Spanish producer prices fell the least in six months in October as oil prices rose.
Prices of goods leaving Spain’s factories, mines and refineries declined 4.2 percent from a year earlier, the National Statistics Institute in Madrid said today, after a 5.4 percent drop in September. Prices were unchanged from the prior month, today’s report showed.
The price of crude oil rose 14 percent in the year to the end of October and traded at $76.94 today. Weak demand is still pulling producer prices lower as the Spanish economy contracted for a sixth quarter from July through September even as Germany, France and the euro region expanded.
Spanish consumer prices have been falling in annual terms since March, as inflation slows more sharply than in the euro region overall. The Spanish economy may contract 0.7 next year, the International Monetary Fund forecast on Oct. 1, while the euro area, the U.S. and the U.K. post full-year growth.
Industrial production in Spain decreased 12.5 percent from a year earlier in September, declining for a 17th month as companies reduced staff to weather the slump. Nissan Motor Co. cut production of cars and light trucks 57 percent in September from a year earlier, compared with a global decline of 8.5 percent, it said on Oct. 28.
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Every weekday morning, as soon as I look through the overnight e-mails, I go to my bank’s bookmarked website and check that everything is in order with my checking, savings and credit card accounts.
People used to tease me about this habit, some telling me to get a life (or worse). But it turns out what I do — it took just 53 seconds this morning — is the advice now commonly given to consumers to avoid rising and irritating bank and credit card fees.
By always knowing the overall and available balances (and verifying that all deposits and debits are recorded properly and promptly), I’ve never bounced a check or incurred a bank overdraft fee or over-the-limit or late-payment credit card fee.
I’ve never paid "maintenance," "low-balance" or ATM fees. I have never paid credit card interest, because I always make sure there’s enough money in the bank to pay the balance in full.
For the five minutes a week it takes me to keep track of the account balances — and a couple of times, to spot errors and have them fixed — that’s a big payoff.
Consider, for instance, that the average "non-sufficient funds" or bounced-check bank fee rose to an average of $29.58 this year, according to an annual study by Bankrate.com, a bank-tracking, consumer oriented website.
Ostensibly to avoid such fees, many banks offer automatic "overdraft protection" programs that temporarily cover expenditures exceeding a customer’s available balance. But such programs can be costly.
In 2008, banks and credit unions collected nearly $24 billion in overdraft fees, 35 percent more than two years earlier, according to a study by the Center for Responsible Lending, a not-for-profit, nonpartisan group.
More than 50 million Americans overdraw their checking accounts at least once over a 12-month period, the Center estimates based on a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation study, and 27 million incur five or more insufficient-funds or overdraft fees payday loans.
Americans also pay dearly for access to cash. The average fee for using an automated teller machine from another bank is $2.22, up 12.6 percent from 2008, Bankrate.com found. On top of that, your own bank is also likely to ding you with fees averaging $1.32 for using somebody else’s machine.
There’s more. "Service" charges for interest-bearing checking accounts falling below a minimum balance rose to a new average high of $12.25 a month. To avoid the charge, you need to maintain an average balance of $3,372.18. And the interest? "A miserable average yield of 0.12 percent," the Bankrate.com study said (at that rate, I calculated, your minimum balance would earn $4.05 in interest a year).
As to credit cards, late-payment and other fees have proliferated as card issuers prepare to meet requirement of federal legislation regulating interest rate increases.
I won’t get into whether banks and card issuers are gouging customers or simply trying to make an honest profit. I’ll focus on the practical, what consumers can do.
For starters, match your accounts to your needs. If it’s just simple checking, bill pay, ATM or debit card transactions, a non-interest paying but free checking account with no minimum balance and no per-check charges is best, Bankrate.com advises. Once you set up the right accounts, my suggestion is simple: Keep track of them (don’t forget debit card transactions that can cause an overdraft).
You don’t have to give up your "life" to do this. You just have to get a grip.
Small companies create more than half of America’s jobs, but the entrepreneurs who drive this part of the economy continue to complain that access to credit two years into the recession remains scarce.
Small business owners say banks remain extremely wary of risk and a world away from the carefree lending that inflated an epic boom in housing values that went bust and pushed America into its worst economic downturn in decades.
