Barclays PLC reported a 7 percent rise in net profit in the first nine months on Monday, largely on the back of a one-time boost from investment banking.
The bank reported a net profit of 2.65 billion pounds ($4.25 billion) compared to 2.48 billion pounds a year earlier.
Revenue was up 10 percent to 25.2 billion pounds in part due to a 3 billion pounds credit gain in the third quarter.
The bank said the gain came from widening spreads on Barclays Capital’s structured products, a range of investment products which typically include complex derivatives.
For the third quarter, pretax profit was up from 327 million pounds a year ago to 2.4 billion pounds, again reflecting the one-off gain. Adjusted pretax profit for the quarter was up 5 percent to 1.34 billion pounds, broadly in line with the market consensus.
The adjusted figure excludes the own credit, a 1.8 billion pounds writedown on its stake in the investment firm BlackRock Inc. and other one-time items.
Barclays Capital third-quarter income excluding the gain was down 15 percent to 2.25 billion pounds.
Barclays shares were up 2.9 percent to 207 pence in early trading on the London Stock Exchange.
“Overall, these results are slightly better than we had expected,” said Gary Greenwood, analyst at Shore Capital, who nonetheless rates the shares as “sell.”
The bank reported that it had reduced its exposure to sovereign debt in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland and Greece by 31 percent in the quarter to 8 billion pounds, with about half of the remaining exposure in Italy.
A year has passed since entrepreneur Kim Harris concluded that the security of a paid professional position with health benefits outweighed the autonomy of operating a mobile dog grooming business.
Counting on the graduate degrees she earned in social work and criminal justice, the East St. Louis resident waded into the job market confident of a return to the full-time workforce.
Harris, 45, now realizes she underestimated the depth of the employment crisis.
“Even my undergraduate degree in education hasn’t helped,” said Harris, who supplements her business income with a part-time job as an aide at a Metro East health care facility. “They’re laying off teachers everywhere, too.”
Officials who track St. Louis economic trends are unfortunately unable to offer much in the way of hope to job-seekers such as Harris, one of 132,345 area residents who are jobless and don’t want to be.
Job creation, they say, has stalled on both sides of the Mississippi River, and the prognosis for early 2012 isn’t much better.
Hiring “is stuck on hold nationally and will probably continue to drift down a little,” said Howard Wall, director of the Institute for the Study of Economics and the Environment at Lindenwood University. “We’re just along for the ride, and there’s not much we can do about it instant credit report.”
Vicki Niederhofer, an economic analyst with the Illinois Department of Employment Security office in Belleville, has seen the jobless rate in her state again creep into double digits after a solid year of improvement.
The Metro East lost 2,700 jobs in the year since September 2010 as the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 9.1 percent during the 12-month stretch. (Chicago, by contrast, added 17,000 jobs in the same period.)
“The national headwinds are difficult to fight,” Niederhofer said.
A Post-Dispatch survey of the region’s 40 largest employers seems to bear out Niederhofer’s belief that hiring won’t rebound until recession-weary consumers loosen the purse strings.
Less than a third of companies, government agencies and nonprofit organizations said they were planning to expand their workforce by the end of the year.
In employment economics, the past often serves as prologue.
Given that, Niederhofer cites a 2010 baseline survey conducted by her agency to forecast the Metro East jobs with the “highest projected demand” through 2018.
Health care tops the list, followed by office and administrative support, management, food preparation, transportation and production.
Experts say there are 72 million reasons
MADISON COUNTY
A former Goldman Sachs board member on Wednesday surrendered to federal authorities to face criminal charges stemming from a massive hedge fund insider trading case.
Rajat Gupta appeared in Manhattan federal court. The charges were not immediately disclosed.
The Securities and Exchange Commissioner originally brought civil fraud charges against Gupta in March. The SEC alleged that, at the height of the financial crisis, he passed along privileged financial information that helped enrich Raj Rajaratnam, a former billionaire hedge fund manager who was the prime target of the criminal probe.
Gupta’s lawyer responded by accusing the SEC of launching a “flawed case premised in large part on unreliable evidence being used in an attempt to bring down a man of sterling reputation and remarkable achievements without the procedural safeguards historically accorded to all persons similarly charged.”
The Indian-born, Harvard-educated Gupta also has served on the boards of Procter & Gamble and the parent company for American Airlines. He was a guest at President Barack Obama’s first state dinner.
