In a Labor Day message to General Motors employees, his first companywide statement since becoming CEO, Dan Akerson pledged to cooperate with the United Auto Workers (UAW). "Coming from a union family, I know on a very personal level the good things that unions can do," said Akerson, GM's fourth chief executive since 2009.

The UAW will negotiate a new contract with GM next year, and it may attempt to restore losses it agreed to ahead of GM's bankruptcy. This is expected to be a challenge for Akerson, who has a reputation for telling subordinates to "stop complaining and start working."

The Federal Reserve's next Beige Book report is scheduled to be released this week. This report is a compilation of anecdotal information on current economic conditions from each of the 12 Federal Reserve Bank districts, and it is released eight times a year. The data comes from interviews with business contacts, economists, market experts, and other sources. While the June report showed modest growth across the districts, the July report showed that the economic recovery had slowed, even stalled in some districts.

Other economic data due out this holiday-shortened week include:

Apple's (AAPL) new iTunes-based social networking service, Ping, has gotten off to a somewhat rocky start. The service allows iTunes users to see what others like and to recommend music.

But within 24 hours of Ping's launch it was inundated with comment spam. While Apple filters Ping for other offensive material, it apparently forgot about such spam, an obvious oversight.

"While traditionally many investors worry about the potential effects of runaway inflation on stock prices, lately others worry more about the potential effects of deflation, a falling price level," observes Mark Salzinger.

"There's certainly plenty of common sense behind worries that either deflation or significant inflation would be bad for equity prices, but does the history of stock prices agree?" asks the editor of No-Load Fund Investor.

"We believe that for the next year or two, likely low demand for loans and considerable slack in employment and capacity utilization greatly limit the possibility of rapidly increasing inflation. The odds of deflation are higher, but still not high.

So I haven't been fully behind the Krispy Kreme Doughnuts (KKD) thesis. Sorry, it's just the way I am; I haven't been able to gather the amount of courage that is necessary to allow me to buy this low-priced equity.

Yet the stock is firmly above its 52-week low of $2.56. It rose 4.7% on Friday, settling out at a quote of $4.46. That price may be well below the 52-week high of $5.15, but it doesn't matter to the speculators who bought ahead of the second-quarter earnings report that was posted after the bell this past Thursday. They made money.

M & A. That's mergers and acquisitions. They're all over the financial pages. Intel (INTC) is buying Infineon's wireless division for $1.4 billion so the chip manufacturer can diversify beyond computers. HP (HPQ) or Dell (DELL) will end up with 3PAR, a cloud-computing company, at a cost of $2 billion or more. Carl Icahn, the billionaire financier, is making a hostile tender bid for Lions Gate (LGF), the film and television producer. 3M (MMM) is buying Attenti Holdings, an Israeli maker of remote monitoring technology used to track people, for $230 million. Exelon (EXC) is picking up a division of Deere (DE), a renewable energy unit, for about $900 million so it can enter the wind-power segment. Sanofi-Aventis (SNYNF) is trying to buy Genzyme (GENZ) but the board won't accept the bid of $18.5 billion. The board is open to better numbers. There are many more.

Is all this good for investors? Or is there some bad in there?

China's currency reserves are estimated at $2.45 trillion dollars. While hard data is a state secret, some information was obtained from the China Security Journal and reported by Reuters.

Roughly 65% of China's currency reserves are in U.S. dollars, 26% in euros, 5% in pounds and 3% in yen. With such a huge sum outstanding, Chinese officials are afraid of depreciation. Hu Xiaolian, vice governor of the Peoples Bank of China, writing in China Finance said: "Once a currency's value becomes unstable, there will be quite large depreciation risks for assets."

Del Monte Food Company's (DLM) stock wasn't one you wanted to be in today. Especially at a time when the bulls are in charge. The company, whose colleagues include ConAgra Foods, Inc. (CAG) and Kraft Foods Inc. (KFT), was down 2.1% to $12.56 about thirty minutes before the close of the session.

