Finance Blog number 1

British police are investigating whether computers belonging to former government minister Peter Hain were hacked by the tabloid News of the World while he was the official responsible for Northern Ireland, Hain’s office said Wednesday.

It said in a statement that Hain had met with police officers “regarding an investigation into the alleged hacking of his official and personal computers during his time as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.”

Hain was Northern Ireland secretary between 2005 and 2007 and would have had access to classified intelligence information.

Police are investigating phone hacking by the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper have set up a parallel probe into whether computers also were targeted.

Murdoch’s News International said it was “co-operating fully with the police” on all investigations.

Earlier Wednesday, Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former spin doctor, told a media ethics inquiry set up in the wake of the hacking scandal that a minority of journalists had turned the country’s press “putrid” and tarnished the whole industry. Campbell said journalists such as those who hacked phones for the News of the World tabloid had “besmirched the name” of almost every other reporter in the country.

“A very, very small number of people have completely changed the newspaper industry,” said Campbell, who is credited with running a sophisticated _ and manipulative _ media operation when he worked for the then-prime minister at 10 Downing Street between 1997 and 2003.

“We have a press that has just become frankly putrid in many of its elements,” Campbell said, criticizing the “inhumane treatment” meted out to celebrities and ordinary people alike by newspapers in relentless pursuit of exclusives.

Campbell was giving evidence to Judge Brian Leveson’s inquiry, which was established to examine media ethics and practices and recommend changes to Britain’s system of media self-regulation.

Prime Minister David Cameron set up the inquiry in response to the scandal that began with the exposure of illegal eavesdropping by the News of the World.

Murdoch shut down the tabloid in July after evidence emerged that it had accessed the mobile phone voice mails of celebrities, politicians and even crime victims in its search for scoops.

Campbell said police had told him details about his working life were included in the notes of private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, who worked for the News of the World and was jailed in 2007 for phone hacking.

In a written witness statement, Campbell said he suspected the phone of Blair’s wife, Cherie, had been hacked _ although he acknowledged he had no proof.

He said stories about her “often involved details of where Cherie was going, the kind of thing routinely discussed on phones when planning visits, private as well as public.”

He said phone hacking could explain how the Daily Mirror learned that Cherie Blair was pregnant in 1999.

“As I recall it, at the time only a tiny number of people in Downing Street knew that she was pregnant,” Campbell said. “I have heard all sorts of stories as to how the information got out, but none of them strike me as credible.”

Campbell told the inquiry he had accused Cherie Blair’s adviser Carole Caplin of tipping off the press about Cherie Blair’s whereabouts. Caplin has since been told by police her phone may have been hacked.

Campbell said he had apologized to Caplin for blaming her.

More than a dozen current and former News of the World journalists and editors have been arrested, and two top London police officers and several senior Murdoch executives have resigned over the still-unfolding hacking scandal.

Police said they had made a new arrest, a 31-year-old woman detained in northern England on Wednesday. Her name was not disclosed, although media including Sky News _ which is 39 percent owned by Murdoch’s News Corp. _ identified her as a former News of the World reporter.

The only people charged with crimes so far are Mulcaire and former News of the World reporter Clive Goodman, who were jailed in 2007 for hacking into the voicemails of royal aides.

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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 Robin Hoods in this northern Greek town sport rubber gloves, fuses and orange stickers.

Nearly two years of pay cuts, job cuts and tax hikes have pummeled living standards in debt-crippled Greece and the country is facing record unemployment and a fourth year of recession in 2012. On a personal level, that means many in Veria can’t pay for basic necessities such as electricity and end up getting cut off from the grid.

That’s where the “Citizens of Veria” activists step in.

The group illegally reconnects needy households back to the electric grid in a direct challenge to the country’s dominant power provider, the Public Power Corporation.

“By cutting off power, (PPC) punishes young children, elderly people and generally those who can’t cope without it,” said activist Nikos Aslanoglou. “We decided that we had to reconnect them. We’re not hiding, everybody knows who we are.”

He says the group has so far reconnected dozens of households, particularly in the villages and small towns outlying Veria.

Greece sank into a financial crisis in 2009 after it emerged that authorities had been falsifying financial data for years. The fallout from that blocked the country’s access to bond markets. Greece only escaped bankruptcy with a euro110 billion ($147 billion) international rescue loan in May 2010, and when that was not enough, a second, euro130 billion ($174 billion) rescue deal that awaits final approval.