Gupta’s name played prominently at the criminal trial earlier this year of Rajaratnam, who was convicted after prosecutors used a trove of wiretaps on which he could be heard coaxing a crew of corporate tipsters into giving him an illegal edge on blockbuster trades.
Jurors heard testimony that at an Oct. 23, 2008, Goldman board meeting, members were told that the investment bank was facing a quarterly loss for the first time since it had gone public in 1999.
Prosecutors produced phone records showing Gupta called Rajaratnam 23 seconds after the meeting ended, causing Rajaratnam to sell his entire position in Goldman the next morning and save millions of dollars payday loans with no fax.
Rajaratnam also earned close to $1 million when Gupta told him that Goldman had received an offer from Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway to invest $5 billion in the banking giant, prosecutors said.
In one tape played at trial, Rajaratnam could be heard grilling Gupta about whether the Goldman Sachs board had discussed acquiring a commercial bank or an insurance company.
“Have you heard anything along that line?” Rajaratnam asked Gupta.
“Yeah,” Gupta responded. “This was a big discussion at the board meeting.”
Prosecutors sought to maximize the impact of the Gupta tape by calling Goldman Sachs chairman Lloyd Blankfein to testify that the phone call violated the investment bank’s confidentiality policies.
Gupta’s lawyer Gary P. Naftalis said Tuesday night that his client and Rajaratnam communicated for “legitimate reasons.” He said his client didn’t trade in any securities, didn’t tip Rajaratnam so he could trade and didn’t share in any profits.
“The facts demonstrate that Mr. Gupta is an innocent man and that he has always acted with honesty and integrity,” Naftalis said in an emailed statement.
Rajaratnam, who’s in his mid-50s, was sentenced earlier this year to 11 years in prison. His lawyers had argued for 6 1/2 to nine years. Defense attorney Terence Lynam asked the judge to show compassion because of Rajaratnam’s illnesses, saying: “He does not deserve to die in prison.”
WikiLeaks _ whose spectacular publication of classified data shook world capitals and exposed the inner workings of international diplomacy _ may be weeks away from collapse, the organization’s leader said Monday.
Although its attention-grabbing leaks spread outrage and embarrassment across military and diplomatic circles, WikiLeaks’ inability to overturn the block on donations imposed by American financial companies may prove its undoing.
“If WikiLeaks does not find a way to remove this blockade we will simply not be able to continue by the turn of the new year,” founder Julian Assange told journalists at London’s Frontline Club. “If we don’t knock down the blockade we simply will not be able to continue.”
As an emergency measure, Assange said his group would cease what he called “publication operations” to focus its energy on fundraising. He added that WikiLeaks _ which he said had about 20 employees _ needs an additional $3.5 million to keep it going into 2013.
WikiLeaks, launched as an online repository for confidential information, shot to notoriety with the April 2010 disclosure of footage of two Reuters journalists killed by a U.S. military strike in Baghdad.
The Pentagon had claimed that the journalists were likely “intermixed among the insurgents,” but the helicopter footage, which captured U.S. airmen firing on prone figures and joking about “dead bastards,” unsettled many across the world.
The video was just a foretaste. In the following months, WikiLeaks published nearly half a million secret military documents from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a whole the documents provided an unprecedented level of detail into the grueling, bloody conflicts. Individually, many raised concerns about the actions of the U.S. and its local allies _ for example by detailing evidence of abuse, torture and worse by Iraqi security forces.
Although U.S. officials railed against the disclosures, claiming that they were putting lives at risk, it wasn’t until WikiLeaks began publishing a massive trove of 250,000 U.S. State Department cables late last year that the financial screws began to tighten.
One after the other, MasterCard Inc., Visa Europe Ltd., Bank of America Corp. Western Union Co. and Ebay Inc.’s PayPal stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks, starving the organization of cash as it was coming under intense political, financial and legal pressure.
Assange said Monday that the restrictions _ imposed in early December _ had cut off some 95 percent of the money he believes his organization could have received.
WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson defended the estimate as “conservative,” noting that in 2010 the average monthly donation to WikiLeaks had been more than 100,000 euros ($140,000), while in 2011 the amount had fallen to between 6,000 and 7,000 euros business card.
Each company has given its own explanation for the blockade, expressing some level of concern over the nature of the secret-spilling site. But WikiLeaks supporters often point out that MasterCard and Visa still process payments for fringe groups such as the American KKK or the far-right British National Party and that neither WikiLeaks nor any of its staff have been charged with any crime.
