Visitor spending in Hawaii increased a modest 0.5 percent year over year to $760.2 million in April, marking two straight months of growth, according to preliminary data released Thursday by the Hawaii Tourism Authority.
Visitors from the U.S. West, Hawaii’s biggest market, spent $296.8 million in April, a 5.6 percent increase from the year before.
The biggest percentage increase in visitor spending came from Canadians, who spent 24.5 percent more in April, totaling $60.2 million.
The slight boost in visitor spending came courtesy of a 1.1 percent increase in visitor arrivals by air — to 536,194.
Hawaii saw a boost in visitors from the U.S. West and Canada, with increases of 5.8 percent and 2 percent, respectively. But visitor arrivals from both the U.S. East and Japan were down for the month, by 4.7 percent and 1.4 percent, respectively.
The statistics measure spending by visitors who arrive by air and do not factor in spending from cruise ship passengers.
Overall visitor arrivals by air and cruise ship (which brought in 15,865 visitors in April) increased by 1.9 percent to a total of 552,059 visitors year over year.
Among the major Hawaiian islands, Maui continued to see the biggest increase in visitor arrivals, up 3 percent to 161,140 in April. It is the only island to see continuous growth in visitor arrivals since the start of the year.
Maui also saw an 8.9 percent increase in visitor spending in April, which totaled $202.1 million.
Year-over-year results from Hawaii’s top visitor markets for April:
• 5.8 percent increase in arrivals by air (245,203 visitors) from the U.S. West;
• 4.7 percent decline in arrivals by air (119,768 visitors) from the U.S. East;
• 1.4 percent decline in arrivals (83,230 visitors) from Japan;
• 2 percent increase in arrivals (33,259 visitors) from Canada.
BERLIN — A dark cloud has settled over the world’s financial markets, as growing numbers of people conclude that the debt crisis in Europe could hammer global growth — and even bring back recession barely a year after a patchy recovery took hold.
Government officials — whose job it is to boost confidence — downplay that risk, but many economists are warning that a much-feared "double dip" recession could be starting from Europe.
It would be the next ugly chapter in the global financial and economic turmoil that began three years ago. And now as then, what is striking is the inter-connectedness of everything — how near-default in Greece and weeks of dithering in Germany have affected commodities such as oil and gold and, with demand and confidence waning, have bludgeoned stock markets around the world in a way that rattles ordinary people saving for retirement from Korea to California.
In 2007, the bad debt connected to repackaged subprime mortgages started undermining banks and hedge funds, and by early 2008 confidence in the system was slipping fast. This time it is the exposure of banks everywhere to sovereign debt — the IOUs of governments — whose value has been falling for months.
The sheer size of the European economy is a factor, said Mauro F. Guillen, director of the Lauder Institute at The Wharton School in Pennsylvania. "If European demand goes down, global growth will slow down," he said.
"A European economy that lags is not necessarily enough to put the world economy back into recession," Nicholas Colas, ConvergEx Group chief market strategist, said. "But a European economy that cannot stabilize its currency and capital markets certainly will push the global economy back into the red.
"A double dip is a possibility."
It is a daunting prospect, because having already deployed their best countermeasures — stimulus spending and central bank interest rate cuts — governments everywhere may be out of ammunition.
Stephen Lewis, a London-based economist with Monument Securities, spoke for many of the pessimists Friday after a week of market turmoil in Europe when he saw "no guarantee that the upswing in the global economy from 2009’s low point will be sustained."
At the heart of the crisis are fears that indebted eurozone governments will be unable to pay what they owe. Those fears have sent the prices of government bonds — many of them held by big banks in Germany and France — plummeting. Europe also faces low growth prospects because governments must cut back on spending to pay down heavy debt loads payday loan lenders in states.
If banks in Europe and beyond suffer losses on marked-down government bonds, this would then make them afraid to lend the money that businesses need to operate and expand, choking off growth — a replay, in a sense, of the freezing of credit markets after the Sept. 2008 collapse of the U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers, which led to a worldwide recession. The global economy shrank by 0.6 percent in 2009, its first dip since World War II.
"If sovereign debt concerns are accompanied by worries over bank liquidity any more significant than those currently influencing the credit market, another dip in world economic activity would seem a sure thing," Lewis said.
As fear spreads, stocks and the price of oil, both signs of expectations for future economic growth, have been drawn into the downdraft. And gold, traditionally a safe haven, has hit ominous all-time highs.
Most of the world’s leading stock markets are below where they started the year as investors revise down their growth expectations for the global economy.
Reflecting the optimism that held sway until recently, the IMF slightly raised in April its 2010 global growth forecast to 4.2 percent, although eurozone growth was forecast at only 1 percent. Now even that looks optimistic.
