Globalization and technology are intensifying the growing income gap between the rich and poor in Canada, economists say.
And government policies aren
The Senate unanimously approved tough new sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank amid fears of Tehran developing a nuclear weapon.
The 100-0 vote Thursday was for an amendment to the defense bill. Lawmakers had argued that concerns about a nuclear-armed Iran outweighed reservations about driving up oil prices and hurting Americans at the gas pump.
Sens. Bob Menendez of New Jersey and Mark Kirk of Illinois offered the amendment that would target foreign financial institutions that do business with the Central Bank of Iran, barring them from opening or maintaining correspondent operations in the United States easy payday loans. It would apply to foreign central banks only for transactions that involve the sale or purchase of petroleum or petroleum products.
Administration officials cautioned that driving up oil prices could mean more money for Iran.
U.S. home prices are falling again in most major cities after posting small gains over the summer and spring, the latest evidence that the troubled housing market won’t recover any time soon.
The Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index released Tuesday showed prices dropped in September from August in 17 of the 20 cities tracked. That was the first decline after five straight months in which at least half the cities in the survey showed monthly gains.
A separate index for the July-September quarter shows prices were mostly unchanged from the previous quarter.
David M. Blitzer, chairman of S&P’s index committee, said that while the steep price declines seen between 2007 and 2009 appear to be over, home prices are down from the same time last year and do not show signs of easing.
“Any chance for a sustained recovery will probably need a stronger economy,” Blitzer said.
Atlanta, San Francisco and Tampa, Fla. posted the biggest monthly price declines. Prices in Atlanta, Las Vegas and Phoenix fell to their lowest points since the housing crisis began four years ago. Blitzer called the new lows reached in those three cities a “bit disturbing.”
Prices rose in New York, Portland, Ore. and Washington.
Americans are reluctant to purchase a home more than two years after the recession officially ended. High unemployment and weak job growth have deterred many would-be buyers. Even the lowest mortgage rates in history haven’t been enough to lift sales.
Some people can’t qualify for loans or meet higher down payment requirements. Many with good credit and stable jobs are holding off because they fear that prices will keep falling payday loan lenders.
Sales of previously occupied homes are on pace to match last year’s dismal figures _ the worst in 14 years. And sales of new homes are shaping up to be the worst since the government began keeping records a half century ago.
“Despite record high affordability of real estate, the psychology of home buyers is still being weighed down by economic uncertainty, keeping them on the fence when it comes to buying homes,” said Stan Humphries, chief economist at Zillow.com, which measures home values.
The Case Shiller index covers half of all U.S. homes. It measures prices compared with those in January 2000 and creates a three-month moving average. The September data is the latest available.
Prices are certain to fall further once banks resume millions of foreclosures. They have been delayed because of a yearlong government investigation into mortgage lending practices.
Home prices had stabilized in coastal cities over the past six months, helped by a rush of spring buyers and investors. But this year, prices in many cities, including Cleveland, Detroit, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Tampa, have reached their lowest points since the housing bust more than four years ago.
Foreclosures and short sales _ when a lender accepts less for a home than what is owed on a mortgage _ are selling at an average discount of 20 percent.
A pair of triple button Ugg boots for just $209 at a U.S. online retailer looks like a better deal than the $285 price tag on Ugg
The deputy supreme commander of the United Arab Emirates’ armed forces says France is seeking unacceptable terms for the sale of up to 60 Rafale fighter jets.
The comments Wednesday by Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan could signal a final blow to the bid by France’s Dassault Aviation, which has been in talks with UAE officials for several years.
The official WAM news agency quotes Sheik Mohammed _ who is also the highly influential crown prince of Abu Dhabi _ as saying Dassault was offering noncompetitive and “unworkable” terms. He gave no other details.
He made the comments after touring the Dubai Airshow, where the Rafale and others, including American-made F-15, F-16 and F-18 fighters, performed flight demonstrations,
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) _ Airbus says its customers are committed to buy 1,420 of its new A320neo after less than a year of sales savings account payday advance.
Chief Operating Officer John Leahy said on Wednesday that the brisk business shows there’s strong demand for fuel-efficient planes despite some economic “storm clouds on the horizon.”
Leahy spoke as Airbus wrapped up its order announcements at the Dubai Airshow, where it scored 130 firm orders for the single-aisle plane.
Airbus says it now has 1,268 firm orders for the A320neo, which promises a smaller fuel bill than older A320 models. It ended the Dubai show with $13.7 billion worth of firm orders.
Its rival Boeing snagged the show’s biggest deal _ an $18 billion order for 50 777s from Dubai’s Emirates airline.
Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s main coalition ally urged him to step aside Tuesday as political uncertainty in the eurozone’s third-largest economy rocked financial markets for yet another day.
Berlusconi’s government is under intense pressure to enact quick reforms to shore up Italy’s defenses against Europe’s raging debt crisis. However, a weak coalition and doubts over Berlusconi’s ability to push through austerity and reforms have financial markets fearing some type of financial disaster in Italy.
“We asked him to step aside, take a step to the side,” Northern League leader Umberto Bossi told reporters as he arrived ahead of a key vote that could force Berlusconi’s resignation. Bossi is the volatile ally who brought down Berlusconi’s first conservative government in 1994 when he yanked his support.
With debts of around euro1.9 trillion ($2.6 trillion), Italy is considered by many as being too big for Europe to bail out, like it has already done for Greece, Portugal and Ireland.
Italy’s center-left opposition said it would abstain in Tuesday’s voting, to make it clear just how fragile Berlusconi’s forces in Parliament are. If he is backed by less than 316 deputies _ or less than half of the 630-member chamber — it would be plain that Berlusconi can no longer count on a majority in the lower house of Parliament, even though the government mathematically could still win the vote to approve the 2010 state finances.
Bossi said the man Berlusconi has already hand-picked to be his eventual successor, former Justice Minister Angelino Alfano, should now lead the government.
But it would be up to the Italian president, Giorgio Napolitano, to decide whether to appoint a new leader or dissolve parliament and call early elections.
International financial officials and the markets, meanwhile, fretted over how long it was going to take for lawmakers to approve measures promised by Berlusconi to rein in Italy’s galloping public debt.
With that in mind, Italy’s borrowing rates spiked Tuesday to their highest level since the euro was established in 1999. Higher rates would make it more difficult for Italy to rollover its debts and will mean they consume more and more of its national income. Italy has over euro300 billion ($412 billion) to raise in 2012 alone.
By late-morning, the yield on Italy’s ten-year bonds was up 0.07 percentage point at 6.60 percent, down from an earlier high of 6.74 percent. A rate of over 7 percent is considered unsustainable and proved to be the trigger point that forced Greece, Ireland and Portugal into accepting financial bailouts.
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
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/
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.
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