First-quarter data was reported by the business this morning. The market obviously wasn't too pleased. According to an article over at TheStreet.com, profit from continuing operations was 29 cents per share. This figure was two pennies above the estimate generated by the analysts. No matter what the traders are doing to the stock, at least shareholders can be happy about that aspect of the period.

Option traders appear to be setting up for a bullish move on Cogent Inc. (COGT). Traders plowed into 1,571 new call option contracts -- 3.27 times the average volume -- on the stock on Friday. And we know that traders were eager to get into this trade because 99% of the trades came in on the ask price.

Recently, 3M Company (MMM) announced that it was going to acquire Cogent for $10.50 per share. The stock closed Friday at $11.01, up 19.53% during the past month.

Petroleo Brasiliero (PBR) closed up $1.49 to $37.48. PBR aims to raise $64 billion to fund PBR's plans to develop offshore oil fields. Crude oil futures are recently down 1.41% to $73.96 a barrel according to Bloomberg. PBR call option volume of 31K contracts compared to put volume of 33K contracts. September put option implied volatility is at 30, October is at 36, January is at 40 versus its 26-week average of 35, according to Track Data, suggesting larger price movement.

Expedia, Inc. (EXPE) closed at $25.43. EXPE shares have recently rallied; likely due to the news Google, Inc. (GOOG) proposed acquisition of ITA may face a lengthy review process by the U.S. Department of Justice. October put option implied volatility is at 41, January is at 45: versus its 26-week average of 40 according to Track Data, suggesting larger January price movement.

Options Update is by Stock Specialist Paul Foster of theflyonthewall.com.

It's been a trying summer for many Americans, with a job market that's underperforming, and a listless Dow that's exhibited sideways action for three months, but there has been one encouraging trend of late: gasoline prices.

Although at an average U.S. price of $2.70 per gallon for regular unleaded and about 4% higher than last Labor Day, 'the trend has been the motorist's friend,' as they say on Wall Street, with prices moving lower, with a few hiccups, essentially since spring. In early May, the average price for unleaded regular hit $2.78 per gallon.

Bearish traders should be using the recent strength in the equity markets to identify short opportunities. The S&P 500 is currently trading above 1,100 and has rallied very sharply off of the 1,040-1,050 level in just a matter of days.

This surge in equities appears to be driven by a combination of short covering and better than expected economic numbers. Rather than getting bullish here, however, it may be time to put out some tactical shorts. Traders that have been buying the highs and selling the lows in anticipation of a breakout of the current trading range have been consistently burned.

Unemployment and non-Farm payrolls managed to keep the bears in hibernation this Friday, although that post-release gain and cheer was a bit more muted through most of the trading day. The fact that most trading desks were light and that a hurricane was off the east coast and most investors were either not in at all or gone by 11 AM made for a quiet rest of the day.

Here were the unofficial closing bell levels:

Dow Jones 10,447.86 +127.76 (1.24%)
S&P 500 1,104.44 +14.34 (1.32%)
Nasdaq 2,233.75 +33.74 (1.53%)

Top Analyst Calls

The U.S. lost fewer jobs than expected in August. Here are the key stats, as reported in the New York Times:

• The economy lost another 54,000 jobs last month.
• Private companies added 67,000 jobs.
• The unemployment rate rose to 9.6% from 9.5%.
• The government lost 121,000 jobs in August.
• State and local governments cut 10,000 jobs and another 114,000 temporary census positions.

"Cree (CREE) is a leading provider of light-emitting diodes (LED) and related technology; in my view, the company is in an excellent position to benefit from the "Green Revolution" taking place in the lighting industry," says Geoffrey Seiler.

The editor of BullMarket.com explains, "Operationally, the Durham, North Carolina-based company delivered solid results for the quarter ended June 27th, which was its fiscal fourth quarter of 2010.

"The company announced last night that it earned $52.8 million, or 48 cents per share, up from $9.7 million, or 18 cents per share, in the year-ago period.