German and French leaders meet this week to map out a revised plan for the euro as the Group of Eight exposed disagreement on a rescue strategy, Greece lurched toward a possible exit and Spain
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Treasuries fell for a second day on speculation record-low yields will curb demand when the U.S. auctions $99 billion of coupon-bearing debt beginning tomorrow.
The government plans to start the sales with $35 billion of two-year notes, followed by the same amount of five-year debt on May 23 and $29 billion of seven-year securities on May 24. Seven-year yields slid to 1.135 percent May 18, the least ever, raising concern U.S. bonds are becoming too costly. German and French finance ministers plan to meet today on the euro, after Europe
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General Motors said Tuesday that it will stop paid advertising on Facebook.
The automaker says it will still be on the social networking site, it just won’t be spending money to buy ads.
"We regularly review our overall media spend and make adjustments as needed," GM said in a statement. "This happens as a regular course of business and it’s not unusual for us to move things around various media outlets."
GM (, Fortune 500) has fan pages for its various brands, such as Buick, Chevrolet and Opel, as well as for General Motors itself. Those pages will continue to be updated, according to the company.
But the social media paid ads simply weren’t delivering the hoped-for buyers, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal Tuesday.
GM had been spending $10 million on paid Facebook ads, according to the Journal report.
A spokesman for GM would not confirm how much money GM spent on Facebook ads cash advance no faxing. Facebook, also, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
GM’s advertising represents a tiny part of the $3.7 billion Facebook brought in in advertising revenue last year, but the move does indicate that ads placed on the site have proven disappointing for at least one major advertiser.
GM rival Ford (, Fortune 500), meanwhile, says it is accelerating its advertising efforts on Facebook and other social media platforms.
"We’ve found Facebook ads to be very effective when strategically combined with engagement, great content and innovative ways of storytelling," Ford spokeswoman Kelli Felker said in an e-mail.
Facebook will soon launch an initial public offering.
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Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin has renounced his U.S. citizenship, a move expected to save him hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes stemming from the company’s impending initial public offering.
The Brazil-born 30-year-old became a U.S. citizen in 1998 but has lived in Singapore since 2009. Giving up his citizenship will allow him to avoid paying taxes on billions of dollars of capital gains when Facebook launches its IPO Friday. Singapore does not have a capital gains tax.
Saverin gave up his citizenship in the first quarter of this year, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service said.
“Eduardo recently found it to be more practical to become a resident of Singapore since he plans to live there for an indefinite period of time,” Saverin’s New York-based spokesman Tom Goodman said Tuesday in a statement.
Goodman said that because Saverin plans to invest in Brazilian and global companies that have strong interests in entering Asian markets, “it made the most sense for him to use Singapore as a home base absolutely free credit score.”
Saverin has a 4 percent stake in Facebook, which has headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Analysts say the company could be worth $100 billion.
Saverin, who moved to the U.S. from Brazil in 1992, founded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 while the two were students at Harvard University. Saverin gained additional fame when his conflict with Zuckerberg and departure from the company was depicted in the 2010 movie “The Social Network.”
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Greek President Karolos Papoulias will today take on the task of trying to persuade political leaders to form a government and avert a new election amid mounting concern the country may leave the euro area.
Evangelos Venizelos, the socialist Pasok leader, will return the third, and final, mandate to form a government to Papoulias at a meeting in Athens today, after Alexis Tsipras, the leader of the biggest anti-bailout party, Syriza, turned down an appeal to join a unity government.
Tsipras
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JPMorgan’s surprise $2 billion trading loss prompted a sell-off in financial stocks Friday, but the broader market rose as investors decided this was a problem for investment banks and not other industries.
The Dow Jones industrial average rose 31 points in morning trading after bouncing back from a 76-point decline. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose four points to 1,362. The Nasdaq composite index, which is heavily weighted with technology stocks, was up 20 points at 2,954.
