Greece’s finance minister is breaking ranks with Prime Minister George Papandreou over his call to hold a referendum on a hard-fought European debt deal to rescue the country’s economy.
Evangelos Venizelos issued a written statement Thursday on returning from an emergency meeting in Cannes, France, where he accompanied Prime Minister George Papandreou for meetings with top European officials.
After the meeting, the French and Germany leaders said a Greek vote would decide whether the country stays in the eurozone, and vowed Athens would not get critical bailout funds until after the vote free credit score online.
Venizelos said Greece’s position within the euro was a “historic conquest” of the country that “cannot be put in doubt” and “cannot depend on a referendum.”
Bank of America is nixing its plans to charge a $5 debit card fee.
The bank says in a statement that the decision to scrap the plan came after listening to customer feedback in recent weeks.
The news comes after other major banks, including Chase and Wells Fargo, said last week that they were canceling tests of similar fees.
“Our customers’ voices are most important to us. As a result, we are not currently charging the fee and will not be moving forward with any additional plans to do so,” David Darnell, co-chief operating officer, said in a release.
The about-face by the banking industry comes amid growing public anger over fees. A movement to get customers to switch to credit unions had marked this Saturday as “Bank Transfer Day.”
Stock indexes closed at the highest point since the U.S. debt limit showdown in August Monday. The market was driven higher by a round of big corporate takeovers and reports that Europe’s bailout fund will be larger than originally thought. The Nasdaq composite turned positive for the year.
Netflix Inc. plunged 22 percent in after-hours trading after the DVD-by-mail and video streaming company forecast a sharp drop in fourth-quarter profits.
Investors are still waiting for a resolution to Europe’s debt problems. European leaders said they made progress at a weekend summit and plan to unveil concrete plans for containing the crisis by Wednesday.
The Dow was up about 40 points in the first hour of trading but moved steadily higher through midday following reports that Europe’s takeover fund will be greatly expanded. It finished with a gain of 104.83 points, or 0.9 percent, at 11,913.62.
“The market is expecting that there will be some kind of deal worked out Wednesday,” when European financial ministers are scheduled to meet, said Uri Landesman, president of Platinum Partners. “If there’s not a deal by then, the market is going down significantly.”
Even with concerns about Europe, U.S. companies are still reporting bigger profits. “Although there is a good deal of economic and political uncertainty in the world, we are not seeing it much in our business at this point,” Caterpillar Chief Executive Doug Oberhelman said.
The maker of construction equipment reported a 44 percent surge in income, more than Wall Street analysts were expecting, thanks to strong growth in exports. The company said it expected the global economy to continue recovering, albeit slowly. Caterpillar jumped 5 percent, the most of the 30 companies in the Dow.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose to 1,254.19. That is just 3.45 points, or 0.3 percent, below where it started the year. It’s the highest close for the S&P 500 since Aug. 3, just as Washington was resolving a showdown over raising the country’s borrowing limit. If the S&P 500 finishes the year with a gain, it will be its biggest turnaround since 1984.
The Nasdaq composite rose 61.98, or 2.3 percent, to 2,699.44. The gains turned the Nasdaq positive for the year. The S&P 500 is the only major market index that remains lower than where it started the year.
The Russell 2000 index of small companies rose 3 payday loans.3 percent as investors moved money into higher-risk assets.
Netflix sank 21.6 percent post-market trading after forecasting fourth-quarter income that was far below what analysts were expecting. Through Monday’s close the stock had plunged 59 percent since July 12, when it raised prices and announced a plan to break its DVD-by-mail business into a separate company. The company abandoned the plan after it triggered a revolt among subscribers.
Other major U.S. companies due to report earnings this week include UPS Inc., Ford Motor Co. and Procter & Gamble.
Analysts expect companies in the S&P 500 to report earnings growth of 14 percent for the third quarter, according to data provider FactSet. They expect a 10 percent gain in revenue.
Expenses are also expected to climb. Higher costs for raw materials helped drag down income 8 percent at Kimberly-Clark Corp., which reported results Monday. The stock fell 5 percent. The company is a major consumer products maker whose brands include Huggies and Kleenex.
Higher costs also hurt cigarette maker Lorillard, which reported a 3 percent drop in income. Lorillard’s stock fell 0.6 percent.
A series of corporate deals helped lift the market, said Phil Orlando, chief equity strategist at Federated Investors. “This is telling us that companies think stocks are cheap, and they’re willing to spend some of the cash that’s sitting around on their balance sheets,” he said.
Deals announced included:
_ HealthSpring Inc. jumped 34 percent after Cigna Corp. said it will buy the health insurer for about $3.8 billion in cash. Cigna rose 1.4 percent.