They say their home equity lines of credit have been cut, business credit lines withdrawn and credit card limits slashed. Still profitable firms complain of a major pullback by banks, which many warn will leave a U.S. economic recovery stillborn.
“It’s like we’ve gone back 15 years in time,” said Carmine Ryan, who founded Ryan Bros Coffee in San Diego with his brothers Tom and Harry in the early 1990s, using credit cards.
“We have a proven track record, we pay our bills early and we’re profitable,” he said. “But banks are so gun-shy now that no one would touch us. They’re just sitting on the money.”
The Ryans developed a wholesale coffee business and opened a second coffee shop earlier this year. After they opened it, they sought a loan of $120,000 to finance operations. Nonprofit lender CDC Small Business Finance was able to arrange a $90,000 loan. The rest they had to come up with themselves.
“This is not the way it should be right now,” Harry Ryan said banks issue payday loans. “Banks should be lending to people like us.”
A few miles away, Yi Ping Lai runs an online business, Heart to Heart Gifts, which sells toys and decorations ranging in price from $6 to $100 for girls up to six years of age.
Last year, her sales passed $1 million. With the downturn, her revenue will end up about 50 percent lower this year. But she will still turn a profit, she says.
In August, she got a letter from her bank canceling her $55,000 business line of credit. She said the bank cited routine credit checks that had reduced her credit score.
“All of those credit checks were for legitimate personal reasons,” Yi said. “For instance, I move apartment and my landlord ran a credit check on me. I tried to explain that to the bank. But they said I was now a risky option for them.”
The bank later restored $20,000 in credit. But Yi said she is being hampered in developing a new product line.
“I need that cash flow for my business,” she said.
Susan Lamping, a senior community loan officer at the nonprofit CDC in San Diego, helped Yi obtain $35,000 in credit.
“Financing is extremely hard to come by and many businesses can’t get help through the banks,” she said.
BlackBerry maker Research In Motion could see its share of the smartphone market eroded by competing devices like Apple’s iPhone, analysts warned on Friday as RIM’s shares plunged 15 percent in wake of a disappointing profit and outlook report.
Analysts again wondered whether RIM would be able to hold its own as it fights an increasingly intense battle for retail and corporate subscribers, even as the economy seems to be stabilizing.
Such worries first surfaced ahead of the iPhone’s launch in the summer of 2007, but RIM maintained it would be unshaken. It continued to post impressive subscriber gains and in late 2008 rolled out the touchscreen-based BlackBerry Storm, its answer to the iPhone.
Now, in wake of a profit and outlook report that fell short of expectations, analysts are again starting to doubt the Waterloo, Ontario-based company will be able to sustain its success.
“RIM is unlikely to maintain its over 50 percent share in North America in the face of increasing competition from Apple, Motorola, and Palm, among others,” Goldman Sachs analyst Simona Jankowski wrote in a note to clients.
“Even in a still-benign competitive environment and with two newly launched products, RIM lost share for the second consecutive quarter,” Jankowski added.
Goldman also cut its rating on the stock to “neutral” from “buy.”
Part of RIM’s strength in the smartphone market is its impressively sized distribution network. Retail consumers and corporate clients can buy the BlackBerry from more than 500 carriers and distribution partners in about 170 countries around the world.
But as the iPhone and other rivals expand their reach, RIM could find itself fighting for previously uncontested territory.
Canada, RIM’s home turf, is a good example. The iPhone is currently available from only one of the country’s Big Three carriers, Rogers Communications.
However, the other two big players — BCE Inc and Telus Corp — are working together on a network upgrade that could let them offer the iPhone as early as next year.
All three carriers currently offer the BlackBerry.
RIM has also historically reported strong growth outside North America, but Jankowski cautioned this could now be stalling.
“A second consecutive decline in international sales tempers our expectations for share gains overseas,” the Goldman analyst wrote.
RIM’s shares were down 15.6 percent at $70.10 on Nasdaq on Friday morning. In Toronto, the stock was down 15.4 percent at C$76.25. The company issued its latest earnings report after markets closed on Thursday.
St. Louis’ economy shrank faster than almost any other region in the country in the second quarter, according to a new report out today from the Brookings Institution.
