Dean Foods' shares
fall most in a month

Shares of Dean Foods Co., the biggest U.S. maker of dairy products and parent of Reiter Dairy operations in Akron and Barberton, tumbled the most in a month after the company forecast third-quarter profit that trails analyst estimates.

Dean also said the outlook for its organic-milk unit is weaker than expected.

Dean Foods fell $1.32, or 5.7 percent, to $22.02, its biggest decline since June 18. Shares have fallen 15 percent this year.

Dean Foods forecast third-quarter profit of 26 cents to 31 cents a share excluding one-time items, trailing the 32-cent average estimate of 10 analysts in a Bloomberg survey.

Report outlines
risk management

A group of Wall Street executives released a report on Wednesday that outlined how the industry failed to forsee the financial meltdown of the last year and what companies can do to improve risk management.

The 172-page report, written by chief risk officers and senior executives at banks like Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup, also provides suggestions about technical issues at the same time as it offers a bit of a mea culpa.

''Virtually everybody was frankly slow in recognizing that we were on the cusp of a really Draconian crisis,'' said E. Gerald Corrigan, a managing director at Goldman Sachs and a chairman of the Counterparty Risk Management Policy Group III, which released the report.

GM chairman gets
support of directors

The chairman of General Motors, Rick Wagoner, has the full support of the board of directors and will continue to lead the troubled automaker, GM's lead outside director said.

''Rick has the unified support of the entire board to a person,'' said George M.C. Fisher, who serves as presiding outside director. GM's 13 outside directors reaffirmed their support of Wagoner in a regular board meeting on Monday and Tuesday, Fisher said.

France's workweek
isn't really 35 hours

French President Nicolas Sarkozy's effort to extend France's famously short workweek could be beside the point, if a new study means anything.

The idea of the leisure-mad, uncompetitive French worker who heads for the door after 35 hours appears to be more fantasy than reality, the study shows.

The 35-hour workweek, to Sarkozy's chagrin, is still the law of the land. But French workers racked up an average of 41 hours per week last year, a study by national statistics agency Insee found.

Sarkozy, a Conservative, contends the 35-hour law — enacted 10 years ago by a Socialist government to reduce unemployment — was a mistake, and has made reforming it a priority.

Financial sector
gets more bad news

The Bush administration dealt a blow to the already reeling financial services sector, ruling that companies can't transfer their pension plans to large banks to be managed for a profit.

The Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service said that current law doesn't allow such transfers unless they are part of a larger transaction that also includes ''significant business assets, operations or employees.''

The Treasury Department indicated the president supports legislation that would allow the transfers to take place.

Allowing banks and other companies to acquire pension plans from other companies and manage them for a profit has raised some concerns among Democrats in Congress and unions.

Sprint Nextel posts
second-quarter loss

Sprint Nextel Corp., the nation's third-largest wireless carrier, said it swung to a second-quarter loss on severance and other charges but still beat Wall Street expectations.

The company said it had slowed customer defections in the quarter, but it expects customer losses to increase again in the third quarter.

The company reported a loss of $344 million, or 12 cents per share, compared with a profit of $19 million, or 1 cent a share, a year ago.