In return, the government has promised to slash bloated budget deficits through harsh austerity measures.

As jobs become rarer and worse-paid, many in this northern farming region are falling through a weakening social safety net. In the village of Agia Marina, 9 miles (15 kilometers) from Veria, activists recently reconnected the house of a disabled, 34-year-old single mother, who lives with four of her five children.

As they left, they placed an orange sticker on the electricity meter that reads: “Citizens of Veria. Social solidarity. We are reconnecting the power.”

The woman’s eldest daughter, a 19-year-old student, said before the activists came her siblings _ aged from 6 to 18 _ had to study by candlelight or with oil lamps in an unheated house.

“Our only income is a euro400-euro500 ($535-$668) welfare payment every two months,” said the student, Vasso. “PPC disconnected us because we owed them money, and we were left in the dark for about a month, but then some gentlemen came and reconnected us. Now we have heating again.”

She didn’t want her full name used because she was afraid authorities would track down her family.

What the activists are doing is illegal and can be punished by more than ten years’ imprisonment depending on the size of the outstanding bills, although in most cases sentences do not exceed five years no fax payday loan.

“Greek law treats the theft of electricity like any other common theft,” University of Thessaloniki law professor Lambros Margaritis said.

Undeterred, a three-strong activist team recently reconnected a house in the small town of Meliki, where a 54-year-old woman lives with her two unemployed sons in their thirties. Working deftly, it took them 15 minutes.

“We’re not stealing, the electricity consumption is recorded,” Aslanoglou said. “The poor houseowners can’t face consequences, it’s us who do the reconnecting.”

Hence the stickers.

Veria activists claim their campaign is catching on in other parts of the country _ particularly since the introduction in September of a deeply resented new property tax levied through power bills. People who can’t pay the new tax face losing their power supply.

That prospect has enraged even PPC employees, who staged a sit-in at a company office in Athens to disrupt the collection of the new emergency tax.

While the Veria municipal authority says have-nots should not be disconnected over the new tax, Mayor Haroula Ousountzoglou says the activists are going too far.

“What the group is doing may be very romantic, it is, however, dangerous,” Ousountzoglou told the AP. “PPC just goes and cuts off the electricity again, and imposes additional charges.”

In cases of repeated illegal reconnection, homeowners can also face prosecution _ or have their link severed at the nearest electricity pole, a drastic move that activists are powerless to counter.

PPC public relations officer Kimon Stergiotis warned that the company is determined to protect its interests.

“To illegally reconnect cut power links poses severe threats to the life and property of unsuspecting citizens,” he said. “In any case, PPC will use the law to its utmost severity.”

Ousountzoglou said her town has about 330 families on a welfare program that sometimes includes assistance in paying power bills.

“But our funds are constantly dwindling, and I keep making the rounds of local firms to ask for contributions,” she added.

The Veria mayor has threatened to sue PPC if people who really can’t pay the property tax are left without power.

“We told them we’re not joking,” she said. “PPC can’t behave like that to needy people.”

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Italy had to pay sharply higher borrowing rates to entice investors to part with their cash during a couple of auctions Friday, in an acute sign that Europe’s crippling debt crisis is laying siege to the eurozone’s third-largest economy.

The auction results are another sign that the country’s new technocratic government, faces a big battle to convince that it has a strategy to get a grip on the country’s massive debts.

The country had to pay an average yield of 7.814 percent to raise euro2 billion in two-year bills. That rate was sharply higher on the 4.628 percent it had to pay in the previous auction and represented a new high since the creation of the euro in 1999.

And even raising euro8 billion for six months proved exorbitantly expensive. The yield for this auction spiked to 6.504 percent, nearly double the 3.535 percent rate in the last equivalent auction no faxing payday loans.

Following the grim news on the auction front, the country’s borrowing rates in the markets sky-rocketed, with the ten-year yield spiking 0.34 percentage point to 7.30 percent _ above the 7 percent threshold that is widely-considered unsustainable in the long-run and eventually proved the point at which Greece, Ireland and Portugal had to seek financial bailouts.

