Kimberly-Clark Corporation (NYSE: KMB), a consumer products entity whose colleagues include Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG) and Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ), is up today on third-quarter results. At the time of this writing, my screen was showing shares of Kimberly-Clark higher by a little under 6%.

According to the corporate press release, sales declined 1.7%. Not a great start, but Kimberly-Clark highlighted a better metric: organic sales increased 3%, helped along by price increases. Luckily, sales volume didn't fare too badly; they were essentially flat.

Hasbro (NYSE: HAS) isn't doing too well today. Shares of the toy entity are down 3.5% at the time of this writing in early afternoon trading. Third-quarter results are the catalyst, apparently. Management must hate this, because on Friday, rival Mattel (NYSE: MAT) saw a bid after its own earnings release.

Hasbro's top line contracted 2%, and earnings per share, even with some dilution from a joint venture with Discovery Communications (NASDAQ: DISCA) and investments in Hasbro's virtual-studio initiative, increased 11% to 99 cents. Expectations were beat by six pennies. Gee, that was better than Mattel's performance. The maker of Barbie actually saw a per-share earnings decline and came in line with forecasts.

International Business Machines (NYSE: IBM) posted an excellent earnings report on Thursday. Yes, the bottom-line results did beat analysts' projections. According to Earnings.com, IBM was supposed to do only $2.02 per share for the second quarter. Big Blue actually did much more than that: try $2.32 per share.

Okay, beating analysts is always great, but it's even better when there's legitimate earnings growth behind the beat. Often during the recession we've witnessed companies go beyond estimates but actually post year-over-year declines in profit. That's always a mixed bag, and you have to dig through the release to figure out exactly what's going on. Well, the cool thing with IBM is that the $2.32 per-share figure represents double-digit growth of 18%.

Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ), a company that counts Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG) and Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) as colleagues, will report results for the second quarter on Tuesday, July 14. JNJ is expected to post a bit of a profit decline. Last year's Q2, according to Earnings.com, saw the health-care business earn $1.18 per share. This time around, analysts are thinking that JNJ will do somewhere around $1.11 per share.

Will JNJ beat the analysts? It's quite possible, since the company has a good record on this count. As a matter of fact, JNJ beat predictions by four cents back in April. Sales, however, came in a little weak. Interestingly enough, the market didn't really care too much about the earnings performance on that day. Shares had rallied a bit in pre-market trading, but they closed slightly down by the end of the regular session. I found a similar situation back in January.

Adobe Systems (NASDAQ: ADBE) said it earned 35 cents per share on an adjusted basis in the second quarter in a press release issued after the bell on Tuesday. Was it enough? Well, not exactly. According to the earnings preview, the market was betting on Adobe to make just that amount. Yep, it's that whole confusing Wall Street thing. Meet expectations, and you don't really pass the test.

Meeting expectations in this climate should be considered cool, though. And let's not forget that the software company did okay on the revenue side. Sales came in at roughly $705 million. The market was expecting about $10 million less.

Verizon Communications, Inc. (NYSE: VZ) reported Q1 earnings on Monday, and they didn't disappoint. The telecommunication entity said it earned $0.63 per share on an adjusted basis. Okay, the growth wasn't so great. The company earned an adjusted $0.61 per share in the year-ago period. But you know the game: it's all about expectations. So, on that count, Verizon was ahead by four pennies, according to this database.

But the Verizon story isn't just about earnings. It's also about cash flow. Net cash from operations increased 19% to $6.4 billion. Free cash flow more than doubled to $2.7 billion. Verizon is a well-known dividend-paying stock, so shareholders definitely want to see good cash flows.

Factory orders fell in December for a record fifth month in a row. With December's numbers now in the books, it is official that last year was the worst year for manufacturers since 2002.

Going into today's announcement, everyone agreed that factory orders had probably dropped in December, but analysts were not expecting the decline to be as steep as the actual figures revealed. Analysts had estimated that we would see a 3% dip in factory orders for the month, but the actual numbers indicate a deeper 3.9% reduction during December.

While my colleague Joseph Lazzaro noted earlier that continuing jobless claims are at a jaw-dropping 25-year high, we certainly can't blame the gadget-masters at Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) for this weakness in the job market. According to an SEC filing on Wednesday, the tech-sector heavyweight ramped up its payroll by 48% in fiscal 2008.