Financial stocks in the S&P fell 1 percent, while the other nine industry groups rose. For that, the other investment banks could thank JPMorgan, America’s biggest bank. The stock plunged 8 percent, dragging other banks with big Wall Street operations down with it. Morgan Stanley fell 4.3 percent and Goldman Sachs fell 3 percent.
Retail-focused banks fared better. Bank of America and Wells Fargo each declined just 0.3 percent.
JPMorgan’s blunder comes in the midst of a political battle over how closely to regulate banks, though JP Morgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon said the trades would not have been affected by the so-called Volcker rule, expected to take effect this summer. Still, the $2 billion loss is sure to be used as ammunition by those pushing for tighter regulation of investment banks.
Tech stocks did well. Intel rose 1.8 percent after it told analysts that it is on track to meet sales expectations. Tech investors were relieved to hear that one day after Cisco Systems prompted selling in tech shares by being pessimistic about sales. Microsoft shares rose 2 percent. Semiconductor maker Nvidia jumped 8.6 percent, the most in the S&P 500, after reporting revenue that was higher than analysts were expecting.
Consumer discretionary stocks were also up. Retailer Bed Bath & Beyond jumped 4.5 percent, one of the biggest gains in the S&P 500 index, and video streaming and DVD-by-mail company Netflix rose 6.6 percent.
Also Friday, the Labor Department said that the producer price index, which measures price changes before they reach the consumer, dropped 0.2 percent last month. It was the first decline since December and the biggest drop since October. Declines were driven by gas and energy prices. That’s good news for consumer spending.
Separately, a closely watched measure of consumer confidence from the University of Michigan released Friday morning was better than analysts had expected. The index was at its highest level since January 2008.
Crude and gasoline futures slid again. Oil fell 44 cents to $96.64 per barrel. Gold prices fell a half-percent to $1,587.70 per ounce.
European stocks were mixed. France’s CAC 40 index fell 0.3 percent, but Britain’s FTSE 100 rose by the same percentage and Germany’s DAX rose 0.7 percent. Borrowing costs for Germany and France fell, while costs for Italy and Spain rose as investors remain focused on Greece, where another general election is expected for next month following the failure of attempts to form a government.
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The number of people applying for U.S. unemployment benefits ticked down last week after dropping sharply the previous week, evidence hiring could pick up this month.
Weekly applications dropped 1,000 to a seasonally adjusted 367,000 in the week ending May 5, the Labor Department said Thursday. The previous week’s figure was revised up slightly.
The four-week average, a less volatile measure, fell 5,250 to 379,000.
Applications are a measure of the pace of layoffs. When they stay consistently below 375,000, it suggests job growth is strong enough to lower the unemployment rate.
Applications are falling again after rising for most of April. The spike in applications coincided with weaker hiring in March and April. That raised fears that the job market is sputtering after a strong winter.
From December through February, employers had created an average 252,000 jobs a month. That was the best three months of job growth since the recession ended in June 2009, not counting months thrown off by the hiring of temporary census workers in 2010.
The unemployment rate has dropped a full percentage point since August _ to 8.1 percent in April.
The recent jobs picture has been clouded by an unseasonably warm winter. That allowed construction firms and other companies to hire earlier than usual, effectively stealing jobs from the spring. Economists are puzzling out how much of the slower hiring in March and April was weather-related payback and how much reflects economic weakness.
More than 500,000 Americans have left the work force since February. That’s one reason _ and not a good one _ that unemployment has continued to fall. People who are out of work but not looking for jobs aren’t counted among the unemployed.
The economy grew at a disappointing 2.2 percent from January through March, a rate consistent with less than 110,000 new jobs a month.
There’s still has a long way to go. The United States has regained only about 3.8 million, or 43 percent, of the 8.8 million jobs lost during and immediately after the recession.
The number of people receiving unemployment benefits also dropped. That is partly because extended benefit programs are winding down. More than 6.4 million people received benefits during the week that ended April 21, down nearly 175,000 from the previous week.