_ RightNow Technologies Inc. gained 19 percent after Oracle Corp. said it will buy the tech service company for about $1.5 billion. Oracle rose 2.3 percent.
_ Mattel Inc. rose 2 percent after it agreed to buy Hit Entertainment, the owner of the Thomas & Friends and Barney brands, for $680 million in cash.
_ The J.M. Smucker Co. added 0.7 percent after it bought most of Sara Lee Corp.’s North American foodservice coffee operations for about $350 million.
Five shares rose for every one that fell on the New York Stock Exchange. Volume was average at 4.2 billion shares.
When it comes to the intersection of energy and geopolitics, few know more than economist Daniel Yergin.
Yergin cofounded and now chairs the IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an energy consultancy. But he’s better known for his epic tale on the history of the global oil industry, “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, & Power,” a No. 1 best-seller that won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1992 and was later made into a PBS miniseries.
Yergin spoke Friday at the St. Louis County Public Library about his latest book, “The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World”
Choosing a much-detested raccoon as its mascot made a clear statement: Porter Airlines was going to be a daring, different kind of airline.
And the upstart that some doubted could ever succeed given the volatility of the aviation industry is celebrating its fifth birthday on Sunday.
Robert Deluce, president and CEO of Porter Airlines, uses the mascot, whom they call Mr. Porter, an alter-ego of sorts, to illustrate why they
France’s finance minister said Tuesday that 2012 growth may be lower than estimated, a day after a leading agency warned that it may put the country’s cherished triple-A rating on notice for a possible downgrade.
Ahead of the 2012 budget debate in parliament, Finance Minister Francois Baroin warned on France-2 television that the growth estimate of 1.5 percent for next year was “probably too high.”
He blamed the risk of a global slowdown, which he said could be “very vast” and “severe.”
Baroin said the government would “put everything in place to avoid falling into a recession… and to protect our country from a downgrade” of its triple A rating, a day after Moody’s said it was assessing the country.
However, Baroin said he wouldn’t change the forecast just yet, especially in the run-up to the meeting of eurozone leaders in Brussels this Sunday and the early November meeting of the Group of 20 leaders from the industrial and developing world.
“If we are capable in the next two weeks of …. measures powerful enough to stop speculation so that we can make people understand that we will not let 60 years of European construction collapse … then I will have no worries, there will be growth in 2012 and 1.5 percent will be achieved,” he said.
Being the eurozone’s second largest economy, France could well have a big bill to pay for sorting out Europe’s debt crisis.
It’s in that context that Moody’s said it will be studying whether to put France’s rating on notice for a possible downgrade over the next three months. It said it will focus in on the government’s ability to implement its fiscal and economic reforms as well as any other potential adverse economic or financial market developments.
It said the French government has much less room for maneuver in terms if stretching its balance sheet than it had in 2008 Low fee payday loans.
“France may face a number of challenges in the coming months _ for example, the possible need to provide additional support to other European sovereigns or to its own banking system, which could give rise to significant new liabilities for the government’s balance sheet,” Moody’s said.
Moody’s warning comes ahead of Sunday’s meeting of eurozone leaders in Brussels. For days, markets have been hopeful that they would unveil a comprehensive solution to Europe’s debt crisis that would include a big ramp up in the bailout fund, a recapitalization of a large segment of the banking sector and a strategy for Greece.
However, on Monday German officials sought to downplay market expectations and the market mood has turned sour once again. France’s CAC-40 index of leading shares was underperforming its main peers in Europe on Tuesday, trading 1.7 percent lower as against the 0.6 percent fall on the German DAX.
Ahead of the meeting on Sunday in Brussels, the markets will be closely monitoring comments from all round Europe.
Jan Kees de Jager, the Netherlands finance minister, said the meeting needs to produce concrete results even though his counterpart in Germany, Wolfgang Schaeuble, said Monday that the weekend summit would not provide a “definitive solution.”
De Jager is quoted in Germany’s Die Welt newspaper Tuesday as saying that the markets “are awaiting a long-term solution. The overall package must involve a wide-reaching and irreversible agreement over enhanced controls in the eurozone in the future.”
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David Rising in Berlin contributed to this story.
Stronger retail sales and surging profits from Google are sending stocks higher.
The Dow Jones industrial average turned positive for the year Friday, and the S&P 500 index had its best week in more than two years.
Retail sales increased 1.1 percent in September, the biggest gain in seven months.
Google Inc. shot up nearly 6 percent after its quarterly income jumped 26 percent. Apple Inc. rose 3 percent as its new iPhone went on sale my credit score.
The Dow rose 166 points, or 1.4 percent, to close at 11,644. The S&P 500 rose 21, or 1.7 percent, to 1,225.
