Oprah Winfrey made herself famous on broadcast TV and now she is walking away from the medium. Harpo, her production company, sent a letter to the 214 stations that carry her show saying that "The Oprah Winfrey Show" will air its last program on Sept. 9, 2011. CBS (CBS) syndicates the show, so it will lose a large source of revenue. Many ABC stations air her program, so this will be a blow to them as well.

A number of newspapers and news websites reported that Oprah is well along in creating her own cable channel. She is a billionaire, according to knowledgeable sources, so the risk of moving to cable is one she can afford. The new venture will be called OWN and will be partially owned by Discovery Communications (DISCA).

The AAA projects that 38.4 million people will travel more than 50 miles from home over the Thanksgiving holiday next week. That is not up much from last year -- only 1.4%. But at least it is up. With a slow economy, high unemployment and oil at $80 a barrel, it would not have been shocking for the group to forecast a drop.

Broken down by mode of transportation, the AAA projects: "The number of travelers by automobile is expected to be 33.2 million in 2009 compared to 32.5 million last year; an increase of 2.1%. The number of travelers by air is expected be 2.3 million compared to 2.5 million in 2008; a decline of 6.7%." The drop in air travel is probably an indication that people are still watching what they spend carefully. The decline is despite the fact that the AAA expects the cost of airline tickets and hotel rooms to drop.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development doubled its forecast for the global recovery from the deepest recession in decades. But even its new numbers call for a remarkably weak economic rebound. "The good news is that the recovery -- albeit a weak one -- is under way," OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría said in the group's latest semi-annual report.

Weak, indeed. The jobless rate is expected to peak in the first half of 2010 in the U.S., but it may not be until 2011 that unemployment begins to fall in the euro area, according to the OECD's forecasts. U.S. GDP is only expected to rise 2.5% in 2010 and 2.8% in 2011.

Sony (SNE) held its investor and analyst meeting on November 19th. Tucked among the presentation materials was information about the company's new targets aimed at getting its profits and operating income back to "normal" levels. The problem with the projection is that it is for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2013. Sony only expects a small profit in the 2011 fiscal year, mostly based on sales of its Playstations, TVs and camera hardware.

Sony previously said it would return to "normal" levels of margins in 2011. But reaching that goal has been pushed out by two years. "It's a very realistic plan; there is little flair, but the company has previously set targets it couldn't achieve," said Masaryk Ashing, a Tokyo-based analyst at Mitsubishi UFO Financial Group Inc, according to Bloomberg.

Large U.S. banks have raised money to improve their capital position this year, in some cases because the government required them to do so. Bank analysts have worried that a wave of write-downs on commercial real estate and credit card debt might require some big financial firms to go back to the funding well. That raises the question of whether institutional investors still have any appetite for putting money into global banks.

Those concerns about bank funding may have been allayed a bit. Mitsubishi UFJ (MTU), the largest bank in Japan and a major investor in Morgan Stanley (MS), is raising $11 billion. The firm has already filed papers with Japan's Ministry of Finance to sell common shares.

"A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage." --Herbert Hoover, 1928.

Federal regulators plan to propose a way to get inexpensive broadband to every person in the U.S. According to several media sources, The Federal Communications Commission will offer a program for the federal government to take an activist role in expanding broadband, and may add a tax to phone bills to help fund it. Two months ago, the Berkman Center at Harvard laid out a plan for universal U.S. broadband. It said that building the necessary infrastructure of the program could cost as much as $350 billion.

YouTube, the video-sharing unit of Google (GOOG) has launched a new product called YouTube Direct. Its purpose, according to the site, is to offer "a new tool that allows media organizations to request, review and rebroadcast YouTube clips directly from YouTube users."

The actual purpose of the Direct product is to help television outlets to get access to video collected by "citizen journalists." A local station in Cleveland, for example, could get clips of a fight at a Browns football game taken by someone siting in the stands.

There are two sides to every story, and sometimes three, four or five. An audit by the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) claims that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York allowed banks to get 100% of the value of complicated financial instruments that they had insured with AIG (AIG). The transactions involved over $60 billion. The full report was issued today.

The inspector general Neil M. Barofsky claims that the Fed "refused to use its considerable leverage" to force major banks to make concessions on the money they were owed as part of their relationships with AIG.

Japan's GDP rose at an annual rate of 4.8% in the quarter ending Sept. 30. Most analysts had forecast a figure below 3%. It is not entirely clear how much of the increase is due to government stimulus and how much is due to "organic" activity including consumer spending and exports. Capital spending did rise 1.6%. Consumer activity was up a tiny 0.7%, but most experts believe that this was due to incentive programs to get people to buy cars and appliances.

The Japanese numbers, while good, point to the dilemma of the all the wealthy nations including the U.S., U.K. and many E.U. countries. GDP started to improve in the third quarter for most of these countries, but almost all of that activity was due to stimulus programs, which in turn have caused sovereign treasuries to take on hundreds of billions of dollars in new debt. Debt service is becoming a larger and larger part of most national budgets, and unless GDP growth rebounds quickly and dramatically, higher taxes will be the only way to dig these economies out of a hole.

In a court case that began last year, Apple (AAPL) charged the young upstart Psystar, which makes Mac knock-offs, with a host of copyright and trademark violations. The venerable computer and consumer electronics company said that Psystar had infringed its copyrights by selling PCs that looked like Macs and ran slightly modified versions of its Mac OS X.

Psystar apparently didn't have much of a case. On Sunday, U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup ruled in Apple's favor in a sixteen page decision. The most important part of the court's opinion is that companies cannot resell the Apple OS to consumers because they are "unauthorized copies" which violate Apple's terms of use for the software.