Assange said his group was being subjected to corporate censorship, a sentiment backed by Dave Winer, a visiting scholar at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
“This was done without due process, without any charges, and has been in place since December last year,” he said in a blog post about the blockade. “If I want to give $100 to WikiLeaks, and if I want to use my credit card to do so, who are they to say I can’t?”
WikiLeaks has recently taken steps to work around the blockade, including a series of auctions and moves toward cell phone-enabled donations. Assange said Monday that his group was switching its focus from soliciting small-time donations, which typically net about $25, to getting money from a “constellation of wealthy individuals.”
He didn’t elaborate, but Assange has several wealthy backers, including Frontline Club founder Vaughan Smith, whose manor house in eastern England has been put at Assange’s disposal while he fights extradition to Sweden on sex crime allegations.
A decision on whether to extradite him is expected in the next few weeks. Speaking to journalists after Monday’s appearance, Assange put his chances of being extradited without the possibility of appeal at “30 percent.”
Also looming in the background is a U.S. grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks’ disclosures. Earlier this month a small California-based Internet provider became the second company to confirm it was fighting a court order demanding customer account information as part of the American WikiLeaks inquiry.
WikiLeaks’ suspected source, U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, remains in custody at Fort Leavenworth prison in Kansas.
___
Online:
WikiLeaks: http://wikileaks.ch/
Frontline Club: http://www.frontlineclub.com/
The threat that floodwaters will inundate Thailand’s capital could ease by the beginning of next month as record-high levels in the river carrying torrents of water downstream from the country’s north begin to decline, authorities said Sunday.
The Flood Relief Operations Command made the comments just a day after reports that Bangkok’s main Chao Phraya river was overflowing its banks deepened concerns that the city would be inundated. The report said the river was at its highest levels in seven years.
The command’s chief, Justice Minister Pracha Promnok, said in a televised press conference Sunday that people should not be too concerned about the river’s spillover because it could be drained off. He also said water in Klong Prapa, a major canal that had been overflowing, was receding, and that plans to drain water to the east and west were working well.
Floodwaters that have spilled onto highways north of the capital, including near Bangkok’s second airport in the Don Muang district, came from rising groundwater that will quickly recede, he said.
Off the highways, however, the situation remained dire. Associated Press reporters found people scrambling for safety outside a hospital in northern Rangsit district, where the water was waist-deep.
The flood relief agency said “people should adjust their lifestyles in accordance with the situation” and check all information because rumors have been quick to circulate. Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said Saturday that the waters may take up to six weeks to recede to manageable proportions.
The death toll from the flooding, which began in August in northern Thailand before moving south, has reached 356, while the economic costs are estimated to be as high as $6 billion and still counting.
Residents of Bangkok and its suburbs have settled into a daily routine of waiting and worrying. Advice from the authorities has generally been vague or sometimes overly detailed, giving little idea of the urgency of evacuation, so many people have decided to hunker down in their homes and hope for the best.
Many are hoarding supplies for the aquatic siege, and supermarket shelves have been emptying faster than they can be restocked. Bottled water, batteries and canned food were among the first items to go.
At a supermarket in central Bangkok’s business district _ which is not under immediate threat _ sandbags were lined up at both entrances Sunday, forcing shoppers to step over to go inside. Many of the shelves were bare, with the handful of shoppers inside grabbing the few snacks that were left small personal loans. Cat food and toilet paper were gone.
While larger stores in Bangkok have kept their prices fixed, in the flooded zones north of the city, smaller merchants were raising theirs. A Rangsit resident, Taweetit Hongsang, complained that the price of a papaya, 10 baht (33 cents) a week ago, had shot up to 30 baht ($1)
The front lines in the battle against the flood have been shifting every day, but always drawing closer to the capital. The latest red zone is the Don Muang area in northern Bangkok, where the city’s second and older airport _ now serving as an anti-flood headquarters and evacuation center _ is located.
Other spots of concern in Bangkok are in the west, where several thousand people living along the Chao Phraya river have been advised to move, as high tides expected late Sunday could cause the river to overflow its banks in some areas, and in the east, where barriers were being erected to protect an industrial estate.
At least five major industrial estates north of Bangkok have been forced to suspend operations, contributing to an estimated 700,000 people put out of work by the flooding. Among those affected are Japanese carmakers Toyota and Honda, which have halted major assembly operations. The electronics industry has also suffered, including computer hard drive maker Western Digital, which has two major production facilities in the flooded zone.
Some flooding on Bangkok’s outskirts was expected after Yingluck ordered floodgates opened Thursday in a risky move to drain the dangerous runoff through urban canals and into the sea. Nobody knows with any certainty to what extent the city will flood.
