[C13.] Williams Cuts Its Earnings Forecast The Williams Companies has sharply reduced its 2002 earnings forecasts and announced plans to scale back its energy marketing and trading business, as part of an efforts to shore up its creditworthiness.
The wholesaler then boosts his own sales forecast, causing the manufacturer to scale up production.
New CBO projections that fall for the costs of Medicare and Medicare raised deficit forecasts, leading the President-elect to scale back his planned public investment package.
The Williams Companies sharply reduced its 2002 earnings forecasts yesterday and announced plans to scale back its energy marketing and trading business, as part of an effort to shore up its creditworthiness.
The announcement came one week after Mr. McDonough warned analysts to scale back their forecasts for the third time this year, a move that helped drive Newell's stock to its lowest level since 1994.
The overall sluggish result led some analysts to scale back their growth forecasts for the year and predict that the Bank of England would keep interest rates steady at 4.75percentt.
The IMF is the latest institution to scale back its growth forecasts, following downward revisions by the Federal Reserve and many investment banks.
These forecast errors were scaled to have unit variance prior to application of Page's test.
If manufacturers focus too much on low consumer confidence levels and dismal forecasts, they may scale back on research or production, which could backfire, experts say.
While the forecasts were scaled back somewhat yesterday, the storm, before rolling out to sea on Wednesday, was still expected to drop a foot of snow in New York City and southern New Jersey, with lesser amounts on Long Island.