Only beleaguered Detroit saw its economic output fall faster than St. Louis’ in the three months ending in June, a time when Chrysler’s Fenton truck plant limped into shutdown and U.S. Steel’s massive Granite City Works sat quiet.
Those sort of cuts contrasted with a relatively stable housing sector and a job market that’s less gruesome than some, keeping St. Louis mired in the middle of the pack among 100 large metropolitan areas that Brookings has been tracking through the recession. It’s better off than housing crisis hot spots like Las Vegas or factory towns like Dayton, Ohio, but worse off than energy hubs in Houston and Dallas, the same as it was three months ago.
With its broad base of industries, St. Louis’ $120 billion regional economy tends to track the nation as a whole. But this spring’s factory cuts took an outsized toll here because they eliminated jobs with better-than-average wages, said Jason Kunkel, an economist who tracks St. Louis for Moody’s Economy.com. That translated into a 1.5 percent decline in output, though that figure may be revised upward a bit. Since the recession began, output is off 6.1 percent.
"The manufacturing sector there has been hit very hard," he said. "That certainly has a big effect on why (output) in the first half of 2009 will be worse than average."
The good news, said Howard Wial, who co-authored the Brookings report, is that things appear to be getting a little better. The pace of job cuts is slowing. Auto sales have leveled off, a good sign for the car-making that remains here. The big plant in Granite City is pumping out steel again.
"You can see the light at the end of the tunnel," he said. "But you’re not there yet."
Comments from two senior Federal Reserve officials on Monday touched on what could become a struggle in the coming months and years over how and when to unwind the bank’s dramatically accommodative policy.
The line between policy hawks and doves on the Federal Open Market Committee on the inflation outlook will likely become more pointed now that the U.S. recession appears to be over and the world’s largest economy embarks on a tentative recovery.
“In my career, I have never witnessed a situation like the one that exists now, when views about inflation risks have coalesced into two diametrically opposed camps,” said Janet Yellen, San Francisco Fed President.
Speaking in San Francisco, the 2009 FOMC voter put herself in the ranks of those still worried about disinflation or outright deflation in the U.S. economy as high unemployment looks set to drag on for years.
“Our foot is down on the pedal of stimulus as far as we can possibly go,” Yellen said after a speech to the San Francisco Society of Certified Financial Analysts and that stance is still right for now, she added.
The U.S. central bank has set its official interest rate near zero since December and created a number of unorthodox programs to reopen incapacitated credit markets. As the recovery progresses, the timing and velocity of interest rate increases and other measures to wind down accommodative policy — the so-called exit strategy — will be a key factor for U.S. Treasury markets and investors across a range of assets.
The recovery is likely to be “tepid” even if the long recession seemed to end during the summer and the economy is set to grow in the second half of 2009, she said. Like other Fed officials recently, she cited inventory investments, not job creation, as the major catalyst for growth at this point.
Even gross domestic product growth of 3 percent to 4 percent in the next few quarters, should it occur, would do little to dent the ranks of the unemployed, said Yellen, suggesting a certain circularity to the possible jobless recovery.
“Weakness in the labor market is another factor that may keep the recovery in low gear for a while,” she said. “My business contacts indicate that they will be very reluctant to hire again until they see clear evidence of a sustained recovery.”
U.S. consumers, often counted on to power economic growth following a downturn, are still smarting.
“The destruction of their nest eggs caused by falling house and stock prices is prompting them to rebuild savings,” said Yellen.
Yellen acknowledged, but downplayed, current worries that vast expansion in the Fed’s balance sheet could fuel rising inflation over the long haul.
“My personal belief is that the more significant threat to price stability over the next several years stems from the disinflationary forces unleashed by the enormous slack in the economy,” she said.
“It seems likely that core inflation will move even lower … we need to defend our price stability goal on the low side, and promote full employment.”
RICHMOND’S LACKER: RECOVERY ON TRACK
Robert Benmosche, the new CEO of American International Group Inc, said he regrets tough comments he made about New York’s attorney general, saying he was trying to bolster a demoralized AIG work force.
“You can characterize me as a goon or you can characterize me as somebody who is attempting to deal with a complex issue of a very demoralized employee force and said those things to them in confidence to reassure them that they no longer have to be afraid that they are going to be attacked again,” Benmosche told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.