In a weekly radio address Saturday, Yingluck said that “during the next four to six weeks, the water will recede.”
In the meantime, the government will step up aid to those whose lives have been disrupted, including 113,000 people living in temporary shelters after being forced to abandon submerged homes, she said.
The flooding is the worst to hit Thailand since 1942, and the crisis is proving a major test for Yingluck’s nascent government, which took power in July after heated elections and has come under fire for not acting quickly or decisively enough to prevent major towns north of the capital from being ravaged by floodwaters.
U.S. Sens. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Roy Blunt, R-Mo., have introduced legislation that will prevent the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) from requiring the removal of homes or businesses built within the boundary of a hydroelectric project, the senators announced this morning.
The move comes in response to a uproar, chronicled recently in the Post-Dispatch and STLtoday.com, over a federal threat to require existing landowners to remove their properties from a federally regulated zone near the shoreline.
According to FERC, thousands of property owners built homes, decks, gazebos and patios on land that belongs to Ameren Missouri’s Bagnell Dam and Osage hydroelectric project, which the agency regulates. So FERC issued an order stating that all of the so-called nonconforming structures must be removed payday loans online.
St. Louis-based Ameren, caught in the middle of the dispute, has asked the federal agency to reconsider, at least with respect to the 1,200-plus residences in jeopardy. The utility, which manages the shoreline under federal oversight, wants to redraw the hydroelectric project boundary to exclude most, if not all, of the homes in danger.
About four thousand properties would be in jeopardy, according to a news release from Blunt and McCaskill. In September, McCaskill and Blunt strongly urged FERC to rescind its plan and allow Ameren to redraw the project boundary, according to the release.
Now they have drawn up the . which would prohibit FERC from issuing any shorelines management plan that requires the removal of structures along the lake, and would be enforced retroactively to January, 2011
Most Sub-Saharan countries made doing business easier over the past year, but the African region is still the costliest and most complex in the world for entrepreneurs, the World Bank said in a report Thursday.
In its annual ranking of 183 countries, the bank found 36 of 46 Sub-Saharan African nations improved their business environment in the year through June 2011, the highest number since the study began nine years ago.
The world’s top five countries for doing business were unchanged from last year _ Singapore, Hong Kong, New Zealand, the U.S. and Denmark.
The bank judges nations on 11 criteria _ starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, getting credit, protecting investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts, resolving insolvency and employing workers.
The bank said 125 countries improved business regulations in the past year, up 13 percent from the previous year.
Morocco was this year’s biggest gainer in the rankings, jumping to 94 from 115 after the North African nation simplified construction permits, allowed minority shareholders to obtain some corporate documents during trials and enhanced electronic tax filing guaranteed payday loans.
South Korea leapt to 8th place from 15th by introducing an online process for starting a business, merging several taxes and filing commercial litigation electronically. Sweden fell out of the top ten to 14th.
Sub-Saharan Africa’s improvement was led by Sierra Leone, which advanced to 141 from 150. Mauritius at 23, and South Africa at 35, are Africa’s highest ranked countries.
Africa also has eight of the 10 lowest ranked nations, including Chad in last place.
Venezuela is South America’s lowest ranked country at 177, the only non-African nation in the bottom nine.
Greek railway workers and journalists joined ferry crews, garbage collectors, tax officials and lawyers on Tuesday in a strike blitz against yet more austerity measures required if the country is to avoid defaulting on its debts.
The protests will lead into a general strike over the coming two days, culminating on Thursday when Parliament holds a crucial vote on the new painful cutbacks that follow nearly two years of austerity. A similar strike before an austerity bill in June was accompanied by large protest marches which degenerated into street battles between rioters and police.
The highly unpopular new measures include further pension and salary cuts, the suspension on reduced pay of 30,000 public servants out of a total of more than 750,000 and the suspension of collective labor contracts.
Meanwhile, European countries are trying to work out an overall solution to the continent’s deepening debt crisis, ahead of a weekend summit in Brussels.
“The situation is exceptionally difficult, because there is great uncertainty in Europe, great uncertainty internationally,” Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos said in a meeting with the country’s president, Karolos Papoulias. “People … are making big sacrifices. We are carrying out a patriotic duty because we have to save the country.”
Venizelos also tempered expectations for reaching a definitive deal on a second rescue package for Greece at a European Union summit this weekend. The second bailout, worth euro109 billion, was initially agreed in July, but crucial details remain to be worked out.
