By Scott Eden, TheStreet

Walt Disney’s (DIS) fourth-quarter earnings beat Wall Street targets as its television business expanded.

The company, one of the purest gauges of discretionary spending among US consumers, said its net income was $844 million, or 44 cents a share, slightly less than the year-earlier quarter.

Excluding items related to the sale of a stake in a European television service, Disney said it would have earned 47 cents. Analysts had expected a 38-cent profit, according to a Thomson Reuters poll. Revenue rose 1% to $9.74 billion, topping the consensus estimate of $9.66 billion.

And now for a break from the euro and the Greece bailout rumor fest. (For more on Tuesday's euro bounce, see this earlier post.)

There's real news on the U.S. economy, and it's very good news indeed. Inventories at U.S. wholesalers dropped in December, according to data released by the Commerce Department (guess somebody made it in through the snow down there).

That was an unexpected fall. Economists were expecting that inventories would climb in December.

By Philip van Doorn, TheStreet

Investors usually must choose between stock-price growth and big dividends.

But a select group of small banks has seen their shares jump, with one posting an 18% increase this year while the S&P 500 Index ($INX) has fallen 5%. Another is paying a dividend almost twice as high as the benchmark 10-year Treasury bond yield.

Following an earlier look at three bank stocks with outsized dividends in November, this expanded list features more conservative measures and excludes companies whose dividend payouts exceeded their 2009 net income. We also left out current participants in the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Here are the banks:

As cultural phenomena go, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue gets vastly more ink than it spends, and it has done so for some 45 years.

Time Warner (TWX), the owner of Sports Illustrated, is said to rake in 7% of its total ad revenue for the year from this single issue of the magazine.

As with all things print, the focus is on advertising revenue, and this issue of the magazine does its job. Ad pages are the same as a year ago, as major advertisers have once more bought a significant amount of advertising to surround the beautiful women in their teeny bikinis.

The swimsuit issue will certainly boost Time Warner's first quarter 2010 numbers. And those numbers could use some help.

By Joseph Woelfel, TheStreet

Coca-Cola (KO) reported fourth-quarter earnings that were in line with analysts’ estimates as international sales soared.

Coca-Cola said earnings rose 55% to $1.54 billion, or 66 cents a share, from $995 million, or 43 cents, a year earlier. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected a 66-cent profit.

Case volume in the quarter rose 5%. In emerging markets such as China and India, unit case volume rose 29% and 20%, respectively. The company also achieved 12% unit case volume growth in 118 countries where per capita consumption of Coca-Cola products is less than 150 8-ounce servings per year.

By Dan Freed, TheStreet

The U.S. Treasury has lost its entire $2.33 billion TARP investment in CIT Group (CIT), according to a regulatory filing submitted Monday.

The Treasury made the investment in CIT in December 2008, but CIT later ran into trouble after the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. refused to guarantee its debt, as the FDIC did for larger lenders, including General Electric (GE) and large banks like Citigroup (C), Bank of America (BAC) and Wells Fargo (WFC). CIT filed for bankruptcy protection on Nov. 1, reorganizing and returning to a public listing on Dec. 10.

Contrary to what many assumed, the bankruptcy filing did not extinguish all hope for a taxpayer recovery. The Treasury and other preferred shareholders received complex securities called contingent value rights (CVRs), which could have been worth something if CIT Group's stock had reached the mid-50s ahead of Monday's session, according to the estimate of another investor who held CVRs.