- Experts see trouble ahead for developed world
By DAN PERRY
2010-09-03T15:56:09Z
CERNOBBIO, Italy (AP) -- Is the global economy out of the woods? Two years after near-meltdown, with the U.S. looking sluggish, equity markets groggy and Europeans fighting a debt crisis, experts gathered in Italy offered a generally gloomy outlook - especially for the United States and much of the industrialized world....
- Companies add 67K workers, but jobless rate rises
By CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER
2010-09-03T15:24:39Z
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Private employers hired more workers over the past three months than first thought, a glimmer of hope for the weak economy ahead of the Labor Day weekend. But the unemployment rate rose because not enough jobs were created to absorb the growing number of people looking for work....
- Service sector grows at slower pace in August
By TALI ARBEL
2010-09-03T15:49:54Z
NEW YORK (AP) -- The U.S. service sector, the nation's predominant job generator, expanded for the eighth straight month in August although the pace of growth slowed, according to a trade group survey....
- Obama: New jobs numbers 'positive' but not enough
By ERICA WERNER
2010-09-03T15:27:16Z
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama welcomed news Friday of better-than-expected private sector job growth. But with the unemployment rate ticking upward nevertheless, he said he'd roll out new plans next week to spur the economy....
- Watch those gas pumps; prices expected to fall
By SANDY SHORE
2010-09-03T15:46:52Z
DENVER (AP) -- Gasoline prices have been falling for weeks, and they could go even lower as autumn's leaves begin to drop....
- Skilling speaks: Enron CEO's jailhouse interview When Jeff Skilling, the former Enron CEO, was convicted on 19 counts, the headline of the Houston Chronicle read "Guilty! Guilty!" Sentenced to 24-plus years in prison, Skilling had been a wealthy executive who went too far in pursuit of profit and caused financial pain and devastation to thousands of investors, employees, and contractors with his decisions at the helm of Enron. Few if any in the media or public rose to his defense or mourned his imprisonment.
- Eliot Spitzer, anchorman? Why would Eliot Spitzer want to become a TV host?
- John Wooden's best coaching tip: Listen Former UCLA Coach John Wooden passed away Friday June 4th. He is widely considered the greatest basketball coach of all time, and many believe he is the greatest coach of any sport. Wooden won ten national championships in his years 16 years at UCLA. A skilled player himself, Wooden is one of only three individuals (along with Lenny Wilkins and Bill Sharman) to be inducted in the Basketball Hall of Fame both as a player and a coach.
- The man who made people see profit in poverty As a management writer for many years, I met more than my share of self-professed "gurus." They spanned the gamut from publicity-seeking quacks to deep-in-the-mud academics to -- occasionally -- truly brilliant and devoted thinkers who used their minds to make business, or the world, better.
- Oprah to end talk show in 2011 Oprah Winfrey knows how to keep viewers on the edge of their seats.
- Software Safety Zone Vendors bucked the bleak economic trend in 2009 and are well-positioned for survival.
- CFOs on the Move: Week Ending September 3 INVISION, The Pantry, CBS Interactive, Evraz, CODA Holdings, First American Financial, Technology Research, Oncothyreon, FreightCar America, Hutchinson Technology.
- Captains of Capex Some companies have outpaced the field in capital investments even as they've kept the cash flowing. What are their secrets?
- Health-Plan Headaches Trying to maintain grandfathered status for health-care plans appears to be an exercise in frustration, says one expert.
- Why the SEC Won't Flip the IFRS Switch Risk analysis indicates that the SEC is highly unlikely to require public U.S. companies to use IFRS instead of U.S. GAAP if the two sets of standards remain substantially different.
- Plenty of turbulence after Mexicana airline shutdown Joann Kuk of Oak Park is stuck with tickets on Mexicana Airlines that are worthless because the carrier is no longer flying, but she can count herself as lucky. She charged her tickets on her American Express card. Travel experts said using a credit or charge card is the best way to pay for an airline ticket. The card companies are generally quick to credit accounts if the carrier doesn't fly. In Kuk's case, she said she checked prices for Puerto Vallarta in late July, planning to travel in late January. She said Mexicana turned up with uncommonly cheap flights, just $227 per round trip.
