With tears welling in her eyes, the 16-year-old recounted how both her brothers were killed by troops fighting for strongman Laurent Gbagbo. Then rage contorted her face as she ranted against the arrested former president: “They must kill him. He’s a savage.”
Gbagbo was finally arrested and forced from power on April 11, more than four months after he lost elections. Calls for reconciliation and healing have come from all sides since then.
“We beg forgiveness for the bad things that have happened. But nothing can be gained by seeking vengeance,” said warlord Ibrahim “IB” Coulibaly, who had thrown his forces against Gbagbo. “Hatred and vengeance are our weaknesses.”
President Alassane Ouattara himself has called for reconciliation. He also has said he wants Gbagbo tried by national and international courts.
But despite calls for healing in Ivory Coast, some say they cannot forgive.
Justice Minister Jeannot Ahoussou said he is drawing up a list of ministers, generals and journalists to be charged with blood crimes, corruption and hate speech.
At an Abidjan church where Gbagbo partisans have sought refuge, people still were talking of the need for the West African nation to be run by “real Ivorians” _ a reference to Gbagbo’s divisionist tactic of questioning the nationality even of Ouattara, who was born in Ivory Coast but whose father is from neighboring Burkina Faso. Gbagbo also attempted to raise Western opposition to Ouattara by harping on his Muslim religion and suggesting he would turn Ivory Coast into a refuge for Islamist radicals.
Gbagbo, who came to power in 2000 promising to unite the country, had resorted to inciting old tribal and religious rivalries to create dissension and prolong his stay in power.
Coulibaly, whose “Invisible Commando” began the fight in the commercial city of Abidjan to wrest power from Gbagbo troops who fired mortars and rockets at civilians, said Ivory Coast needs reconciliation and pointed to South Africa as an example. But Coulibaly himself has been a divisive force among those fighting for Ouattara, raising fears that old rivalries put aside while different armed groups joined forces to topple Gbagbo could now re-emerge.
Coulibaly has denied there was infighting between his fighters and other pro-Ouattara forces. But witnesses said there was, costing lives and delaying Gbagbo’s capture for 10 days. The witnesses said Coulibaly wanted to announce on TV that he was heading a new transitional military government. Coulibaly denies it.
Another possible obstacle is Gbagbo’s rabble-rousing youth minister Charles Ble Goude, who is in hiding. He is wanted by the Ivory Coast government for crimes including inciting his Young Patriot thugs to attack foreigners and people from tribes loyal to Ouattara. He also allegedly used them as a human shield around the presidential residence where Gbagbo had sheltered in a fortified underground bunker.
Before Gbagbo was finally ousted, there were barbarities on both sides.
Gbagbo fighters slaughtered at least four Muslim imams during the fighting in Abidjan and set ablaze at least 10 mosques.
Pro-Ouattara fighters attacked the Catholic cathedral in the southwestern cocoa port of San Pedro, firing into 5,000 residents from tribes opposed to Gbagbo who had sought refuge there. One man was killed and many wounded.
On Saturday, Gbagbo party leader Pascal Affi N’Guessan urged die-hard militants to lay down their arms and called for national reconciliation. “The war has ended,” he said, urging Ivorians to “give a chance to the restoration of peace” and halt the “revenge killings, the looting.”
He expressed the party’s sympathies to the families of all those who died.
But that is not enough for Fatoumata Zhama Diaby, the 16-year-old. She was at a weekend march, dancing and singing along with other women and shouting their support for Ouattara. After she lashed out at Gbagbo, a reporter asked if she heard Ouattara’s call for reconciliation.
“They killed both of my brothers. We are six left now, only girls. My brothers were very dear to me,” she said, putting a hand over her heart.
She said Fohmad Diaby, 24, and Comaba Blo Diaby, 17, died the day of the election, Nov. 28, when soldiers attacked people protesting Gbagbo’s refusal to step down. The elder brother was hit by a grenade she said, showing shrapnel wounds on her arms from the same blast. The younger brother was disabled and could not run with others. He was shot.