The Cupertino, California-based company reported 32,000 full-time and 3,100 temporary and contract employees as of September 27. That's up from 21,600 full-time workers and 2,100 temporary or contract staffers in fiscal 2007. Of those new hires, it seems that 8,000 went to work at Apple's retail outlets -- 50 new Apple stores were opened during the course of fiscal 2008.

In its first full quarter on the market, Apple reported that it sold 6.9 million iPhone 3Gs. However, it seems unlikely that sales of the smartphone will be so impressive in the future. Analysts at Friedman Billings Ramsey & Co. have already warned that their checks indicate a significant slip in iPhone production, and that sentiment was echoed Wednesday by UBS. Analyst Maynard Um warned that "recent data points may suggest unit volumes weaker than our current estimate of 5 million" for the December quarter. The production slip could reduce Apple's earnings per share by 5 cents.

At last check, AAPL is down about 3% to hover near the century mark.

Elizabeth Harrow is an analyst and financial writer in the research department at Schaeffer's Investment Research. She is featured in the video series Schaeffer's Daily Q&A on SchaeffersResearch.com.

An interesting post written by Joseph Lazzaro on Tuesday indicated that many economists think that the economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, known as the BRIC economies, will supplant the United States and European nations in terms of world power and economic strength. While this may be true to a degree, I have a message for those emerging economic powerhouses: they had better be careful.

Dear Brazil, you have resources you can't yet even contemplate. However, you have been whacking through your opportunities at a very rapid pace. You have no idea about what political powers you should align yourself with. Can you reign in your pirates, your poachers, your drug lords? Can you effectively protect even just one of your trees?

Dear Russia, you scare me. The world knows more of your organized crime than it knows of your present government. You move more capital through your black markets than through your own ports. You turn your backs on true enterprise in exchange for quick profit.

Hormel Foods (NYSE: HRL), a foodstuffs processor whose colleagues include ConAgra Foods (NYSE: CAG) and Kraft (NYSE: KFT), issued its Q2 numbers on Thursday. Revenues jumped 6% to $1.6 billion, although the growth rate was only 4% if you look at just the amount credited to organic appreciation. Net earnings per diluted share rose 14% to $0.56 per share. Volume jumped 5% altogether, and 3% based on, once again, organic growth.

This wasn't a bad earnings report for a major supermarket brand, although it certainly wasn't overly stimulating, either. So, you wanna take a guess as to by how much Hormel beat earnings expectations? If you said "by the proverbial penny," then you just might be a Wall Street junkie! Seems like so many companies got the penny-thing down pat. Anyway, Briefing.com not only said that earnings were better by a penny, but that revenues came in pretty much as expected.

Basically, Hormel is trying to navigate this inflationary environment as best it can. As we all know, it's pretty competitive out there in the grocery aisles even during prosperous periods. But take a look at the cash-flow statement and you'll see that the company did pretty well in terms of net cash from operations. That metric soared almost 30% over the six-month period. Only problem is, not too much was left over after capital expenditures and dividend payments were taken into account. Still, Hormel seems reasonably fine for now on the cash-flow front.

I'm not necessarily interested in Hormel's stock at this time. If I wanted to get in, I certainly would look to pick up shares at a higher yield; there are better opportunities out there for dividend yield, in my opinion. As Joseph Lazzaro observed a couple months back, Hormel is definitely an interesting defensive name during challenging economic times, and I did enjoy the double-digit bottom-line growth. I just think investors would be better off if this one came down a bit in terms of share price.

Disclosure: I don't own shares in any company mentioned here; positions can change at any time.

There's much speculation today about the possibility of yet another interest rate reduction by the Federal Reserve. Some people indicate they think another rate cut would be a good thing. Pardon me while I ask: Are they nuts?

The dollar is already devalued to the point that our trading partners are getting edgy about their export values, and you can forget about foreign investors sticking their money into American companies to help spur development. Low level municipal bond issues could soon become a thing of the past, and that concept of placing money into conventional savings accounts? Yeah okay, I'll get right on that.

Jim Cramer sings a gloom and doom song about 7 million home owners becoming renters, and declares that the nation will be required to swallow $500 billion in losses. He alludes to a wholesale crumbling of major banks. I see no mention in his blog about possible alternate solutions to the trouble that sloppy bankers have caused themselves. Personally, I don't think that ruining the dollar with yet another round of artificially created economic stimulation based on cheap credit is a good long-term solution for our country, although it might allow some of those sloppy bankers another breather before they have to face the music. The thinking that cheap bank credit will help the economy by infusing borrowed money into the stock market and loosening up spending habits is nothing short of a sucker's bet.