- Bill & Walter boost ratings Lewis Lazare: The return Wednesday of Bill Kurtis and Walter Jacobson as regular anchors of WBBM-Channel 2's 6 p.m. newscast catapulted the station into second place -- at least for one day -- among the three local stations with 6 p.m. newscasts, according to Nielsen overnight TV ratings released Thursday.
- Applications for jobless benefits down 2nd week in a row... The weak economy showed a smidgen of strength on Thursday, with mildly positive reports on jobs, store sales and housing. Figures released on unemployment claims, store sales and home-buying contracts all trend in the right direction, tempering fears the economy is on the brink of another downturn.
- Stocks extend September rally after jobs report NEW YORK Stocks are on pace to break a three-week losing streak after an encouraging employment report lifted hopes about the pace of economic growth.
- Hyatt O'Hare workers stage one-day strike Hundreds of workers at the Hyatt Regency OHare in Rosemont walked off the job this morning, staging a one-day strike to protest understaffing and the lack of a new contract.
- U.S. Lost Jobs in August, but Fewer Than Expected Private employers added 67,000 jobs, more than forecast, but governments shed jobs in August, the Labor Department reported, as the jobless rate rose to 9.6 percent.
- Wall Street Gets a Lift From U.S. Jobs Report The better-than-expected jobs report, however, was moderated somewhat by a report on the services sector.
- BP Says Limits on Drilling Imperil Oil Spill Payouts The company, which had committed to setting aside $20 billion for damage claims and penalties, says proposed legislation could disrupt those efforts.
- An Oil Platform Burns, Blanketing the Gulf With Angst The mishap sent waves of anxiety along a coast that has just begun to recover from the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
- YouTube Ads Turn Videos Into Revenue YouTube is expected to turn a profit this year, on revenue of about $450 million, with help from its onetime critics.
- Montagu gears up for 2.3 bln eur new fund -sources * Montagu has returned 1 bln eur to investors in 18 months
- UPDATE 1-Italy's SNAI attracts suitors * Sisal, Investindustrial, Clessidra among possible suitors
* SNAI shares up 0.8 pct
- CD&R buys 42.5 pct stake in Univar from CVC, IPO postoned AMSTERDAM, Sept 3 (Reuters) - Private equity firm Clayton,
Dubilier & Rice (CD&R) has agreed to buy a 42.5 percent stake in
Dutch chemical distribution firm Univar [UNIV.UL] from CVC
Capital Partners in a deal valuing the company at $4.2 billion.
- Market Chatter -- Corporate finance press digest BANGALORE, Sept 3 (Reuters) - The following corporate
finance-related stories were reported by media on Friday:
- Oil explorer Kosmos considers IPO - FT LONDON, Sept 3 (Reuters) - Oil exploration and production
company Kosmos, the operator of Ghana's Jubilee oil field, is
considering an initial public offering, the Financial Times
reported on Friday.
- Economics focus: War footing Monetary and fiscal stimulus make a potent, if uneasy, combinationTHE Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is the big event of the year for central bankers. But defining monetary policy is far harder than it used to be. In recent years central bankers have lurched ever closer to the realm of fiscal policy, mainly by buying government debt with freshly printed money. They can justify such “quantitative easing” (QE) on monetary grounds since they have already lowered short-term interest rates to, or close to, zero. But they also worry it is a slippery slope from QE to monetising government deficits and thence, inevitably, to inflation. When Phillip Swagel, then an official with the US Treasury, was asked why he attended the conference in 2008, he shrugged: “Fiscal policy, monetary policy—what’s the difference?”For central bankers this is an unsettling thought. Their mistrust of fiscal policy was nicely captured in a paper presented at this year’s Jackson Hole conference by Eric Leeper of Indiana University*. As central bankers have become more independent, they have increasingly based their policies on rigorous economic analysis. By contrast fiscal policy is deeply politicised, with haphazard methods and few, if any, defined goals. ...