During a closed-door staff meeting in Houston, Texas, last month, Benmosche said New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo “doesn’t deserve to be in government” and had acted like a “criminal.”
Cuomo’s office declined to comment on the incident or on Benmosche’s subsequent comments.
In March, New York’s top lawman issued subpoenas following news that AIG had paid $169 million in bonuses to employees in its money-losing financial products division. The payments sparked congressional and public outrage, as AIG has received more than $180 billion of federal aid.
Cuomo sought details about the bonuses, including the names of those who received them, the amounts, and details of employee contracts. His office has not made the data public.
“I was responding to several questions from the audience (in Houston) about their enormous fear for their well-being and their families, and it brought back a very dark period of time for AIG and its employees,” Benmosche said by cell phone from the Adriatic Croatian city of Dubrovnik, where he owns a villa payday loans.
“They were afraid that the bonus issue may come back again, and it was dealing with their fear, and I think I overstated myself. I was a little too aggressive in my comments, but I was responding to enormous fear on the part of many, many associates.”
AGGRESSIVE LEADERSHIP
Benmosche, a former CEO of MetLife Inc and a native New Yorker, prides himself on a reputation for toughness.
“One should not misconstrue my aggressive comments — which were aggressive,” he said in the interview. “But, on the other hand, I think the government understands that I said what I said.
“I said I would be aggressive before I came on board, and this is going to require strong, aggressive leadership to get this company righted and be able to make good on all of our obligations,” he continued. “They need an aggressive person.
“But one should not assume that my aggressiveness is disrespect.”
Benmosche said he had apologized to Cuomo’s office, but added he had not received any complaints from the government, which now owns a 79.9 percent stake in AIG, once the world’s largest insurer.
“Let me stress that in no way has anybody from the government ever complained to me about anything,” he said. “It really is me complaining about me.”
DETROIT — The federal government will end its popular "Cash for Clunkers" program Monday, more than two months early, because it is already running out of money.
The sudden halt means that new car showrooms are likely to be flooded by last-minute shoppers over the weekend. Dealers have until 7 p.m. Monday to submit the 13-page application to be reimbursed for the rebates they are giving out under the program.
Although the program has brought on a welcome surge in demand for cars after months of dismal sales, some dealers will be glad to put it behind them because it has been plagued by confusion and processing delays.
General Motors on Thursday told dealers that it would give them cash advances on money the government owed them to keep them from dropping out, as some have already.
The program, formally known as the Car Allowance Rebate System, or CARS, gives consumers a credit of up to $4,500 toward the price of a new car or truck if they turn in an older vehicle with lower gas mileage. It has generated more than 457,000 sales since July 24, causing the Ford Motor Company and other automakers to increase factory output and call back some idled workers.
"It has been successful beyond anybody’s imagination," President Barack Obama said on Thursday in a radio interview with the syndicated talk show host Michael Smerconish. "And we’re now slightly victims of success because the thing happened so quick, there was so much more demand than anybody expected, that dealers were overwhelmed with applications."
As of Thursday, the Transportation Department had repaid dealers just $145 million, or 7 percent of the $1 free credit report without a credit card.9 billion that they had requested, leaving many squeezed and prompting some to withdraw from the program early. The government is tripling the size of the work force assigned to handle the applications.
In many cases, incomplete forms or errors in information submitted by dealers are slowing the process. Workers have reviewed about 40 percent of the applications, and many have been rejected and then returned for possible resubmission.
The program was initially given $1 billion of funding, enough for about 250,000 sales, and an end date of Nov. 1. That money was used up in a little more than a week, and Congress quickly approved $2 billion more to extend it.
Transportation officials say they believe reimbursement requests of about $400 million on completed sales have yet to be filed, leaving about $600 million in credits still available for the final weekend, after removing $100 million for administrative costs.
If the funding is exhausted before all reimbursements are made, some dealers — and possibly GM — could end up having to write off the unpaid credits. The administration does not plan to seek a third installment of funding.
GM decided to give dealers cash advances, though officials said earlier that the company was "not in a position" to do so.
Switzerland’s UBS will not have to pay a fine as part of the settlement of a tax evasion dispute with the United States, two Swiss newspapers reported on Sunday.
