Daily Highlights: 3.17.2010

• Asian stocks, commodity prices rise on Fed rate pledge, BOJ lending expansion.
• Bank of Japan doubles credit program to $222B, holds interest rate.
• BoJ loosens monetary policy, increasing low-interest loans available to the money market.
• India may create sovereign wealth fund to help state entities to acquire overseas energy assets.
• OPEC Ministers poised to keep output steady with Oil over $80/bbl.
• World Bank raised its forecast for China's growth this year to 9.5%.
• AAR Corp beats by $0.01, posts Q3 EPS of $0.36. Revs fell 8.6% to $309.6M.
• Batista's OSX slashes IPO price 40%, cuts share sale size to 3.1M.
• CIT Group loses $1B in Q4, excluding a huge one-time reorganization benefit.
• Google's China advertising agents demand compensation in event of pullout.
• Hartford Financial selling $3.05B in securities in plan to repay $3.4B from federal bailout.
• Honda recalls 412,000 Odyssey vans, Element wagons to repair 'soft' brakes.
• India's Bharti Airtel in talks with banks for $8.5B to help it buy most of Zain's African assets.
• MDU Resources to purchase Green River Basin production assets for $113M.
• PepsiCo to remove full-calorie sweetened drinks from schools in 200 countries by 2012.
• Reliance Industries in talks with Atlas Energy to invest in latter's shale assets.
• San Miguel to raise $1B selling stakes in its food, packaging & liquor businesses to fund growth and acquisitions.
• Simon Property Group is readying a sweetened takeover bid for General Growth Properties.
• UniCredit's Q4 net falls 27% on rising provisions against bad loans.
• VirnetX wins case against Microsoft, gets $106M in compensation.

Economic Calendar: Data on PPI, Crude Inventories to be released today.

Earnings Calendar: ATU, AXAS, COMS, CWCO, DNE, IHS, LUB, MLHR, NKE, PATK.

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Data provided by Egan-Jones Ratings and Analytics