Home Depot (NYSE: HD) reported its first quarter numbers today, topping Wall Street estimates, but cautioning that the company's business remains under pressure from the current housing crisis.

Ahead of today's earnings report, analysts had been expecting to see Home Depot, the nations largest home improvement retailer, show earnings of 29 cents per share for its first quarter, but the company surprised to the upside with 35 cents per share. Sounds like good news, but Wall Street has been selling the stock off so far in today's action.

The Consumerist, a website published by the parent of Consumer Reports, has a potential lead on an alleged development at Borders Group (NYSE: BGP). Forgive all the wishy-washy verbiage; nothing is confirmed yet. An individual identifying him/herself as a Borders employee informed the website that the chain is severely paring down its CD and DVD sections, leaving only top sellers and reducing the prices of those.

Said alleged employee also encourages shoppers to wait for deep-discount sales of remaining digital inventory in the coming weeks.

On one hand (or on many hands), this makes sense. The advent of MP3 technology, Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN), Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX), and file-sharing services have seen bigger and better CD/DVD outlets (e.g. Tower Records - SOB!) go belly up, so why wouldn't Borders focus all of its energy on its more popular books line?

Early this morning, McDonald's (NYSE: MCD) reported February sales, which may act as a lodestone on quarterly earnings. According to MarketWatch, MCD's systemwide sales dropped 4.6%, but "currency fluctuation" caused the problem. Without these fluctuations, MCD's sales would have increased 3.2%.

MCD's same-store sales increased 2.8% in February, or 6.8% excluding a calendar shift for an extra day in February 2008. European sales decreased slightly, but were up 4% taking the calendar shift into account.

Last week, the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) announced that worldwide semiconductor sales dropped to $17.4 billion from $22.3 billion in December, a drop of 22%. Compared to November, December's sales were 16.6% lower. For comparison, November 2007 chip sales fell only 10%.

SIA President George Scalise noted that weakened demand for automotive products, personal computers, cell phones, and corporate information technology products. However, Scalise said the largest revenue declines were "in the memory sector where price pressure more than offset significant growth in total bit shipments."

Most companies saw sales weakness in January, and The Boeing Company (NYSE: BA) was no exception. As the global economic slowdown continues to drag out, the company saw sharp drops in order for both freight and passenger jets in the month.

The figures are pretty staggering. In January, the company only received order for 18 jetliners. When you compare this with January of last year, when the company had orders for 65 of its planes, you see a year over year decline of 72%.

Shares of chip maker Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC) are selling off today after the company announced that fourth quarter revenues were going to be below (wsj subscription required) an already lowered estimate.

The stock is currently down 6.4% on the day to $14.38 and trading near its intraday low of $14.34 following the announcement that the company is expecting to see revenues for its fourth quarter around the $8.2 billion level. At this level, the quarterly revenues would be 20% lower than its previous quarter, and well below its guidance from November that forecast a 12% dip in the quarter.

Today's news is a clear sign of the troubles that the semiconductor industry is dealing with at this time. Typically, the fourth quarter is the strongest quarter, and as recently as October, Intel had forecast that its fourth quarter sales would actually be higher than its third quarter numbers by around 3%. How quickly things can change.

While most retailers were looking at dismal holiday shopping seasons this year, online retailer Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced that it had its best holiday season in history.

Early indications are showing that retail sales figures could be down as much as 5.5 to 8% during this year, as rising unemployment and general concern over the economy has led to most consumers tightening up their spending this year.

Amazon, which has probably actually been benefiting from the current economic slowdown, saw massive sales on December 15, which is typically the company's strongest day of the year. This year it saw sales of 6.3 million and shipments of 5.6 million units on the 15th, its strongest day in history.

The world has not been swayed by the coy laugh of organic vegetables, the winsome eyes of local produce, the sparkling personality of grass-fed beef. When money's tight, the world goes to McDonald's for a dollar burger, and maybe a splurge on Southern-style chicken, an opportunity to win big -- or small, that next package of French fries has to come from somewhere -- with the chain's traditional 'Monopoly' game. Same-store sales were up 8.2% worldwide, with a respectable 5.3% increase in U.S. outlets.

McDonald's Corporation (NYSE: MCD) is still struggling to gain Wall Street approval for many of its recent moves, such as expanding hours and diving head-first into competition with Starbucks, rolling out espresso bars and fancy blended coffee drinks into its U.S. stores. Given some rough numbers from Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX) out yesterday, it seems reasonable to wonder whether customers are avoiding the pricey pastries and coffee drinks at Starbucks and heading for the Dollar Menu at McDonald's.

August was yet another tough month for American auto maker Ford Motor Company (NYSE: F) as the company reported today that during the month, U.S. sales were off by a mind boggling 26.5%.

During the month, Ford was able to sell a total of 155,172 light vehicles, which was 3.6% below July's figures of 160,990, which was the worst month for U.S. car sales in the past 16 years.

As expected, truck sales really took a beating last month for the company. With consumers dealing with record high gasoline prices, truck sales have been weak for some time now, and last month the company saw truck off by more than 32%. Its car sales fell by nearly 9%.

Look for shares of Office Depot (NYSE: ODP) to take a beating today after the office supplies retailer shocked Wall Street by predicting a huge drop in its second quarter same-stores sales.

Office Depot is going to announce its second quarter numbers later this month, and investors got a better picture of just what to expect this morning after the company stated that it is now forecasting a 10% drop in its same-store sales for the quarter, citing the slowing American economy as the main reason.

