Apple earnings surge on blow-out iPhone sales. Shares jump as iPhone, iPad drive results; forecast ahead of Street Apple Inc. saw earnings more than double for its first fiscal quarter, reporting results on Tuesday afternoon that blew past Wall Street’s estimates, primarily from a huge jump in sales of the iPhone. Shares of Apple jumped nearly 8% in after-hours trading immediately following the results. The period included the launch of the iPhone 4S, and Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said “tremendous popularity” of the 4S model led iPhone sales growth across all of...

Bank of America Corp., the Charlotte, N.C., banking firm, swung to a fourth-quarter profit on 11% higher revenue. Net income was $1.58 billion, or 15 cents a share, compared with a net loss of $1.57 billion, or 16 cents, in the year-earlier period. Total revenue reached $24.89 billion from $22.4 billion. A survey of analysts by FactSet Research produced a consensus estimate of 22 cents a share of profit on $23.74 billion of revenue. Within the total revenue, the revenue from interest on loans fell 14% to $10.7 billion. The...

The number of Americans who filed requests for jobless benefits sank by 50,000 last week to 352,000, the lowest level since April 2008, the U.S. Labor Department said Thursday. Claims from two weeks ago were revised up to 402,000 from 399,000. The average of new claims over the past four weeks, meanwhile, dropped by a much smaller 3,500 to 379,000. The monthly average is viewed as more accurate because it reduces volatility in the week-to-week data, which is especially pronounced in January after the end of the holiday season. Meanwhile, the...