The howling-wolf T-shirt phenomenon it is not. Walmart Stores (WMT) has closed the lid on customer reviews of its caskets. As DailyFinance reported this week, the retailer is selling 15 caskets, and more than 130 urns and cremains containers, through its website.

As debatable as that business proposition might be, it proved a sure thing with at least one type of consumer: not the bereaved, but the wags who lurk behind high-speed Internet connections, waiting for an opportunity to heckle retailers with tongue-in-cheek reviews.

There is a lot of buzz these days over a new product called Google (GOOG) Wave. Some are under the false impression that it's the next Twitter, but this new tool from Google is very different. Think of it as a real-time collaboration tool that includes, among its many features, email on steroids.

Greg Dalesandre, Google Wave product manager, in an online video, describes Wave as a "shared space," where users can communicate using text, videos, photos and maps. So you can have a conversation while working on a document with a group of people in another city -- or in another part of the planet. You can both work together in real time using richly formatted text, photos, videos and more. The wave is the shared experience that you are involved with. So you could be working with 10 people and everything you do -- from the conversations you have to the changes you make to a document, will be inside a wave. What's really cool about this is that the wave allows you to rewind, allowing you to see who said what when. Since everything is in real-time -- it's fast.

Bears who warn the U.S. stock market has gone too far too fast -- the broad Standard & Poor's 500 index is up 18 percent year to date -- may not get much vindication anytime soon. Investors should see stocks continue to rally as long as corporate profits keep recovering, says market expert Joseph Mezrich (pictured), Nomura Securities International's head of quantitative research.

And the signs look good. The estimated earnings growth rate for the Standard & Poor's 500 during the fourth quarter is 216 percent, according to Thomson Reuters. Even stripping out the volatile financial sector, the other eight out of nine sectors are expected to show a blended growth rate of 7 percent. But that's still double the 3.5 percent economic growth of the U.S. economy in the third quarter. And Mezrich says it's the fact that profit growth is outpacing the U.S. economy that stocks have rallied ahead of an economic recovery.

After weeks of build-up, Verizon Communications's (VZ) Verizon Wireless unleashed its new Google (GOOG)-powered Droid smartphone on Friday, and New York City retailers were selling out of the device -- billed as the first legitimate challenger to Apple's (AAPL) iPhone's first legitimate challenger -- on the first day.

"We're gonna need more phones," Amanda Leavelle, a Verizon Wireless store manager in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood, said around 2 p.m. "I just checked, and our inventory is running low, so I've got to call for some more."

Fannie Mae's (FNH) report of a third-quarter loss of $19.76 billion and subsequent plea to the federal government for $15 billion in additional aid is sure to intensify a big question that so far has gone unanswered: What can be done to stem the bleeding at the giant mortgage lender and its sibling Freddie Mac (FRE)? Given this week's bankruptcy filing by CIT, which will probably lead to the loss of $2.3 billion in taxpayer money, Fannie Mae's request for another $15 billion will strike many as throwing more good money after bad.

Fannie Mae had previously posted second-quarter losses of $14.8 billion, on top of $23.2 billion of red ink in the first quarter, leading Morningstar equity analyst Matthew Warren to write in a report: "Nothing fundamentally has changed with the situation at Fannie Mae, and we remain quite certain that the equity shares are worthless barring a ridiculous public policy decision on the part of the U.S. government."

When it comes to allocating scarce public resources, large corporations seem to have the upper hand in the US. We already know that many powerful companies, particularly the Wall Street investment banks, having gotten plenty of Washington cash. Now it looks like they're getting first dibs on the scarce H1N1 vaccine as well.

If I remember correctly, last fall the problems with the financial sector nearly cratered the global economy -- what with the $30 trillion in lost stock market value and over a trillion dollars in bank write-offs. As I've written before, Wall Street accounts for 0.057 percent of our population, but because it has given $5 billion to Washington politicians and lobbyists over the last decade, the government poured trillions of dollars into bailing it out after its little collapse last year.

Facing a contempt of court charge, BlueBeat.com, an obscure music website, has yanked Beatles remasters off its site after EMI, the band's record label, sued for copyright infringement, though some non-remastered Beatles albums and songs are apparently still available on the site. EMI had charged that BlueBeat "engaged in music piracy of the most blatant and harmful kind," naming Hank Risan, of Santa Cruz, Calif., as the head of the operation. As the songs came down, more details emerged about BlueBeat's "psycho-acoustic simulation" defense, which U.S. District Judge John F. Walter practically laughed out of court.