“I can never, never forgive them,” Diaby said. “Gbagbo is inhuman. If I saw him today, I wouldn’t just kill him, I would cut him into pieces.”
Crows cawed overhead as tsunami survivors in devastated towns along Japan’s northeast coast buried their dead in makeshift graves en masse Wednesday as workers at Fukushima’s overheated nuclear plant struggled to cool down the crippled facility.
With supplies of fuel and ice dwindling, officials have abandoned cremation in favor of quick, simple burials in a show of pragmatism over tradition. Some are buried in bare plywood caskets and others in blue plastic tarps, with no time to build proper coffins. The bodies will be dug up and cremated once crematoriums catch up with the glut, officials assured the families.
In Higashimatsushima in Miyagi prefecture, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo, soldiers lowered bare plywood coffins into the ground, saluting each casket, as families watched from a distance and helicopters occasionally clattered overhead.
Some relatives placed flowers on the graves. Most remained stoic, folding hands in prayer. Two young girls wept inconsolably, hugged tightly by their father.
“I hope their spirits will rest in peace here at this temporary place,” said Katsuko Oguni, 42, a relative of the dead.
In Fukushima, the struggle to stabilize the plant suffered another setback Wednesday after a spike in radiation levels forced officials to pull workers and suspend restoring power to the Unit 2 reactor, a Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency official said in Tokyo.
The setback showed how tenuous the situation remains nearly two weeks after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out power to the Fukushima complex, allowing radiation leaks that have seeped into vegetables, raw milk, the water supply and even seawater.
Broccoli was added early Wednesday to a list of tainted vegetables that already includes spinach, canola and chrysanthemum greens.
The nuclear crisis has complicated the government’s response to the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that swallowed up villages along the coast. The number of bodies collected stood at more than 9,400, with more than 14,700 people listed as missing. Those tallies may overlap.
Hundreds of thousands remain homeless. Schools, gymnasiums and other community buildings in the northeast are still packed with survivors, many of them elderly suffering after days without heat, medicine and hot meals.
In Fukushima, relief after the lights went on late Tuesday in the control room of Unit 3 made way hours later for concern over radiation levels in Unit 2, putting on hold plans to try restarting the plant’s crucial cooling system. The sprawling nuclear complex has six units.
In the first five days after the disasters struck, the Fukushima complex saw explosions and fires in four of the plant’s six reactors, and the leaking of radioactive steam into the air. Since then, progress continued intermittently as efforts to splash seawater on the reactors and rewire the complex were disrupted by rises in radiation, elevated pressure in reactors and overheated storage pools.
Missions to dump seawater into one storage pool holding spent nuclear fuel went well, and firefighters continue to spray water on spent fuel pools in two other units, NISA said. Temperature at a seventh, joint spent fuel pool have stabilized, they said Wednesday.
Two workers were slightly injured trying to restore electric cables, neither from radiation, Tokyo Electric Power Co. spokesman Kaoru Yoshida said Wednesday.
Tokyo Electric warned that time is needed to replace damaged equipment and vent any volatile gas to make sure the restored electricity does not spark an explosion.
“You’re going to get fires now as they energize equipment,” said Arnold Gundersen, the chief engineer at the U.S.-based environmental consulting company Fairewinds Associates. “It’s going to be a long slog.”
Radiation continues to leak from the site, though the main barriers appear intact, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said.
The operator suspects some damage to an inner containment structure at Unit 2 as a result of an earlier explosion there. Also, spent fuel pools in damaged buildings could be releasing some radioactivity into the air.
“I think we have enough information to determine that there’s not large holes or excessive releases from those containments, but we continue to see radiation coming from the site … and the question is where exactly is that coming from,” nuclear safety expert James Lyons said at a briefing Tuesday by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The Health Ministry ordered officials in the area of the stricken plant to increase monitoring of seawater and seafood after elevated levels of radioactive iodine and cesium were found in ocean water near the complex. Education Ministry official Shigeharu Kato said a research vessel had been dispatched to collect and analyze samples.
Doses detected so far are low and not a threat to human health unless the tainted products are consumed in abnormally excessive quantities, government officials and health experts said.
