News Corp. Revenue Falls Well Short of Forecasts

A steep drop in Australian newspapers took its toll on the company, which publishes The Wall Street Journal and The Times of London. News Corporation said net income attributable to common shareholders was $27 million for the quarter ended Sept. 30, the first of its fiscal year. That compared with a loss of $92 million in the same quarter last year.

Shares of the company fell more than 2 percent in after-hours trading on disappointment over the $2.07 billion revenue figure, which missed a Thomson Reuters forecast for $2.2 billion in revenue.

“The revenue was clearly weaker than expected,” said Doug Arthur, an analyst with Evercore Research.

On an adjusted basis, the company earned $17 million, or 3 cents a share, missing the consensus forecast of 5 cents.

A steep decline in newspapers in Australia, where Mr. Murdoch was born, weighed heavily on the results.

“The weakness of the Australian newspapers was well known, but the sales decline of 22 percent was even worse than I had expected,” Michael Corty, a Morningstar analyst, said.

In July, News Corporation separated its publishing business from its much more lucrative entertainment assets, including its movie studio, cable and television properties, which are now part of 21st Century Fox.

This is the first time that News Corporation, which retained the name and is based in New York, is reporting as a stand-alone company, which includes the book publisher HarperCollins, Australian pay-TV and digital real estate stakes, and Amplify, a fledgling education unit.

Newspapers are facing difficult challenges because advertisers are shunning them in favor of splashier digital properties and readers are canceling print subscriptions.

Saks Losses Rise as Sales Fall Short Of Forecasts

Saks reported a larger-than-expected second-quarter loss on Monday after disappointing sales of shoes and handbags forced it to reduce prices.

Saks, the luxury retailer that agreed last month to be acquired by Hudson’s Bay Company of Canada for $2.4 billion, reported that sales at stores open at least a year rose 1.5 percent, well below the 4.5 percent increase Wall Street analysts had predicted.

Stephen I. Sadove, chief executive of Saks, acknowledged in a statement that “our sales growth was modestly below our expectations.”

Saks is the latest retailer across the price spectrum to report mediocre sales. Last week, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Kohl’s and Wal-Mart Stores all reported lower-than-expected sales.

Overall sales at Saks rose just 0.5 percent to $707.8 million for the quarter.

Gross profit margin fell because Saks had too much inventory of shoes and handbags and cut prices to clear unsold merchandise.

For the quarter that ended Aug. 3, Saks reported a net loss of $19.6 million, or 13 cents a share, compared with a net loss of $12.3 million, or 8 cents a share, a year earlier.

Excluding costs like expenses related to store closings and the Hudson’s Bay deal, Saks lost 10 cents a share, 2 cents more than analysts had expected.

Saks, which is based in New York, had been scheduled to report its earnings on Tuesday. The company did not hold its regular earnings conference call with analysts and investors because of its pending acquisition by Hudson’s Bay, the owner of Lord & Taylor.

Shares of Saks closed little changed at $15.97, down 5 cents or 0.31 percent, and just below the $16 a share in cash that Hudson’s Bay is offering.

DealBook: Banks Fall Short of Planning for the Worst, Fed Finds

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Early Short Story by Stieg Larsson to Be Published

A short story by the 17-year-old Stieg Larsson will be published in English for the first time next year, possibly enticing fans of the best-selling Millennium trilogy that was released after Mr. Larsson’s death in 2004.

Stieg Larsson, the Swedish writer who died in 2004, is shown in a 1998 photograph. An early short story of his is set to be published.

The unpublished story is part of a new anthology of crime fiction, “A Darker Shade of Sweden,” scheduled for release in February. Mysterious Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, announced on Tuesday that it had acquired the collection.

“Sweden’s most distinguished and best-loved crime writers have contributed stories to an anthology that promises to sate the desire to read about the dark side of Sweden,” the publisher said in a statement.

The anthology collects stories from 20 Swedish writers, including Henning Mankell, Asa Larsson, Maj Sjowall, Per Wahloo and Sara Stridsberg. Eva Gabrielsson, Mr. Larson’s companion, has also written a story that will be published in the collection.

John-Henri Holmberg, a writer and close friend of Mr. Larsson, edited the anthology.