The company also warned it expects the remainder of the year to remain difficult. While the retailer believes that sales trends should improve slightly, it is remaining pessimistic. Margins for the quarter, it says, have declined by about 200 basis points than what it had previously anticipated. Even before today's revision, the company had estimated about 200 to 250 basis point decline in its margins. Looking at the rest of the year, the company thinks that its margins should increase sequentially in both Q3 and Q4.

It probably should come as no surprise, but June was a tough month for automakers, and all signs are pointing to more troubles out on the horizon.

All but one major automaker saw their sales drop last month, with Honda Motor (NYSE: HMC) being the sole exception. For the month, Honda actually had a 1% year-over-year sales growth, which given the current market place was an exceptional feat.

So just how bad was June for the automakers? Pretty bad. During the month, combined auto sales fell to 1.19 million vehicles sold, a 266,000 decline from the same period last year. This just continues the trend that we have been seeing all year, amounting to roughly a 10% sales decline during the first half of the year.

Monday, June 30

• H&R Block (NYSE:HRB) to report Q4 earnings; conference call at 8:00am on Tuesday.
• InteractiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI) to give operational update.

Tuesday, July 1

• Constellation Brands (NYSE:STZ) to report Q1 earnings; conference call at 10:00am.
• Texas Instruments (NYSE:TXN) to discuss enhanced financial reporting structure at 11:00am.
• Ford (NYSE:F) to report June sales at 1:00pm; General Motors (GM) to report June sales at 2:00pm.
• Apollo Group (NASDAQ:APOL) to report Q3 earnings; conference call at 5:00pm.
  

Wednesday, July 2

• Family Dollar (NYSE:FDO) to report Q3 earnings; conference call at 10:00am.
  

Thursday, July 3

• Corel Corp (NASDAQ:CREL) to report Q2 earnings; conference call at 8:00am.
• Stolt-nielsen to report Q2 earnings; conference call at 9:00am.

Friday, July 4

• Markets closed for Fourth of July holiday.
  

U.S. business sales increased 1.4% in April - - the fastest pace in five months - - outpacing inventory growth and leaving businesses with small inventory levels, the U.S. Commerce Department announced Thursday.

Sales have increased 6.8% since April 2007.

Meanwhile, inventories increased a modest 0.5% in April, above the 0.3% consensus estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News. Inventories have increased 5.4% since April 2007.

Further, the April business inventory-to-sales ratio declined to 1.25, with the typical company now possessing about a 38-day supply of goods in storage/inventory rooms. A year ago, in April 2007 the inventory-to-sales ratio was 1.27.

Monday, May 5

• Happy Cinco de Mayo!
• Day one of the two-day FDA Anesthetic/Life Support Drugs & Drug Safety/Risk Management Advisory Committees meeting: Purdue Pharma's NDA for Oxycontin.
  
• Anadarko Petroleum (NYSE:APC) to report Q1 earnings; conference call Tuesday at 10:00am.

Tuesday, May 6

• Day two of the two-day FDA Anesthetic/Life Support Drugs & Drug Safety/Risk Mgmt Advisory Committees meeting: Cephalon's (NASDAQ:CEPH) sNDA for Fentora.
• Molson Coors (NYSE:TAP) to report Q1 earnings; conference call at 12:00pm.
• Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS) to report Q2 earnings; conference call at 4:30pm.

Wednesday, May 7

• Marsh & McLennan (NYSE:MMC) to report Q1 earnings; conference call at 8:30am.
• Transocean (NYSE:RIG) to report Q1 earnings; conference call at 10:00am.
• Hot Topic (NASDAQ:HOTT) and Zumiez (NASDAQ:ZUMZ) to report April sales at 4:00pm.

Thursday, May 8

• Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) to report April sales at 8:00am. Abercrombie & Fitch (NYSE:ANF) to report sales at 8:15am. Target (NYSE:TGT) to report sales at 8:30am.
  
• NVidia (NADAQ:NVDA) to report Q1 earnings; conference call at 5:00pm.

Friday, May 9

• PDUFA date for Adolor Corp (NYSE:ADLR) and GlaxoSmithKline's (NYSE:GSK) Entereg for management of Post-operative Ileus.
• American International Group (NYSE:AIG) to report Q1 earnings; conference call at 8:30am.
• Sotheby's (NYSE:BID) to report Q1 earnings; conference call at 9:00am.

U.S. business inventories increased 0.6% in February 2008 to $1.468 trillion, the U.S. Commerce Department announced Monday.

Economists surveyed by Bloomberg News had expected inventories to increase by 0.6% in February 2008.

Meanwhile, sales declined 1.1% in February 2008, the category's largest drop since January 2007.

Also, the inventory-to-sales ratio, an indicator of demand, increased to 1.28 in February 2008 from 1.26 in January 2008.

Economists, business executives, monetary officials and investors/traders monitor the inventories statistic because it can indicate business optimism and/or growing sales in the months ahead.

Further, the ratio of inventories-to-sales can help investors determine whether production demand will expand or contract in the near future -- a major factor in U.S. GDP growth.

Economic Analysis: A sub-par February 2008 business inventories report. The key statistic is the 1.28 inventory-to-sales ratio, which continues to increase. It's been rising since late 2007 -- and a sustained rise historically indicates, at minimum, economic sluggishness up ahead; at worst, a recession. For example, the ratio increased throughout 2001, prior to the start of the U.S.'s last recession. Conversely, it decreased throughout the ensuing, nearly 6-year economic expansion.