biggest, boldest Black Friday sales they've ever had, but also on making sure that the critical holiday shopping season doesn't begin and end on the day after Thanksgiving," CNNMoney writes. A quick stat to back that up: industry analysts at ShopLocal say "retailers have increased Black Friday sale offers by 21% over last year."

Hurting matters further, BusinessWeek figures, is the paucity of "must-have" toys. "The customer is so pressed for money, so scared, and so in debt," says Howard Davidowitz, chairman of retail consultancy Davidowitz & Associates. "They are so focused on price that the huge must-have toys are gone."

One person who likely won't be shopping today is Neel Kashkari, the man in charge of the federal government's Troubled Asset Relief Program. According to the Wall Street Journal, the TARP brain trust is running at half-staff, creating a swelling backlog of unprocessed applications. The lack of qualified staff may be the reason why the TARP program has shifted its original focus and now is content to hand out bailout checks to banks. "Outside observers said the difficulty of quickly building a qualified staff may be one reason the Treasury abandoned its original plans to use the TARP to purchase assets from financial institutions, deciding instead to inject capital into the banking system," the newspaper writes. The workload issues do not appear to be fazing companies. Another 20 firms on Wednesday joined the swelling ranks looking for a fat TARP check to recapitalize, Dow Jones Newswire reports.

India's "9/11," as commentators are referring to the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, has "damaged for now the city's lofty ambitions of becoming an international finance capital," writes the WSJ. In recent years, Indian and international planners have sought to build up Mumbai as a financial rival to Hong Kong and Singapore, while Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have been particularly bullish on the city "greatly beefing up their presence in an effort to cash in on a larger chunk of India's then-booming economy." Following the attacks, companies like Renault India were said to have shut down operations in Mumbai, but, while Indian business leaders agree that the Mumbai assault took place "with a view to destroying the economy," they remain confident that, "it would not impact investment atmosphere in Mumbai and around," Express India reports.

Back to Europe and the siege on Eurozone interest rates: The Financial Times reports that the European Central Bank appears set to slash rates, "by at least half a percentage point after a survey on Thursday showed the region facing its worst downturn since the recession of the early 1990s." Indeed the cut may yet be deeper after the "ECB's 'Shadow Council'—a body that issues its own verdict before each ECB meeting—voted yesterday for an immediate cut of at least one percentage point," the Daily Telegraph says. "There is a feeling that the damage from the credit crunch is yet to come. We're hearing that companies have seen a collapse in orders over the last few weeks," Julian Callow, Europe economist at Barclays Capital, told the paper.

Finally, a look ahead to the day when News Corp. must decide on the heir apparent to 77-year-old Rupert Murdoch's sprawling media empire. According to a new book by Michael Wolff, the handoff of power at News Corp. will most certainly be a messy one. The FT writes, "[A]n agreement giving equal economic rights in the Murdoch family’s stake in the company to all six of its chairman’s children—but voting control to the eldest four only—contains no provision for breaking tied votes, the book reports." That may be by design; the Murdoch family prefers "old-fashioned talking, arguing, shouting, threatening and ultimately compromise to reach consensus,” a person close to the family tells the FT.