The renewed rise is likely to renew tensions over Italy’s debts, which stand at euro1.9 trillion ($2.6 trillion), or a huge 120 percent of economic output. Europe’s current anti-crisis measures are too not big enough to deal with Italy’s debt mountain.

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Asian stock markets edged higher Thursday as speculation that China might ease its monetary policy soothed fears that the German economy _ Europe’s strongest _ may be succumbing to the continent’s debt crisis.

Benchmark oil hovered above $96 per barrel while the dollar fell against the euro and the yen.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng posted a 0.5 percent gain at 17,944.72. South Korea’s Kospi rose 0.4 percent to 1,790.29 and Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 gained marginally to 4,052.30. Benchmarks in Singapore and Taiwan also rose.

Japan’s Nikkei 225, reopening after a one-day public holiday, fell 1.3 percent to 8,208.47. Shares in India, Malaysia and Indonesia also fell.

Speculation that China’s central bank was aiming to ease its tight monetary policy helped spur a wave of buying in Hong Kong, analysts said. But the official Xinhua News Agency said Thursday the move _ lowering reserve requirements for six rural banks in eastern Zhejiang _ was administrative rather a policy shift. The banks’ reserve requirements had been raised a year earlier after they failed to lend enough to farming businesses.

There have been signs that China’s campaign of interest rate hikes and credit controls to tame stubbornly high inflation has been working, giving it leeway to ease monetary policy as the world economy stumbles.

“The positive catalyst today is the expectation that the China tightening cycle might loosen,” said Jackson Wong, vice president at Tanrich Securities in Hong Kong.

The chatter helped push up Chinese banking shares. Hong Kong-listed Agricultural Bank of China Ltd. jumped 3.3 percent and Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, the country’s biggest commercial lender, rose 1.9 percent.

Global markets were spooked Wednesday by the poor results at an auction of German debt, which met with only 60 percent demand. Germany’s Financial Agency blamed “the extraordinarily nervous market environment payday loans.”

The weak buying suggests that Europe’s crisis might be infecting strong nations that are crucial to keeping the euro currency afloat. Germany bears much of the burden of bailing out weaker neighbors such as Greece and Portugal.

Analysts at Credit Agricole CIB said the European debt crisis remains “the major concern for the markets” and that the German debt auction signals the spread of “the contagion to hard core economies” in the region.

Borrowing costs for Italy and Spain rose from levels that already were considered dangerously high. Europe lacks the resources to bail out those countries, its third- and fourth-biggest economies.

In the U.S., the government released a mixed batch of economic reports. Slightly more people applied for unemployment benefits last week, a sign that layoffs continue.

Consumer spending was sluggish but incomes rose a bit more than expected. Orders for long-lasting manufactured products fell for a second month and business investment dropped off.

The Dow fell 2.1 percent to close at 11,257.55. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 2.2 percent to 1,161.79. The Nasdaq fell 2.4 percent to 2,460.08.

U.S. markets will be closed on Thursday for the Thanksgiving holiday and will have shortened hours on Friday.

Benchmark crude for January delivery was up 4 cents at $96.21 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract fell $1.84 to settle at $96.17 in New York on Wednesday.

In currency trading, the euro rose to $1.3379 from $1.3326 late Wednesday in New York. The dollar dropped to 77.07 yen from 77.35 yen.

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O’FALLON, ILL. 

Everyone dreams of striking it rich _ and what they would do with such a windfall. A new house? A fancy car? Maybe designer clothes selected by a personal shopper.

For some in Silicon Valley, those wishes may soon come true.

As restrictions on selling stock are lifted at a handful of sizzling startups, early investors and employees are preparing for big payouts.

What they do with their riches is anyone’s guess, but luxury retailers and wealth managers say they’re expecting a bump in business and have been preparing for this new crop of Internet millionaires.

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The Treasury Department has raised $12.2 million from the sale of warrants of 17 banks that received government support during the financial crisis. The sales are part of the government’s efforts to recoup the costs of the $700 billion financial bailout.

The Treasury said Friday that the largest amount raised in gross proceeds was $2.79 million from the sale of warrants of Eagle Bancorp Inc. of Bethesda, Maryland, followed by $1.75 million from warrants of Horizon Bancorp of Michigan City, Ind.