Radiation levels in the air in Tokyo have been well below the global average for naturally occurring background radiation.
With barely a whimper of the protests that have convulsed Wisconsin, legislation to curb public employee unions is speeding toward passage in Ohio, an even bigger labor stronghold.
Labor experts said the greater tumult in Wisconsin reflects the state’s long history of progressive political activism; the Statehouse’s location in Madison, the famously liberal home of the University of Wisconsin; and perhaps a feeling of hopelessness among Ohio’s working class, which has been hit particularly hard by the recession.
Days of protests in Columbus haven’t added up to the numbers seen in a single day in Madison. The rallies there have topped more than 70,000 people, compared with roughly 8,500 on the largest day of demonstrations at the Ohio Statehouse. When the Ohio bill passed the Senate 17-16 on Wednesday, the crowd was estimated at 450.
“Madison is kind of a perfect storm of factors for this,” said Don Taylor, assistant professor of labor education at the University of Wisconsin School for Workers in Madison. “It’s an extremely progressive city in terms of politics. It’s one of those places in the country where people will refer to it as a ‘People’s Republic.’”
Wisconsin’s measure remains in limbo in the GOP-controlled Legislature after the 14 Senate Democrats fled to Illinois two weeks ago to deprive the chamber of a quorum. In Ohio, though, the Republicans hold big enough majorities in both chambers to vote on the bill and pass it even if the Democrats walk out.
Ohio’s bill could go to House committee hearings as early as next week. The measure is likely to receive strong support from the full chamber and Republican Gov. John Kasich.
Ohio’s bill would restrict the bargaining rights of roughly 350,000 teachers, firefighters, police officers and other public employees. They would no longer be able to negotiate health care benefits or certain working conditions, and they would be barred from striking.
Wisconsin’s measure would affect about 175,000 workers but would exempt police and firefighters. Under the bill, public employees would be allowed to negotiate wages only. And even then, they could not get raises higher than the inflation rate without a public referendum. Wisconsin already outlaws strikes by public employees.
The speed with which the Ohio bill cleared the Senate is energizing Republicans as they push to break what they see as labor’s stranglehold on state and local governments, schools and public safety departments.
Political observers at the Ohio Statehouse were flabbergasted by how fast the legislation was moving in a longtime labor stronghold like Ohio. The state has 655,000 union members, who constitute 13.7 percent of the workforce, compared with 335,000 members, or 14.2 percent of the workforce, in Wisconsin, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“For as far-reaching this thing is and how many lives it will affect, I can’t believe how fast it moved,” said Columbus Police Sgt Low fee payday loans. Shaun Laird.
Many union backers were also clearly disappointed by the turnout in Columbus given the high political stakes in Ohio, a political battleground state that decided the 2004 presidential election.
A law undercutting Ohio’s unions could kneecap the state’s Democratic Party ahead of the 2012 race for the White House by depriving it of a major source of contributions and organizational muscle. Or, as some union members argue, the battle could backfire on the GOP by galvanizing the Democratic Party and its working-class base.
Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said the walkout by the Democrats in Wisconsin slowed down the process there and allowed the opposition to organize. He called what was happening in Ohio “a blitzkrieg.”
Wisconsin was the first state to allow collective bargaining for public employees, in 1959, and is the birthplace of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the nation’s largest public employee union.
In Ohio, despite a long union tradition among steel and auto workers, the right to collective bargaining was not extended to state employees until 1983. A Gallup survey released in August showed Ohio with the lowest proportion of government employees in the U.S. _ 12 percent of the state’s workforce.
Wisconsin’s capital, Madison, is more liberal than Columbus. Were Ohio’s bill debated in one of its blue-collar bastions _ say, Cleveland, Akron or Toledo _ the demonstrations might have been far larger, said Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder.
Ohio State University is only a couple of miles from the Ohio Statehouse, but the tens of thousands of students there have played little part in the pro-labor rallies.
By contrast, passionate student demonstrators from the University of Wisconsin’s flagship campus in Madison _”up there with Berkeley” in its liberalism, according to Vedder _ have been bolstering the Wisconsin fight. The campus is right next to the Capitol.