Mr. Larsson’s series, which began with “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and chronicles the adventures of the computer hacker Lisbeth Salander and crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist, is one of the most successful ever published.

Market Shows Small Gains in Short Session

The stock market ended slightly higher on Wednesday in a half-day session ahead of the Fourth of July holiday and Friday’s government report on the job market.

The three main stock indexes seesawed on thin trading volume, with some traders already away before the holiday. The stock market, which is closed on Thursday, will reopen on Friday for a full session.

Mixed economic data on Wednesday failed to give the market a solid direction. Private sector employers stepped up their hiring in June and weekly initial claims for unemployment benefits fell, but the growth rate in the services sector slowed in June and the United States trade deficit widened on a drop in exports.

“The only explanation that there is to the volatility is that the volume’s really light, so any sudden moves in sentiment, whether it’s buy or sell, reflects itself in the volatility because there’s not a lot of liquidity,” said Jason Weisberg, managing director at Seaport Securities.

About 3.37 billion shares exchanged hands on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and NYSE MKT. The full trading-day average volume has been about 6.4 billion so far this year.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 56.14 points or 0.38 percent, to close at 14,988.55. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index edged up 1.33 points, to 1,615.41. The Nasdaq composite index added 10.27 points, or 0.30 percent, to 3,443.67.

Large-capitalization technology stocks were among the strongest of the day, helping the Nasdaq. Cisco Systems rose 1.1 percent to $24.59 while Oracle gained 2 percent to $30.70.

Crude oil prices rose 1.64 percent to $101.24 a barrel after hitting a 14-month high above $102 a barrel on a sharp decline in crude stockpiles in the United States and political unrest in Egypt.

Health providers were in focus on Wall Street after the Obama administration said it would not require employers to provide health insurance for their workers until 2015, delaying a crucial provision of the health care law by a year.

Tenet Healthcare fell 4.3 percent to $43.64. Universal Health Services dropped 3.5 percent to $65.82.

In the bond market, interest rates moved higher. The 10-year Treasury note fell 8/32, to 93 15/32, while its yield rose to 2.50 percent, from 2.47 percent late Tuesday.

Monitor Finds Mortgage Lenders Still Falling Short of Settlement’s Terms

The nation’s five biggest mortgage lenders have largely satisfied their financial obligations under last year’s $25 billion settlement over mortgage abuses, helping hundreds of thousands of families keep their homes. But four of the five have yet to meet their commitment to end the maze of frustrations that borrowers must navigate to modify their loans, according to a report on Wednesday by the settlement’s independent monitor.

The most common failure involved a requirement that borrowers be notified in a timely manner of any documents missing from their applications. Banks also failed to meet strict timelines for approving applications. The settlement requires that borrowers be notified of missing documents within five days and given 30 days to supply the missing paperwork and that decisions be rendered at most 30 days after an application is completed.

“I think what you see is there’s still a communication problem,” said Joseph A. Smith Jr., the monitor. “If there’s a unifying feature, it’s that the servicers who failed these things are not yet communicating effectively.”

The mortgage settlement came after the housing crash led to a wave of foreclosures across the country and after widespread improprieties in mortgage lending and in the foreclosure process were uncovered.

The banks report their own performance on 29 loan servicing criteria, and their findings are then tested in a random sampling by outside consultants overseen by the monitor.

Citibank failed three metrics, two of which involve notifying borrowers of missing documents in a timely fashion and one that requires that a letter containing accurate information be sent to a homeowner before foreclosure.

Bank of America failed two metrics, one regarding missing documents and the other regarding the pre-foreclosure letter. Wells Fargo also flunked on the missing documents.

JPMorgan Chase failed to adhere to the prescribed timeline for reviewing loan modification requests and notifying customers of its decision. It also failed to remove home insurance policies, known as forced-place insurance, within two weeks of a homeowner’s submitting proof that he or she had insurance.

The fifth lender, ResCap, formerly the mortgage subsidiary of Ally Financial, whose mortgage servicing is now handled by other companies, was not found to have failed on any of the metrics.

The banks are required to submit a corrective action plan and compensate affected borrowers. Chase, for example, has already refunded insurance premiums charged to 2,000 borrowers. “We quickly fixed the issue,” said Amy Bonitatibus, a spokeswoman for Chase, adding that the timeline problem had been remedied as well.