The warrants give buyers the right to buy common stock at a fixed price. Treasury is using direct sales of the warrants to institutional investors because the holdings were judged too small to justify the cost of holding public auctions.

The 17 banks received approximately $1 billion in support from the Troubled Asset Relief Program in 2008 and 2009. All 17 have repaid the money and the warrants represent their last link to the TARP program.

Banks, other financial firms and U.S. carmakers received $413.4 billion from the taxpayer-funded bailout. So far, the government has recovered $317.6 billion. Of that amount, $9.1 billion has come through the sale of warrants.

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Students clashed with police across Italy in protests against budget cuts, while transport strikes idled buses and trains Thursday, as Italian Premier Mario Monti prepared to unveil his anti-crisis strategy ahead of a confidence vote in his day-old government.

Police in riot gear scuffled with students in Milan, where they planned to march to Bocconi University, which forms Italy’s business elite. Monti, an economist and former European Union competition comissioner, is Bocconi’s president.

Monti formed his government Wednesday, shunning politicians and turning to fellow professors, bankers and other business figures to fill key cabinet posts. His administration is tasked with restoring confidence in the country’s financial future and avoiding a worsening in the eurozone’s debt crisis.

But his choice of unelected experts to lead the government and the prospect of tough reforms have fueled unrest among some Italians.

“The government of the banks,” read one placard held by a youth marching in the protest in Milan.

In Palermo, Sicily, demonstrators hurled eggs and smoke bombs at a bank, and protesters threw rocks at police who battled back with pepper sprays, the Italian news agency ANSA said. One protester was injured in the head in Palermo, where police charged demonstrators who were trying to occupy another bank, it said.

In Rome, hundreds of students gathered outside Sapienza University, while others assembled near the main train station. They planned to march to the Senate, where Monti was scheduled to speak ahead of an evening confidence vote on the new government.

Monti’s cabinet took the place of the center-right government led for 3 1/2 years by media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, stepped down last week, the victim of markets punishing Italy for its escalating public debt and stubbornly stagnant economy.

As Berlusconi’s squabbling coalition argued for months over how to attack the crisis, Italian unions and industrialists pressed for measures to encourage job creation and revive the economy.

Parliament gave final approval Saturday to a package that will reform pensions, slash state spending and open up the economy guaranteed cash advance. Hours later, Berlusconi resigned, paving the way for Italy’s president to ask Monti, a former European Union competition commissioner, to form a government that could tackle the crisis.

But many Italians are expecting to swallow harsher medicine, including a possible return of home property taxes which Berlusconi abolished, a special tax on wealth, and a faster increase in the retirement age.

Antonio Romano, who was distributing leaflets to protesters, said the government’s strategy was to “make the workers and retired people pay for the crisis, not those who provoked the crisis, I mean big business, bankers.”

“Income for all, debt for none,” read the spray-painted letters on a white sheet affixed to a fence in Palermo. University and high school students, as well as young people unable to find full-time jobs joined the protest.

In Rome, marcher Titti Mazzacane said she was skeptical about the new government. While Monti chose “decent and competent people,” the government … “is a little bit too free-market liberal. I am a bit scared,” said the 53-year-old elementary school teacher.

A transit strike of several hours idled the subway system and many buses in Rome. A similar walkout in Milan to press for better work contracts was also called.

State railways said a 24-hour nationwide train strike, which was called by one small union affected only 5 percent of the train rains. Train workers have been pushing for better work rules.

Alitalia warned that a four-hour strike, from noon to 4 p.m. (1100 GMT-1500 GMT) in the air travel sector could cause flight delays, and said it was reducing the number of flights as a precaution during the four-hour window. It noted that the walkout mainly involved air traffic controllers and airport workers and not Alitalia personnel.

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Synergetics USA Inc. expects to report growth in sales and net income for the first quarter of fiscal 2012, company officials told the Securities and Exchange Commission in a filing today.

The O’Fallon, Mo.-based maker of equipment for eye and brain surgeries, expects revenue of $13.3 million to $13.6 million in the first fiscal quarter, which ended Oct. 31. That represents a 10 percent to 13 percent increase in revenue compared to a year ago. 

Based on increased sales, the company expects to report earnings from continuing operations of 4 cents to 5 cents a share for the first fiscal quarter, and to report a 1 cent to 2 cent per share loss from discontinued operations.

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