In the recent flood of earnings reports by U.S.-listed ocean shipping companies, common themes have risen to the surface: Third-quarter results are still in the red and weaker than expected, earnings are being impaired by out-of-service time due to exhaust-gas scrubber installations, rates are up sharply in the fourth quarter – and most importantly, as sentiment brightens, dividends are now back in vogue. "We think the reemergence of dividends will become a major theme in shipping equity markets over the next 12 months as companies institute and grow payouts in response to firming day rates and cleaned-up balance sheets across the group," asserted Amit Mehrotra, transportation analyst of Deutsche Bank, in a new client note. Dry bulk owner Genco Shipping & Trading (NYSE: GNK) has just announced instituted a regular dividend of $0.175 per quarter – its first regular dividend since 2008 – plus a special dividend of $0.325 per share....
A federal appeals court found United Parcel Service Inc liable to New York state and New York City for shipping hundreds of thousands of cartons of untaxed cigarettes, but reduced its payout for damages and unpaid taxes to about $97.6 million from $247 million. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan agreed with a trial judge that UPS violated a federal anti-cigarette trafficking law and New York's public health law by shipping the contraband cigarettes, which often came from Indian reservations....
Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) introduced a bill that would extend the US public school day to 6 pm. Yahoo Finance's Adam Shapiro, Sibile Marcellus and Dan Roberts discuss....