“There has always been a sympathy for collective approaches to labor problems in Wisconsin, and you don’t have that as much in Ohio,” Vedder said. “It doesn’t have that same progressive reputation or history.”
John Russo, labor studies professor at Youngstown State University, said the low numbers of people protesting in Ohio reflect the hurt that has been inflicted by the recession in the state, where unemployment is 9.5 percent versus 7.5 percent in Wisconsin.
“There’s a sense of hopelessness,” he said. “Some people feel like `If we’re not going to go anywhere, I’m going to make sure nobody else is going anywhere.’”
Be careful when buying gift cards on a display rack at a store. They could be a target for fraudsters.
Federal regulators on Thursday filed insider-trading charges against six people they say worked for an expert-networking firm and passed on confidential corporate information to investors.
Expert networks connect analysts and experts with investors seeking information, for a fee. They are playing a growing role on Wall Street.
The Securities and Exchange Commission announced the civil charges against the six, accusing them of passing tips to hedge funds and other investors that enabled them to make about $6 million in illegal profits. They had previously been named in criminal cases brought by federal prosecutors, as part of what authorities say is the biggest hedge fund insider-trading case in history.
The SEC said four of the six were employees of technology companies who moonlighted as consultants and exploited their access to confidential information about Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Apple Inc., Dell Inc. and other companies.
The six were consultants or employees of Primary Global Research, based in Mountain View, Calif., which connects experts and consultants with investors seeking information in the technology, health care and other industries. Prosecutors have portrayed the firm as an incubator for insider trading.
Named by the SEC were Mark Anthony Longoria, Daniel DeVore, Winifred Jiau, Walter Shimoon, Bob Nguyen and James Fleishman.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan announced that an indictment was returned Thursday against Fleishman on criminal charges of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
His attorney, Ethan Balogh, said “Mr. Fleishman is innocent of these charges, and we intend to contest them and establish his innocence at trial.”
Balogh declined to comment on the SEC charges, saying he hadn’t yet seen the civil lawsuit.
Nguyen and DeVore pleaded guilty to similar charges in federal court in Manhattan in recent months.
The six Primary Global consultants and employees “schemed to facilitate widespread and repeated insider trading by several hedge funds and other investment professionals,” SEC Enforcement Director Robert Khuzami said in a statement payday loan.
The SEC is seeking unspecified restitution and civil fines from the six; the agency also seeks to bar Longoria, DeVore and Shimoon from serving as officers or directors of any public company.
Attorneys representing Longoria, DeVore, Jiau and Nguyen declined to comment Thursday. Shimoon’s lawyer didn’t return a telephone call seeking comment.
The networks of industry analysts, experts and consultants channel details between corporate America and Wall Street about what companies are up to _ potentially giving some investors an unfair edge. The networking firms set up meetings and calls between current and former managers, and traders who want an investing edge.
The government’s investigation targeting financial industry players accused of masking inside information as legitimate research is an offshoot of what’s been called the biggest hedge-fund insider-trading probe in history. That probe of the Galleon group of hedge funds, revealed with arrests last year, accused more than two dozen defendants of conspiring to share secrets that led to over $50 million in illegal profits.
Among those arrested was Raj Rajaratnam, a one-time billionaire who founded the Galleon group. Free on $100 million bail, he has pleaded not guilty and maintains that he only traded on publicly available information. A person familiar with the probe said Wednesday that the government has identified Rajaratnam’s brother, Ragakanthan, as a co-conspirator in the scheme.
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Associated Press writer Larry Neumeister in New York contributed to this report.
Manufacturing in the Philadelphia region expanded in January for a fourth month as orders grew the most since September 2004 and employment picked up.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s general economic index slipped to 19.3 from 20.8 last month. The gauge was forecast to hold at 20.8, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey. Readings greater than zero signal expansion in the area covering eastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey and Delaware.
Demand for new equipment and more exports to countries like China are boosting sales at manufacturers such as International Business Machines Corp. Gains in consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of the economy, may keep factories expanding and lead to the job growth needed to accelerate the expansion.
