If you’ve put off your holiday shopping and live in or near Louisiana, you’re getting a break this weekend. The 2005 Sales Tax Holiday, passed during a special session of the state legislature last month, will be in effect Friday, December 16, to Sunday, December 18. Shoppers throughout Louisiana, will save 4 cents on every dollar of the first $2,500 of the purchase price on most individual items. The tax holiday applies only to the 4 percent that is the state portion of the sales tax.

The holiday shopping season officially began at midnight Friday morning. Early signs were encouraging as crowds gathered to take advantage of huge sales and deeply discounted prices designed to lure in shoppers. The plan may have not have worked as intended, however. Shoppers came, but spending on Friday was virtually unchanged from the previous year, according to ShopperTrack RCT Corp. which tracks total sales at more than 45,000 retail outlets.The ShopperTrack data indicates total sales dropped 0.9 percent to $8 billion from a year ago.

The Federal Reserve is closer to finding a replacement for Alan Greenspan, who will be retiring as Chairman in January. The Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee has recommended Ben Bernanke’s confirmation to the full Senate. Bernanke serves as chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors as well as a former Princeton economics professor and Fed governor.Bernanke’s nomination received its only opposition from Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY). Bunning voiced concerns that Bernanke was not enough of an independent thinker as the outgoing Greenspan has demonstrated.

If it weren't for fewer car purchases and high gas prices, retail sales for October would have been strong, a new government report shows.Analysts had predicted retail sales would fall 0.7 percent last month, but sales actually fell only 0.1 percent from the month before, Reuters reported. Car sales fell sharply by 3.6 percent in October, so if those figures were excluded, retail sales would have risen 0.9 percent.

An October manufacturing report shows that while manufacturing activity is expanding, it declined from September’s 59.4 percent to 59.1 in October. The Associated Press reports that manufacturing felt the increasing strain of rising energy and raw materials prices. The Institute of Supply Management (ISM) ranks activity with values above 50 indicating expansion and those below 50 showing shrinking activity.

Talk of a windfall tax on oil companies is surfacing as the companies are reporting their latest quarterly revenue. The concern is that while American consumers are facing much higher energy costs, especially for heating oil and natural gas, the oil companies are reporting record-high profits. “Some might call it a novel approach for me, but I cannot sit back in good conscience while those in our society struggling to heat their homes are being left in the cold by oil companies,” Sen.

Marketwatch reports that mortgage servicers are continuing to pay borrowers on their reverse mortgages but how long will they be able to say that in the face of the destruction in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita? While these servicers pay out mortgage payments, they are holding their breath to see how the insurance coverage paid by borrowers respond to the disaster.The operative question is if the value of the reverse mortgage is based on the home that might have been destroyed in the storms or resulting destruction.

Two recent studies reveal important trends about the growth of the downtown areas of American cities. According to a new study by the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), small businesses are the drivers of inner city economies and job growth. At the same time, the first-ever estimates from the U.S.

New orders for manufactured goods rose 2.5 percent in August offsetting a 2.5 percent decrease in July. These numbers may show that the economy is robust even with higher energy prices according to Reuters. Two hurricanes’ worth of damage to the Gulf Coast had not occurred when these numbers were compiled.