- Global economic policy: Monetary illusions Central bankers are not magicians. Don’t count on them to conjure up remedies if the rich economies flagOVER the past few years the reputations of the rich world’s central bankers have fluctuated wildly. When the financial crisis struck, they were blamed for allowing the housing and credit bubbles to build, and for failing to foresee the bust. Later they were lionised for preventing a new Depression with bold actions to support the financial system. Now a third stage is at hand, one of dangerously outsized expectations. With most governments unable, or unwilling, to offer more fiscal stimulus, central banks are left solely responsible for propping up the flagging recovery. The phenomenon is most obvious in America. Its economy has weakened, yet the default path for fiscal policy is a hefty tightening as the Obama stimulus wanes, the states slash spending to balance their budgets and the Bush tax cuts expire. With any discussion of remedies by politicians drowned out by partisan positioning before the mid-term elections in November, disproportionate hope is pinned on Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve. Hence the attention paid to his recent speech at Jackson Hole, which laid out, with great confidence, what further steps the Fed could take. ...
- Economics focus: Bad circulation There is more to America’s stubbornly high unemployment rate than just weak demandAMERICANS are used to thinking of their job market as lithe and supple. Employment snaps back quickly after recessions. Workers routinely shuttle between industries and cities to wherever jobs are abundant. But in the past decade, the labour market has resembled an ageing athlete. Each new injury is more painful and takes longer to heal. More than a year into the current economic recovery the unemployment rate remains stuck close to 10%, raising concerns about the kind of sclerosis that continental Europe suffered in the 1980s. The slow rehabilitation is in part because the economy suffered a trauma, not a scrape. The fall in GDP during the last recession was easily the largest of the post-war period, and output remains well below its potential. Few had expected a rapid return to full employment, but even modest expectations for jobs growth have not been met. Employment has actually fallen since the end of the recession; and unemployment would be even higher than it is were it not for discouraged would-be jobseekers quitting the workforce. Some economists now fret that other barriers besides weak demand stand between workers and jobs, and that high unemployment is partly “structural” in nature. ...
- Economics focus: Paper chains Tight policies in surplus countries helped undo the gold standard, which is a lesson for the euroCHRIS ROCK, a comedian, is a big fan of Oprah Winfrey, a television host and philanthropist. He recalls one of Ms Winfrey’s shows during which a woman confessed to her husband that she had frittered away $300,000 and as a consequence their home was about to be repossessed. “By the end of the show, it was all the guy’s fault,” a clearly impressed Mr Rock told David Letterman, another talk-show host. “He was apologising for not loving her enough—it was the greatest ‘Oprah’ of all time.”This may seem an odd sort of blame-shifting. Yet reasoning of this kind is increasingly used to explain how spendthrift countries get into trouble. On this view America’s credit boom and bust owed as much to a savings glut in Asia as to laxity at home. A new paper* by Barry Eichengreen of the University of California, Berkeley, and Peter Temin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, adds a dash of subtlety and a generous slice of history to this sort of analysis. The authors examine the role of fixed exchange rates in booms and busts and draw parallels between the inter-war gold standard and contemporary schemes, such as the euro and China’s peg with the dollar. ...
- Economics focus: Fiscal fundamentalists Austerity or stimulus? Some economists have much more extreme views than thatBY MOST people’s standards, George Osborne, Britain’s 39-year-old chancellor of the exchequer, is a fiscal hawk. In his first budget, announced in June, he promised to raise taxes and cut spending without flinching. As a result, Britain’s net public debt should peak at about 70% of GDP in March 2014. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think-tank, his spending proposals are even more mortifying than the hair shirt imposed on Britain in 1976 by the IMF. But Mr Osborne’s efforts look dainty compared with the rigours some economists think necessary. For example, Christian Hagist and his colleagues at Freiburg University believe Britain’s fiscal condition is far worse than the official figures suggest. In 2005, a time of prosperity and tranquillity, the country’s “fiscal gap” already amounted to 505% of GDP, they calculate, almost 14 times its official net debt for that year. Mr Hagist is an exponent of “generational accounting”, a method pioneered by Larry Kotlikoff of Boston University, among others. Through this lens, the rich world’s public finances look dire indeed. Writing in the Financial Times last month, Mr Kotlikoff declared that America was in worse fiscal shape than Greece. ...