“Manufacturing is continuing to see a particularly good period at present,” said David Semmens, a U.S. economist at Standard Chartered Bank in New York. As a result, there is a “large potential for hiring to pick up,” he said.
Estimates for the manufacturing gauge in the Bloomberg survey of 56 economists ranged from 12.5 to 25.
Stocks fell on concern China will raise interest rates to cool its economy. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index dropped 0.4 percent to 1,276.5 at 10:37 a.m. in New York. Treasury securities fell, pushing up the yield on the benchmark 10-year note to 3.42 percent from 3.34 percent late yesterday.
Leading Indicators
Separate figures from the Conference Board showed the economy is gathering momentum. The New York-based group’s index of leading economic indicators rose 1 percent in December after a 1.1 percent gain in November.
The National Association of Realtors said purchases of previously owned homes rose 12 percent in December to a 5.28 million annual rate, the fastest since May.
The Labor Department said today that fewer Americans filed claims for jobless benefits last week, a sign of an improving labor market. Applications for unemployment insurance dropped by 37,000 to 404,000 in the week ended Jan. 15.
The Philadelphia Fed bank’s new orders measure rose to 23.6, from 10.6 in December. The employment index increased to 17.6, the highest since April 2006, from 4.3 last month. A measure of the average workweek fell to 10.6 in January from 16.8.
Sales, Prices
The shipments gauge increased to 13.4 from 5.2 last month. The index of prices paid jumped to 54.3, the highest since July 2008, from 47.9 the prior month, while the measure of prices received rose to 17.1 from 9.4.
The overall Philadelphia Fed’s index isn’t composed of the individual measures, so some economists consider it a gauge of sentiment among manufacturers fast cash online. The New York Fed’s factory measure, released Jan. 18, rose to 11.9 this month from 9.9 in December.
Economists monitor the New York and Philadelphia Fed factory reports for clues about the Institute for Supply Management national figures on manufacturing during the month.
The ISM will release its report on Feb. 1. The measure last month increased to 57, a seven-month high, from 56.6 in November.
Business Spending
Manufacturing makes up about 11 percent of the economy and is getting a boost from expanding world trade. Exports rose 0.8 percent in November to the highest level since August 2008, according to Commerce Department data released Jan. 13. Business spending on equipment and software advanced at a 15.4 percent annual rate in the third quarter.
IBM, the world’s largest computer-services provider, said this week that fourth-quarter hardware revenue climbed 21 percent to $6.3 billion, as a mainframe computer introduced in July helped boost sales in that product category by almost 70 percent.
“The improvement in our revenue growth was driven by the hardware and software transactional businesses,” Mark Loughridge, chief financial officer of the Armonk, New York- based company, said on a Jan. 18 conference call. “We see customers starting to spend more in their base business as we exit the recession.”
The U.S. is moving to strengthen economic ties with China as a way to boost American exports. President Barack Obama said the U.S. and China both reap “substantial benefits” from cooperation on economic and strategic issues even as friction remains over currency, trade and human rights.
Following a meeting with business leaders from both countries yesterday, Obama said that a prosperous and growing China is an important market for U.S. goods, and the administration highlighted deals to sell Boeing Co. airplanes and General Electric Co. locomotives.
“We want to sell you all kinds of stuff,” Obama said at a White House news conference with Chinese President Hu Jintao. “We want to sell you planes, we want to sell you cars, we want to sell you software.”
Starbucks Corp. has opened its first store in Hungary.
The Seattle-based coffee giant (NASDAQ: SBUX) created a joint venture with Amrest, a restaurant operator in in Central and Eastern Europe, to manage the store, located in Budapest.
“We have great respect for the longstanding and colorful Hungarian coffeehouse culture and are excited to become a part of the community,” said Vladan Armus, Starbucks Brand President for Central and Eastern Europe, in a statement.
Full Starbucks press release below.
BUDAPEST, Hungary–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Starbucks Coffee has opened its first store in Hungary in the lively and popular WestEnd Mall.