The government did release some good news this week: In March, employers advertised 3.74 million job openings, the most since July 2008. The increase in U.S. job openings suggests that weaker hiring gains in March and April could be temporary. It usually takes one to three months for employers to fill openings.
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The Empire State Building is on an energy diet.
The hulking building, a symbol of American power and, to some, excess, has cut its energy use by 20%.
And that’s just due to changes to the building’s exterior. Once retrofits are made to tenant spaces on the inside, the second tallest building in Manhattan will be nearly 40% more efficient.
The retrofits will cost $20 million once they’re complete, and are expected to save the owners $4.4 million in annual energy costs.
"After one year, we have proven that investing in energy efficiency gives building owners a dollars-and-cents advantage," said Dave Myers, a president at Johnson Controls, which conducted the retrofit.
The renovations are part of a $500 million rehab plan for the building. The building’s owners, Malkin Holdings LLC, filed for an initial public offering back in February which valued the building at $2.5 billion.
The changes to the Empire State include:
–Filling the existing windows with an energy saving gas and adding an additional plastic pane.
–Upgrading the building’s cooling system.
–Using computerized "smart" energy management technology that can adjust temperatures floor by floor.
–Provide tenants with detailed energy use in their space.
–Automatically shut off lights in unused areas.
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The move to make the Empire State Building more efficient was announced three years ago amid much fanfare — Bill Clinton and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg were in attendance at a press conference from the building’s 80th floor.
Energy efficiency often gets less attention than oil drilling, wind turbines or solar panels when it comes to tackling America’s energy challenge.
Yet efficiency often offers the biggest energy saving opportunity, and at a fraction of the cost of new sources.
Buildings account for 40% of the country’s energy use, and an average home emits twice as much carbon dioxide as the average car.
But the country has made some impressive gains in the efficiency arena, both since the energy crisis of the 1970s and more recently amid high oil prices.
The average refrigerator today uses a quarter of the energy it did in the 1970s, said Lowell Ungar, policy director at the Alliance to Save Energy.
In the last couple of years the government has taken steps to make furnaces, air conditioners and refrigerators even more efficient, said Ungar. It has also begun the phase-out of the notoriously inefficient incandescent light bulb.
On the building front, recommended building codes for both commercial and residential structures are 30% more efficient today than they were in 2006, said William Fay, executive director of the Energy Efficient Codes Coalition. By 2015, building codes are expected to be 50% more efficient.
Not all the all states have adopted these stricter codes, said Fay, and that’s one of the challenges in saving even more energy.
Auto efficiency has made major strides in the last few years. George W. Bush famously raised fuel efficiency standards for the first time in decades during the last days of his administration, and Obama has accelerated the trend.
Fuel efficiency standards have gone from 27 miles per gallon in 2006 to a target of 35.5 miles per gallon in 2016. By 2025 vehicles are supposed to average nearly 55 miles per gallon.
That’s a doubling of fuel efficiency.
"We are twice as energy efficient as a county today as were were 20 or 30 years ago," Daniel Yergin, Chairman of the consultancy IHS CERA and one of the world’s foremost energy analysts, said in recent Senate testimony. "And we ought to become twice as efficient again."
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Voters in Greece and France challenged austerity as Europe
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U.S. job growth slumped in April for a second straight month. It pointed to a steadily growing but still sluggish economy that could tighten the presidential race.
A drop in the unemployment rate wasn’t a necessarily a healthy sign for the job market. The rate fell from 8.2 percent in March to 8.1 percent in April. But that was mainly because more people gave up looking for work.
People who aren’t looking for jobs aren’t counted as unemployed.
The 115,000 jobs added in April were fewer than the 154,000 jobs created in March, a number the government revised up from its first report a month ago of 120,000. It also marked a sharp decline from December through February, when the economy averaged 252,000 jobs per month.
The percentage of adults working or looking for work has fallen to its lowest level in more than 30 years. Many have become discouraged about their prospects.
