Morning Market Roundup: Greece’s Selective Default, Yahoo Lawyers Up

Here’s what’s important in the financial world this morning”

Greece, again: Standard & Poor’s cut Greece’s long-term rating to “Selective Default” from “CC.” Greece has responded by implementing a bond swap to decrease its debt and utilizing retroactive collective action clauses for its loans. The European Central Bank has temporarily suspended Greek bonds as collateral for funding operations.

Even through tough times with its debt problems and possible recession, the euro zone economic sentiment rose in February to 94.4, from a previous reading of 93.4; expectations had been 94. Countries leading the rise included Poland, France, the Netherlands and Italy. In March, German consumer confidence could reach a 12-month high, according to the market research company GfK’s forecast.

Yahoo! Inc. has ordered Facebook to give it licensing fees from utilizing its technology, placing the social media giant in a possible patent battle and lawsuit that is rampant across the technology sector. Yahoo put claims on patent that encompasses technical devices found in Facebook’s ads, privacy controls, news feed and messaging service, according to Reuters. Representatives on behalf of the two companies met on Monday and discussions centered around 10 to 20 of Yahoo’s patents.

On Monday, Dell Inc. announced a major update of its enterprise hardware products with new server flash memory products, a data warehousing appliance for SMBs and a new architecture for virtualizing networking resources, which will take on Cisco and its UCS servers, according to a corporate press release. Executives also took the opportunity to reiterate that Dell is not a PC company any more.

Quickly approaching close to a record year-end $10 billion loss from restructuring costs, Panasonic Corp. named a new president to its TV business to turn things around within the next two years. Kazuhiro Tsuga, a 30-year veteran at Panasonic, will take over the reins. He replaces Fumio Ohtsubo, who will become the company’s chairman in an influential Japanese role for exiting presidents.

[Editor’s note: the above is a cross post that originally appeared on Wall St. Cheat Sheet.]