This Week | What Happened to Your Money By Matt Phillips

By MATT PHILLIPS

Luring Investors

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Cash keeps pouring into bonds. And companies may have to boost dividends to snare yield-hungry investors into buying stock, says Jeffrey Kleintop of LPL Financial. Likely raisers include companies with a dividend payout ratio of less than 25% and a lot of cash. Good candidates, he says, include Oracle, Hewlett-Packard and Disney.

Copper Recovery

Bloomberg News (

While the broader markets have been in the doldrums so far this year, surging prices for copper suggest that the economic recovery is gaining steam. The price for the metal—seen as a barometer of economic growth because of its wide array of industrial uses—is up about 2.3% so far this year and more than 12% since the end of January.

Checking Cleveland

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Cleveland is now the sole site where the Fed processes paper checks. That is down from 45 sites before the Fed started consolidating in late 2003. A federal law signed in 2003 was designed to help banks clear electronic checks more easily. Back then, 100% of checks the Fed processed were paper. Today, 99% are electronic images.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

Associated Press

We still aren't generating them. Even so, Friday's February jobs report was much better than expected, with employment standing pat at 9.7%. Temp workers—often seen as a leading indicator of hiring—rose again. But there is plenty of pain out there. The broadest measure of underuse of U.S. labor ticked up to 16.8%, after improving the previous month.

Warranted Sales

Bloomberg News

The U.S. Treasury sold off its warrants for Bank of America shares, bringing in some $1.5 billion for taxpayers. So far, the feds have reaped more than $5 billion selling warrants that they received in exchange for recapitalizing banks through the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Still, the U.S. recently projected that TARP will lose about $117 billion.