Stocks ready to retreat

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- U.S. stocks were poised to open lower Thursday as skepticism grew over a global plan aimed at fighting the credit crisis and investors awaited a slew of economic readings and earnings from Lehman Brothers.

At 6:46 a.m. ET, Nasdaq and S&P futures were lower, pointing to a weak start for stocks.

The Fed and other central banks announced a plan Wednesday aimed at thawing the frozen credit markets. The plan initially sparked big gains on Wall Street, but stocks ended up paring most of their gains as investors expressed doubt that the plan would work and worried about a $4 a barrel jump in oil prices on tighter than expected supplies.

Oil prices were little changed in early trading Thursday, as a barrel of light sweet crude edged up 10 cents to $94.49.

The lack of confidence in the plan hit global markets. Asian stocks fell sharply on Thursday, and European stocks retreated in the early going.

At 8:30 a.m. ET the government is set to release its readings on retail sales in November as well as the Producer Price Index, a key reading of inflation at the wholesale level. It also will report on initial jobless claims at that time, and on business inventories at 10 a.m. ET.

Retail sales are seen posting a 0.6 percent gain, up from the modest 0.2 percent rise in October, according to economists surveyed by Briefing.com.

The PPI is forecast to jump 1.5 percent, due mostly to higher fuel costs, after only a 0.1 percent rise in October. The more closely watched core PPI, which strips out food and energy prices, is seen rising only 0.2 percent after being unchanged in October.

The financial sector, which has been heavily hit by the credit squeeze, will be in focus again as Lehman Brothers kicks off fourth-quarter earnings for brokerages. The results will offer the first look at how the mortgage meltdown hit Wall Street earnings in the most recent period. Lehman (Charts, Fortune 500) is forecast to post a 17 percent drop in earnings, according to analysts surveyed by earnings tracker Thomson First Call.

One Wall Street firm where earnings have stayed strong despite the financial markets turmoil is Goldman Sachs (Charts, Fortune 500). CEO Lloyd Blankfein could take home as much as $70 million this year, which would be up 30 percent from the then record $54 million he took home a year earlier, according to a report in the Financial Times. The firm is also expected to pay a total of $20 billion in salary and bonuses to all of its employees, which comes to an average of about $360,000 per person, according to the report.

In other earnings news, wholesale club retailer Costco (Charts, Fortune 500) posted improved earnings that met the consensus analyst forecast.

Shares of drugmaker Merck (Charts, Fortune 500), a Dow component, fell more than 2 percent in Frankfurt trading after it announced late Wednesday that it had recalled more than a million doses of a common vaccine given to babies as young as two months because of contamination risks,

Biogen Idec (Charts), which under pressure from activist shareholder Carl Icahn had previously announced it would explore a sale of the company, announced late Wednesday that it was taking itself off the block after it failed to receive any definitive offers from potential buyers. Shares plunged 27 percent in after-hours trading on the announcement.

Automakers suffered a legal setback late Wednesday when a federal judge ruled that California can regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles. An industry trade group that represents General Motors, Ford Motor and Chrysler, as well as leading importers such as Toyota Motor, sued the state over the tailpipe standards it approved in 2004, which would force automakers to build cars and light trucks that produce about 30 percent fewer greenhouse gases by 2016. Shares of Dow component GM (Charts, Fortune 500) were off 1 percent in Frankfurt trading while Ford (Charts, Fortune 500) shares were little changed.

Meanwhile, U.S.-based executives for Toyota and Honda Motor both forecast continued gains in sales here in a meeting with reporters in Washington late Wednesday.