The NZZ am Sonntag and SonntagsZeitung both also reported that data of some 5,000 UBS clients would be released to the U.S. authorities. The two papers cited unnamed sources familiar with the case.
Spokesmen for the Swiss justice and the foreign ministry declined to comment on the reports. UBS was not immediately available.
The U.S. government and UBS struck a deal to settle a dispute over tax evasion and Switzerland’s bank secrecy on Friday, heading off a showdown that had threatened to sour relations between the U.S. and Switzerland.
The main sticking point was that U.S. authorities wanted UBS to disclose the names of 52,000 wealthy American clients suspected of using the bank to evade taxes — a demand that tested Switzerland’s vaunted tradition of bank secrecy.
The parties still have to work out details, which are expected by Friday, when a new pretrial status conference is scheduled. The court trial against UBS has been reset for Aug 10, but would be called off if a final deal is signed.
Switzerland’s top-diplomat Michael Ambuehl told the NZZ am Sonntag, the deal would not violate Swiss law.
“The Swiss legal system is maintained, because the U.S. have promised to act on the basis of the current agreements and to ask for legal assistance again,” said Ambuehl, who is state secretary in the foreign ministry cash advance lenders.
Swiss justice minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, whose ministry is in charge of the negotiations together with the foreign ministry, said in a newspaper interview the parties had still to agree on important details.
“I am optimistic, that an agreement can be reached,” she told Swiss paper Sonntag.
But she warned that worries of a failure were not unfounded.
“There are still details to be cleared, which are of importance to us,” she said. “Should we not reach an agreement, which is in line with our Swiss laws, a deal would be put into question.”
IN PRINCIPLE
Under the settlement, described as an “agreement in principle” expected to be finalized by next Friday, UBS is likely to reveal far fewer than 52,000 client names, but would include the biggest accounts, a U.S. government source had told Reuters.
UBS Chairman Kaspar Villiger said earlier this month the tax talks were focusing on client names rather than on a potential payment by UBS.
A U.S. government source who has followed the case closely had downplayed talk of a financial penalty.
Legal “safety valves,” allowing countries to suspend or waive trade commitments, can damage the global economy if abused for protectionist purposes, the World Trade Organization said on Wednesday.
In its annual World Trade Report, the WTO examined the use of “contingency measures,” a topic it said was particularly timely given fears of protectionism in the global crisis.
The global trade watchdog has been monitoring restrictive measures taken by countries — both those that violate trade agreements and those that are allowed under existing deals.
In the latest assessment, issued this month, WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy said governments were unfairly blocking trade in response to the downturn.
“Contingency measures are more likely to be used in difficult economic circumstances. However, the evidence cannot preclude the possibility that such measures are sometimes used as a protectionist device,” the WTO said.
“At a time of global crisis, a proliferation of such measures among trading partners would have adverse economic effects with few of the positive offsetting advantages that might otherwise by invoked to justify such measures.”
An analysis of the measures concluded that their design should aim to limit circumstances in which they can be used for protectionism and that their design should not undermine trade agreements.
The WTO noted it was easier to track the contingency measures analyzed in the report than to identify trade-restrictive measures or subsidies embedded in financial rescue and fiscal stimulus packages favored by rich nations and some emerging ones such as China and Brazil 500 fast cash.
TAXES AND TARIFFS
Protectionism can deepen and prolong an economic crisis even if it does not cause a downturn, Lamy said in an introduction to the report, noting that restrictive trade policies did not actually trigger the 1930s Great Depression.
“A seemingly attractive short-term solution of keeping production and consumption at home soon becomes a millstone around a nation’s neck, the more so when trading partners retaliate in kind,” he said.
The WTO examined the use of contingency measures such as safeguards, antidumping and countervailing duties, as well as measures such as renegotiating tariff commitments, export taxes and increases in tariffs to the maximum agreed ceiling.
Economic research showed that the use of such measures — especially antidumping — increases during downturns, it noted.
Antidumping is when a government imposes a compensatory duty on imports it says are being sold for less than they cost at home — and is a frequent cause of trade disputes.
In the latest such case, China plans to challenge antidumping duties imposed by the European Union on Chinese screws and bolts.
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