"Psychoacoustic simulations are my synthetic creation of that series of sounds which best expresses the way I believe a particular melody should be heard as a live performance," Risan argued in a letter to the Recording Association Industry of America. Say what?

Microsoft's (MSFT) new Windows 7 operating system has launched with a sales boom. In its first weekend, sales were 234 percent higher than what predecessor Windows Vista racked up, according to retail sales measurement company NPD Group. That's a very strong sign for Microsoft, considering that the holiday sales cycle hasn't kicked in yet and there were no major external catalysts, such as back-to-school sales, to stimulate purchases.

Far more important than consumer sales, however, is whether large and midsize companies decide to buy Windows 7 for their fleets of laptops and desktops. Chances of that happening are very high, although the bulk of those purchases probably won't occur for another 12 months at least. Corporate IT managers always prefer to test-drive software for extended periods and normally wait for Microsoft to release fixes to new software, which usually takes around six months.

You may find it hard to believe, but the Congressional Oversight Panel released its monthly report Friday and said that it had found no "significant flaws in Treasury's implementation" of TARP bailout programs. In fact, the panel found that so far, the Treasury Department has collected $17.4 billion in fees and taken only up to $2 million in losses from the Debt Guarantee Program that backs the debt which banks issued.

At the height of the program, the federal government (and ultimately U.S. taxpayers) guaranteed or insured $4.5 trillion in face value assets, with the majority of the guarantees backing money market accounts that held high concentrations of government debt in the form of Treasury securities. So the added exposure was not for the full face value, since government debt is already backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) is upping the ante heading into the holiday season, trimming the online preorder prices of some upcoming DVDs following last month's price cut on books.

The move led rivals Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) and Target Corp. (TGT) to reduce the prices of some online preorder DVDs, which pushed Wal-Mart to take a few more cents off its offerings.

It finally happened. After months of anticipation and trepidation, the nation's unemployment rate inched into double digits, reaching 10.2 percent in October, after employers cut 190,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department reported Friday. The increase topped analyst expectations of 175,000 lost positions and a rise in the jobless rate to 9.9 percent. But now that the 10-percent mark has been breached, what does it mean for investors, and more important, those looking for work?

American International Group Inc. (AIG) posted its second straight profit Friday morning of $455 million, or 68 cents a share, as investment losses narrowed and catastrophe costs declined. But revenue fell at life and property-casualty operations. Shares fell over 10 percent ahead of the bell.

Starbucks (SBUX), late Thursday, reported higher earnings, saying adjusted profit of 24 cents per share, beating the 21-cents-per share estimate of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters mostly due to cost cutting measures. The coffee chain lifted its fiscal 2010 adjusted earnings guidance due to improving traffic in its stores. Shares jumped about 4 percent in premarket trade.

Some pieces of news are worth mentioning only in passing because they are interesting, but may not mean a thing. CNET says that over 100 people lined up at midnight to be early buyers of the new Motorola (MOT) Droid handset at a Verizon (VZ) store in Manhattan. The store in Herald Square had 500 phones in stock to meet the early demand.

The Droid is Motorola's answer to the Apple (AAPL) iPhone and Palm (PALM) Pre. Wall Street is hopeful that the Droid will lift the handset maker's fortunes, and has driven Motorola stock up over 30 percent in three months. After three years of lean sales since Motorola's flagship RAZR phone went out of style, the company may have a hit again. But one day's sales do not a trend make.

Unbelievable. Guess which is the best-performing S&P 500 stock since Obama was elected.

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Good thing the FTC is protecting us from those monopolistic robber barons in the pretzel industry.

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Hedge fund manager James Matthews really hates me.

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AIG (AIG) says it was profitable for the second straight quarter as its core insurance operations continue to stabilize after being bailed out by the government last year.

But investors' initial reaction to the report is negative, as AIG shares are down about 6 percent in premarket trading.

The insurance giant on Friday said its profit available to common shareholders totaled $92 million, or 68 cents per share. AIG lost $24.47 billion, or $181.02 per share, during the year-ago quarter when it was rescued from near collapse by the government.