AT&T's strong second-quarter earnings reflect steady progress in executing our strategy. In fact, two of our growth businesses, AT&T Wireless and AT&T Solutions, grew revenue more than 40 percent each.

Right now it's wonderful to celebrate good earnings growth in the first quarter and nice growth in the second quarter, but it's going to get a heck of a lot harder in the third and fourth quarters.

The estimates are for earnings to be down 50 percent in the second quarter, 37 percent in the third quarter, and 12 percent in the fourth.

That's not where we want it and there's much more to be done to achieve more growth.

We're going to have awful earnings reports for the second and third-quarter so we have to brace ourselves for that. To make a sustained rally, we need to see economic news and earnings news start to turn positive and we don't see that happening until the fourth quarter.

Earnings were up 6 percent from the first quarter, making the second quarter of 2000 Alcoa's eighth consecutive quarter of improved earnings,