AmRest Kavezo KFT, a joint-venture company between Starbucks Coffee International, Inc. a wholly-owned subsidiary of Starbucks Coffee Company (NASDAQ: SBUX), and AmRest Sp. z o.o., a wholly-owned subsidiary of AmRest Holdings S.E. (AmRest, WSE: EAT), will manage the daily operations.
“We have great respect for the longstanding and colorful Hungarian coffeehouse culture and are excited to become a part of the community,” said Vladan Armus, Starbucks Brand President for Central and Eastern Europe. “Over the past few years, coffeehouses have regained their popularity in Hungary, and we look forward to introducing our customers to our high quality coffees and the unique Starbucks Experience.
“WestEnd Mall is a vibrant and dynamic location in the heart of Budapest where people love to shop and meet,” continued Armus. "We think it will be an ideal location for people to enjoy a place where they can rest, relax and chat with friends over a great cup of coffee.”
Starbucks and AmRest have worked together since 2008 opening stores together in the Czech Republic and Poland. They now operate 16 stores across the three markets.
“We are excited to open our first store in Hungary and are committed to being part of the community, a good neighbor and a force for bringing our partners (employees), customers and their communities together,” said Buck Hendrix, president of Starbucks Europe, Middle East and Africa. “Our expansion into Hungary with our trusted partner AmRest is another positive step forward in growing our presence in markets that have a longstanding coffeehouse tradition throughout Central and Eastern Europe.”
Customers in Budapest will be able to enjoy Starbucks full range of offerings including hot and cold beverages made from 100% Fairtrade certified espresso, brewed coffee, and a full range of Tazo Teas. Starbucks will also offer a selection of 16 different varieties of the world’s finest whole bean arabica coffees sourced from farms across Latin America, Africa and Asia Pacific.
Starbucks will offer traditional coffeehouse fare like cakes, muffins, donuts, sandwiches and salads. Exclusive to Starbucks Hungary will be a selection of local favorites including Reform Triangle Sandwiches, Sausage Sandwiches and Pick Salami Sandwiches. Starbucks Hungary is very proud to feature Cheese Pogácsa and Almond Nougat Cake baked by the treasured local patisserie, Gerbeaud Confectionery.
Since 1971, Starbucks Coffee Company has been committed to ethically sourcing and roasting the highest quality arabica coffee in the world. Today, with stores around the globe, the company is the premier roaster and retailer of specialty coffee in the world. Through our unwavering commitment to excellence and our guiding principles, we bring the unique Starbucks Experience to life for every customer through every cup. To share in the experience, please visit us in our stores or online at www.starbucks.com.
AmRest is the largest independent restaurant operator in Central and Eastern Europe. It manages KFC, Pizza Hut, Burger King, Starbucks, Applebee’s, freshpoint and Rodeo Drive sites in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia and Russia. The company will operate Starbucks coffeehouses in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. For more information, please visit www.amrest.eu.
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.
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.
The percentage of workers with virtually no savings is growing, and the outlook for a financially stable retirement is dismal, according to a report released last week.
In 2010, 27 percent of workers have less than $1,000 stashed away, compared with 20 percent in 2009, according to the annual Retirement Confidence Survey from the Employee Benefit Research Institute.
Of the workers with some form of savings, 54 percent said they had less than $25,000. The same percentage said they needed at least $500,000 for retirement. But just 46 percent have calculated how much they need in retirement.
The nonprofit institute, along with market research firm Mathew Greenwald and Associates, surveyed 1,153 U.S. workers and retirees ages 25 and up in January.
Fewer workers have saved at all — 69 percent, compared with 75 percent in 2009 — and even fewer said they were currently doing so. Just 16 percent of workers said they were very confident in their ability to save enough — the second-lowest level in the survey’s 20-year history.
But 32 percent of workers said they were very confident in their ability to invest their savings, up from 24 percent in 2009. More than half said they were somewhat confident. And with the struggling economy, unstable job market and roller-coaster stock market, 24 percent of workers said they had postponed their retirement age, up from the 14 percent in 2009. A third of workers now anticipate retiring after they turn 65.
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