The Nasdaq rose 48 points, or 1.8 percent, to 2,668.
Five stocks rose for every one that fell on the New York Stock Exchange. Trading volume was below average, 3.6 billion shares.
BlackBerry services buzzed back to life across the world Thursday, after a three-day outage that interrupted email messages and Internet services for millions of customers.
Research In Motion Ltd., the Canadian company that makes the phones, posted a statement that says services are improving.
Many BlackBerry users have been unable to send and receive emails and messages in an outage that started Monday in Europe. Web browsers haven’t been working either. On Thursday morning, BlackBerry users on Twitter and online forums were reporting that their phones were buzzing with incoming messages again.
RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis apologized for the outage in a video posted to the company’s site Thursday morning.
“It’s too soon to say that this issue is fully resolved,” Lazaridis said. “I’d like to give you an estimated time of full recovery around the world, but I cannot do this with certainty at this time.”
A crucial link in BlackBerry’s European network failed Monday, and a backup also failed. Although the underlying issues were quickly repaired, the system had built up a backlog of emails and messages that needed to be wound down. Meanwhile, messages destined for Europe were piling up at BlackBerry data centers in the rest of world. By Wednesday, the outage had spread to the U.S. and Canada, slowing service to a crawl there.
RIM shares were down 35 cents, or 1.5 percent, at $23.53 in premarket trading in New York. Investors have taken the outage in stride, figuring that it’s only one of many problems RIM is facing. The shares are up slightly since the outage began.
Wednesday was a good day for Fawad Khan.
He got up shortly before 3 a.m. and headed to a bank of computers in his Mississauga basement. While his family slept, he started trading.
One screen charted the euro in real time. It looked like the seismic readout for an earthquake. Trading in this kind of market, with one
Starbucks hopes customers will be willing to pay at least $5 more when they stop in for their morning cup of Joe.
Starting Nov. 1, Starbucks will begin collecting donations of $5 or more from customers to stimulate U.S. job growth through its “Jobs for USA” program. The Seattle-based coffee chain is collaborating with the Opportunity Finance Network, a nonprofit that works with nearly 200 community development financial institutions to provide loans to small businesses and community groups. Starbucks says 100 percent of the donations will go toward loans for firms and organizations that can add jobs or stem job losses.
Starbucks, which pioneered how Americans drink coffee, declined to estimate how much money it plans to raise, but millions of people visit its nearly 7,000 company-owned U.S. stores each day. Customers who give will get a red, white and blue wristband that says “Indivisible.”
“This is about using Starbuck’s scale for good,” said Howard Schultz, Starbucks Corp.’s CEO.
The program is the latest effort by Schultz to address the nation’s economic woes. In August, he sent more than 200,000 Starbucks employees a memo urging them to do what they can to help business thrive. Then, he asked fellow CEOs to stop contributing to political campaigns until the nation’s leaders reached a long-term economic solution. After that, he hosted a national telephone forum, bought full-page ads in two major newspapers and started a website, Upwardspiral2011.org.
Schultz said he feels personal responsibility to do something to stimulate the U.S. economy. Starbucks is hiring about 200 people a day in the U.S. as part of its efforts to remodel thousands of stores and add about 200 more locations in the next year. But Schultz said he wanted to do more.
Starbucks is covering the operational costs to get loans out through the program, which will run indefinitely. Its charitable arm, The Starbucks Foundation, is giving $5 million to get the program started, with the hope that funds will be invested in communities within a month of a donation being made business card design.
Opportunity Finance Network works with 180 financial institutions _ banks, credit, unions, loan funds and venture capital funds _ that give loans in low-income communities that don’t have easy access to credit. The organization, created 27 years ago, has invested $23.2 billion and generated nearly 300,000 jobs through 2009.
Loans through the network have supported everything from charter schools to grocery stores nationwide. The organization found that, even during the recession, more than 98 percent of the money loaned out has been repaid, which is in line with traditional lenders.
Through the program, businesses will apply to financial institutions, which along with the Opportunity Finance Network will assess their potential for adding jobs. Preference will be given to applicants who can add jobs within six months. An outside organization will audit the program within a year.
“We want to match up every person who has $5 to share with every person who can’t spare $5,” said Mark Pinsky, CEO of Opportunity Finance Network.
The effort has the potential to be successful, say some experts. Community institutions succeed, they say, because they understand the needs in the areas they serve.
“I think it’s a really worthy effort,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “In theory, this is a great idea and should have impact.”
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Online: For more information, visit createjobsforusa.org or for information on Opportunity Finance Network and how to find a community development funding institution, visit opportunityfinance.net
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