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Here’s what The Associated Press’ reporters are finding:
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TEPID ECONOMY, TEPID HIRING
Over time, strong economic growth is vital for strong job growth.
But early this year, hiring accelerated much faster than economic growth did. Job gains averaged a strong 229,000 in the first three months. But the economy grew at a sluggish annual rate of 2.2 percent.
Economists began to wonder: Would growth catch up with hiring? Or would hiring slow to match economic growth (as measured by gross domestic product, or GDP)?
Some economists say April’s disappointing job growth suggests an answer, and it’s not a cheerful one:
“It now appears that jobs have decelerated into line with GDP, rather than GDP accelerating to catch up with jobs,” said Nigel Gault, an economist at IHS Global Insight.
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REVISING HISTORY
The job market seems to look better with hindsight.
The Labor Department has revised job growth upward for 10 straight months _ and for 18 of the past 21. Over the past 10 months, it’s added 413,000 jobs to the original estimates.
The job figures are revised twice. They’re updated in the two months after they first come out. And they’re revised again in an annual update meant to capture updated employment data from the states.
History shows that the updated totals typically follow the trend in job creation: When the economy is creating jobs consistently, the revisions tend to be positive. Months of job losses typically lead to negative revisions.
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THE POLITICAL DEBATE
A falling unemployment rate would seem to be good news for President Barack Obama’s re-election hopes. Dating to 1956, no incumbent president has lost when unemployment fell in the two years leading to an election.
On Election Day, unemployment will almost surely be less than it was two years earlier: 9.8 percent in November 2010.
But for the past two months, the rate has fallen for the wrong reason: More than 500,000 Americans have stopped looking for jobs and are no longer counted as unemployed business card. Job growth averaged a healthy 252,000 from December through February. It slowed to 135,000 in March and April.
The question is whether voters will focus more on the falling unemployment rate (good for Obama) or the modest job growth (not so good).
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A JAB FROM ROMNEY
Mitt Romney seized on the latter. He noted that the declining number of people seeking work explains the drop in the unemployment rate.
“This is way off from what should be happening in a normal recovery,” Romney said on Fox & Friends. “You have more people dropping out of the work force than you have getting jobs.”
“This is not progress,” Romney said.
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DISAPPEARING WORKERS
The percentage of Americans 16 and older working or looking for work is now 63.6 percent, the lowest since 1981. For men, the so-called “labor force participation rate” is 70 percent. That’s the lowest since the government started keeping records in 1948.
The rate peaked at 67.3 percent in early 2000 as women poured into the workplace. Since then, it’s turned south. Demographic and social trends help explain the drop: Baby boomers are aging and retiring.
And more women, especially in upper-income families, are staying at home. The drop in participation accelerated after the economy slid into recession in late 2007. The tough job market led many to give up looking for work.
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SOUR INVESTORS
The stock market didn’t take Friday’s news well.
The Dow Jones industrial average sank 132 points, or 1 percent, in late-morning trading. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 1.4 percent.
Investors were a lot happier earlier this week. They sent the Dow to its highest close since December 2007.
Technology stocks and banks led the market lower Friday. Utility companies were the only broad category of stock in the S&P 500 index trading higher. They tend to fare well when investors grow nervous about the economy.
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NO SURPRISE TO BERNANKE
One person not likely surprised by the sluggish hiring in April: Ben Bernanke.
The Federal Reserve chairman has cautioned for months that the spike in hiring at the start of the year didn’t match the economy’s more modest growth.
His Fed colleagues probably agree. Their latest forecasts show that even under a best-case scenario, unemployment will be at least 7.3 percent in late 2013. Historically, a normal rate would range between 5 percent and 6 percent.
Most analysts expect the Fed to keep its key interest rate at a record low near zero well into 2013, if not later. But few think hiring has weakened enough to trigger a third round of bond buying to help lower long-term rates and encourage more lending.
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