“We must not have great expectations for Sunday’s summit,” Venizelos said. “We will seek what is best for the country and the eurozone. Everyone understands that if Greece is saved, the eurozone will be saved too. And the reverse is also true: if the Europeans fail on Greece they will not be able to safeguard themselves.”
Greece’s embattled Socialist government needs to pass the new measures _ which some of its own backbenchers have threatened to block _ to receive the next euro8 billion ($11 billion) installment of the original euro110 billion package of international rescue loans that have been keeping it afloat since May 2010.
“It must be understood that we are fighting a war here,” the finance minister said, adding that a “national fight” must be waged against tax evasion. “If some people think that we live under normal circumstances and we are implementing a policy we want to implement of cutbacks and austerity, they are very much mistaken.”
The bailout was needed after the country’s borrowing rates soared on international markets upon revelations that Athens had misrepresented its financial data for years. Rating agencies cut Greece’s credit grade to the lowest in the world.
The country has maintained a market presence through regular sales of short-term debt _ up to six months _ and on Tuesday successfully auctioned euro1.62 billion worth of 13-week treasury bills. The country had to offer buyers a slightly higher yield, 4.61 percent compared with 4.56 percent at the previous sale last month. Investor interest was slightly higher, with the auction 2.86 times oversubscribed.
The government has said it will run out of cash in mid-November if the next bailout loan installment is not forthcoming.
Tuesday’s strikes kept island ferries in port for a second day, while stinking mounds of rotting garbage remained uncollected for the 17th day on the streets of Greece’s cities, carpeting sidewalks and forcing pedestrians to make detours through speeding traffic.
Tax collectors and lawyers joined the strikes, while civil servants occupied the finance and labor ministry buildings.
The new austerity measures were announced after the government failed to meet its savings targets, despite some 22 months of austerity that saw a record loss of jobs during a deep recession.
In July, unemployment rose to 16.5 percent, from 16 percent in June and 12 percent a year earlier, according to data provided Tuesday by Greece’s statistical authority. The total number of unemployed exceeded 820,000.
On Wednesday and Thursday, teachers, doctors, taxi drivers and bank employees will be on strike, together with air traffic controllers _ whose walkout will halt all flights for two days.
The country’s two main labor unions have also called rallies and protest marches to Syntagma Square outside Parliament in central Athens during the general strike, while a Communist union has urged members to block off the assembly building on the day of the vote.
Vans mounted with loudspeakers did the rounds of central Athens Tuesday, urging workers to “flood Syntagma Square and surround Parliament.”
Premier Wen Jiabao has promised China’s struggling exporters a stable exchange rate in a move that might fuel tensions with Washington over Beijing’s currency controls as the global economy weakens.
Wen’s pledge, reported by the official Xinhua News Agency and state radio, comes after the U.S. Senate approved a measure to allow higher tariffs on Chinese goods that critics say are unfairly cheap due to an artificially undervalued currency.
Beijing’s exchange rate controls are especially sensitive at a time when other nations are trying to revive growth by boosting exports and complain that a weak Chinese yuan is widening the country’s swollen trade surplus.
Wen’s pledge Friday at a trade fair in southern China came after export growth suffered an unexpectedly steep decline in September, hurt by a fall in sales to Europe amid the continent’s debt crisis.
Wen promised a “basically stable exchange rate,” Xinhua said. He pledged to maintain export-related tax rebates and other support.
U.S. manufacturers complain the yuan is undervalued by up to 40 percent, giving China’s exporters an unfair price advantage and wiping out American jobs. Beijing has allowed the yuan to gain by about 7 percent against the dollar since June 2010 in tightly controlled trading, but that is not as fast as critics want.
The measure approved Tuesday by the Senate would allow Washington to raise tariffs on goods from countries that the U.S. Treasury concludes are manipulating exchange rates for a trade advantage. The bill is not expected to become law because it lacks the support of the leadership of the lower House of Representatives, which has yet to vote on it.
China’s government reacted angrily to the measure, dismissing it as protectionism at a dangerous time for the shaky world economy and warning that trade relations would be damaged if it were allowed to become law.
China’s economy, the world’s second-largest, is relatively robust, with growth forecast by the World Bank of 9.3 percent this year. But weakening exports by Chinese manufacturers that employ millions of people could lead to layoffs and social tensions.
September’s export growth fell to 17.1 percent over a year earlier, down from August’s 24.5 percent, customs data showed Thursday.
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