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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The car company that is off to the worst start of 2010 isn’t Toyota. It’s Chrysler Group.

Industry experts say that even though Chrysler’s overall sales are down only 3% during the first two months of the year, estimates show more than half of Chrysler’s sales have been to fleet customers, such as rental car companies.

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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Two of the world’s oil-rich countries may make it harder for oil companies to do business with them.

Both Brazil and Nigeria currently offer fairly good contract terms to international oil giants like Exxon Mobil (XOM, Fortune 500) and Royal Dutch Shell (RDSA) that operate within their borders. But now they’re hoping to collect a much bigger chunk of the profits from the oil produced in their countries.

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(CNNMoney.com) — When Jim Ball ran a traditional call center in Golden, Colo., in the late 1990s, employee turnover was rampant. Often, Ball was forced to hire just about anyone who walked in the door because few people were willing to commute to the call center and sit in a sterile cubicle for minimum wage.

When Ball and his partner Steve Rockwood sold the call center in 1997, they decided the next business would be radically different: Customer service agents would work from home.

Bonus, given again. Why so much to handle money? What did he and all the others do to desire that big of a bonus? A lot of Americans do a good job every day and we are lucky we get paid. I didn’t understand why they have to get so much for a bonus.

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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Goldman Sachs stunned many in the Wall Street community Friday by awarding chief executive Lloyd Blankfein $9 million as his year-end bonus, far less than many were anticipating, and none of it in cash.

Following weeks of speculation about what the top executive at Wall Street’s leading investment bank would take home as his discretionary pay for 2009, the company revealed in a securities filing it was paying Blankfein 58,381 shares of company restricted stock.

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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin plan to sell off 5 million Google shares each over the next five years, a move that could see them surrender majority voting control over the company they created.

Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) has an unusual dual-stock structure. “Class A” shares are publicly traded on the Nasdaq exchange, while “Class B” shares are reserved for insiders and carry 10 times the voting power of other shares.

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Honda is going “retro” with this hybrid model just introduced at the Detroit Auto Show. It goes on sale in the summer.

Back in the 1980s Honda sold a two seat car called the CR-X. The same trait that made it fun to drive — it was extremely light — also made it extremely fuel efficient. The way the EPA rated fuel economy in those days, it got an eye-popping 57 miles per gallon in highway driving. Using today’s EPA test, it would get about 51 mpg.

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Futures measure current index values against their perceived future performance and offer an indication of how markets may open when trading begins.

The blue-chip Dow closed at its highest point since Oct. 1, 2008 on Wednesday, as investors bounced back from a one-day selloff.

Economy: Investors will keep an eye on a report on retail sales due out at 8:30 a.m. ET. A weekly reading on initial jobless claims is also due out before U.S. markets open.

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BEIJING – China overtook Germany as the world’s top exporter after December exports jumped 17.7 percent for their first increase in 14 months, data showed Sunday, in another sign of China’s rise as a global economic force.

Exports for the last month of 2009 were $130.7 billion, data from the General Administration of Customs showed.

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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The auto industry couldn’t be happier to have 2009 in its rearview mirror at long last.

Industrywide U.S. sales are likely to be down more than 20%. The final figures for the year will be reported Tuesday. The combination of tight credit and soaring unemployment sent sales to their lowest levels since World War II when adjusted for population.

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Unlike the majority of banks closed this year, IBB did not take deposits from, or make loans to consumers. Instead, it offered a variety of services such as check clearing and credit card operations to community banks around the country that find it too costly to do this on their own.

The FDIC said it created a bridge bank to take over the operations of the Springfield Ill.-based institution.

Full Story at msnbc.com

NEW YORK – Citigroup Inc. said Wednesday it is selling a huge chunk of its stock at a steep discount to raise the cash it needs to repay bailout funds and free itself from government support.

But the government backed out of selling any of its 34 percent stake in the bank due to the tepid investor response and the weak price garnered by the $20.5 billion equity offering — described by Citigroup as the largest in history.

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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Wells Fargo said Monday it has reached an agreement with the government to return $25 billion in bailout money it received during last year’s financial crisis.

The San Francisco-based bank said repayment of the funds is contingent on a $10.4 billion common stock offering.