Morgan Stanley: Tomorrow's Headliners

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Morgan Stanley (MS) and Wells Fargo (WFC) become the next two U.S. banks to release quarterly results when both report Wednesday.

Morgan Stanley will report earnings before the start of trading Wednesday, and analysts expect the bank will say it earned 29 cents a share in the third quarter on revenue of $6.99 billion, according to Thomson Reuters. If analysts are correct in their forecasts, Morgan would bounce back from a weak second-quarter, when it reported a loss of $1.37 a share.

Wells Fargo is expected to report a third-quarter profit of 36 cents a share. As the last of the four major U.S. commercial banks, analysts will look close at Wells Fargo's loan performance and investment banking activity. Additionally, investors will hope for some mention of a possible repayment of funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Meanwhile, Boeing (BA) will be the only member of the Dow Jones Industrial Average to report before the start of trading Wednesday, becoming the sixth of 13 components to report during the week. Analysts expect the company to post a loss of $2.12 a share on revenue of $17.18 billion, according to a poll by Thomson Reuters.

Investors will be watching earnings from Altria (MO), Eli Lilly (LLY), Northrop Grumman (NOC) and US Bancorp (USB), all of which release their reports before Wednesday's opening bell.

eBay (EBAY) will headline the after-hours reports, with Amgen (AMGN) and Ameriprise Financial (AMP) are scheduled to report late Wednesday.

While the earnings slate is very busy, the economic docket is slim. The only economic release of the day will come from the Federal Reserve, which is set to release its beige book report. The release, due at 2 p.m. EDT, is expected to show that the economic downturn has stabilized or slowed in the central bank's 12 districts.

Investors will also be focusing on the Energy Department's weekly inventory report, due at 10:30 a.m. EDT, especially with oil prices hovering near the $80-a-barrel level. Crude oil inventories likely rose by 1.5 million barrels last week, a Bloomberg survey of analysts shows.

-- Written by Robert Holmes in New York.

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