Wells Fargo said that its internal reviews showed that it had already fixed its problem. Citi said it had fixed one of its issues and was working on the other two.

Dan Frahm, a spokesman for Bank of America, which is responsible for about 60 percent of the total financial obligation under the settlement, said, “While neither area of noncompliance resulted in inaccurate foreclosures or improper loan modification denials, we took immediate action and resolved one area and will soon return to compliance in the other.”

The servicers also submitted to the monitor almost 60,000 complaints received from elected officials on behalf of their constituents. The most common complaints, the monitor’s report said, were related to the bank’s obligation to provide a single point of contact to borrowers seeking modification of their loans. There were also complaints about “dual tracking,” in which the foreclosure process is begun before a borrower’s request for a loan modification is resolved.

Despite the volume of complaints, none of the banks failed the requirement to provide a single point of contact, leading Mr. Smith to conclude that he needed to add more criteria in that area. He said at least three new metrics measuring the efficacy of the single point of contact would be added.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 19, 2013

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to a lender that was not found to have failed on any of the metrics. It is ResCap, the mortgage subsidiary of Ally Financial, not Ally Financial itself.

Common Sense: ‘Why I Left Goldman Sachs,’ by Greg Smith, Falls Short

Mr. Smith’s letter clearly hit a popular nerve, coming as it did during a devastating financial crisis in which Goldman emerged as the rich, arrogant and unfeeling perpetrator of much of the financial wreckage still afflicting Americans. And it’s hard to quarrel with Mr. Smith’s overriding message: Wall Street should put clients interests’ first or risk oblivion. Indeed, that was Goldman Sachs’s own credo, “Our clients’ interests always come first.”

But stripped of its incendiary conclusions, Mr. Smith’s manifesto was curiously short on facts. Other than the now-infamous reference to muppets — “I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as ‘muppets,’ sometimes over internal e-mail” — there were no examples of a toxic culture at work, no actual names of morally bankrupt people and no examples of a client getting ripped off. Mr. Smith declined to elaborate after the article was published, heightening suspense and no doubt fueling the literary bidding that reached a reported $1.5 million for a book that would deliver the goods.

That book, “Why I Left Goldman Sachs,” goes on sale on Monday. Despite tight security, copies of the book have been circulating, and I read one. The book not only fails to deliver concrete examples to back up his sweeping conclusions, but he admits changing “names or descriptors” for some (but not all) people and acknowledges that what he does disclose is “from memory.”

He says he has tried “to retain the spirit” of what actually occurred. This makes it nearly impossible to verify much of what he says.

Beyond that, from his perch on the equity trading desk he seems to have had a narrow view of the institution where he worked for nearly 12 years. His disillusionment comes across as heartfelt, but much of it seems to have come less from his own experiences than from news reports about the firm’s behavior in deals he wasn’t involved in.

Mr. Smith’s book might even bolster Goldman’s reputation. After all, if Mr. Smith is the ultimate insider, and this is as bad as it gets — Mr. Smith in a hot tub at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas with a topless woman — then he hasn’t made much of a case.

But Mr. Smith isn’t in much of a position to exonerate Goldman, either. The firm was deeply enmeshed in nearly all aspects of the financial crisis and its causes, including mortgage-backed securities. And after an injection of taxpayer support, it managed to profit handsomely and pay the lavish bonuses that Mr. Smith shared in. But you won’t find that story in “Why I Left.”

Mr. Smith declined to discuss any of this before his scheduled appearance on Sunday on “60 Minutes.” Goldman Sachs responded to some of my questions with copies of parts of their internal investigation and made several employees available.

Potential problems with Mr. Smith’s approach surface almost immediately. The first paragraph of Chapter 1 describes “an intern named Josh” who’s being “grilled” and asked to explain risk arbitrage but “was floundering badly.” Josh, Mr. Smith adds, is the son of a billionaire.

There was no “Josh” in Mr. Smith’s group of interns, and only one son of a billionaire: Teddy Schwarzman, son of Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and chief executive of the asset management firm Blackstone Group.

“I was never grilled on risk arbitrage, or asked to give a presentation on it,” Mr. Schwarzman said when I contacted him this week. “I realize it was a long time ago, but I would certainly have remembered it if I had floundered.” Nor did anyone else in the class I spoke to recall such an episode.