World markets have always affected each other, but instant and constant connectivity and real-time trading and instant information have taken things to a new level; bad news in Milan can trigger instant selloffs in Tokyo or Chicago.
A sell-off in the stock market this week signaled, among other things, a belief that the economy is headed for a slowdown later this year, after having expanded by nearly 12 percent in the first quarter from the same quarter the year before.
Daniel Tarullo, a governor with the U.S. Federal reserve, said the direct effect on U.S. banks of losses on exposure to overextended governments in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Italy "would be small." But if problems were to spread more broadly through Europe, U.S. banks would face larger losses as the value of traded assets dropped and loan delinquencies mounted.
Neil Mackinnon, global macro strategist at VTB Capital in London, said it would be a mistake to think the problems on Europe’s periphery represented only a local crisis.
"The problems in the eurozone debt markets, which many people thought was a regional problem, has morphed into a major global problem," Mackinnon said.
Lee Enterprises announced Wednesday that it will produce a new food publication for the St. Louis area, called Feast.
The free monthly publication will begin in August with a circulation of 70,000. It will be distributed at more than 500 locations in the St. Louis region.
The company described Feast as "a culinary magazine that celebrates St. Louis’ food culture." The magazine will serve as the "backbone" of the Feast Media brand, the company said.
Catherine Neville, co-founder and former editor of Sauce Magazine, has been named Feast’s publisher.
VeriFone Holdings Inc. said Monday it expanded into South Korea with the acquisition of Orange Logic Ltd., a payment systems provider in that country.
San Jose-based VeriFone (NYSE:PAY) did not disclose terms of the deal.
With the acquisition, VeriFone said, it gained staff and infrastructure to introduce its secure electronic payment product line into the Republic of Korea, along with an existing domestic product line and customer base.
"Although South Korea is second only to the U.S. market with more than 2.5 million deployed electronic payment systems, only 10 percent to15 percent of those meet government security requirements for compliance with the international EMV standard," the company said.
Orange Logic was founded in 2004 and has primarily been supplying electronic payment devices to customers in the South Korean retail and banking segments.
Orange Logic will operate as VeriFone Korea and will continue to manufacture the existing Orange Logic product family.
The Peach State remains among the best states in which to business, but it is dropping.
Chief Executive magazine on Thursday ranked Georgia the seventh-best state for business, down from No. 4 in 2009.
To get its annual rankings, the magazine surveyed more than 660 CEOs to rate states based on a range of criteria that included taxation, regulation, workforce quality, education and living quality. Click here to see the complete list of each state ranked by each category.
Chief Executive magazine’s top 10 states for business, in order, are Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Nevada, Florida, Georgia, Colorado, Utah and South Carolina.
Dr. David Poplack has been awarded a $953,000 grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Initiative of Texas to expand the Passport for Care program for pediatric cancer survivors.
Poplack, professor of pediatric oncology at Baylor College of Medicine and director of the Texas Children’s Cancer Center, helped develop the web-based program designed to guide health care for pediatric cancer survivors.
He will use the grant to expand the program to 12 treatment centers in Texas, including in Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, the Rio Grande Valley and north Texas.
Launched in October 2008, more than 1,000 patients have been enrolled in the program, which is currently used at Texas Children’s Hospital’s Cancer Center.
The CPRIT grant also includes a research component. A series of studies will be conducted to examine the current standard of care and follow-up information survivors are getting, and how the implementation of Passport for Care will improve that low fee pay day loans.
More than 75 percent of pediatric cancer patients are cured; however many have late effects of their treatment than can be serious or even life-threatening.
“Passport for Care provides the physician with a detailed summary of the survivor's treatment and individualized guidelines for their follow-up screening. It essentially makes every physician a survivor expert,” Poplack said in a statement.
Passport for Care was also developed by Dr. Marc Horowitz, professor of pediatrics hematology-oncology at Baylor College of Medicine, and Dr. Michael Fordis, director of BCM's Center for Collaborative and Interactive Technologies.
US Airways Group Inc. said Thursday it ended merger talks with United Airlines, the biggest carrier at San Francisco’s airport.
A union of the two companies would have would have created a carrier nearly as big as Delta Air Lines Inc., the nation’s biggest airline.
“It remains our belief that consolidation makes sense in an industry as fragmented as ours,” said Chairman and CEO Doug Parker. “Whether we participate or not, consolidation that leads to a more efficient industry better able to withstand economic volatility, global competition and the cyclical nature of our industry is a positive outcome.”
Parker, in his prepared statement, did not discuss why talks ended. But media reports indicate UAL Corp., United Airline’s parent, is considering a merger with Continental Airlines.
United Airlines accounts for one-third of the flights at San Francisco International Airport.
Powered by WordPress -- XHTML 1.0