Finance time

White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers expressed confidence the U.S. will see employment growth as the economic recovery strengthens.

“We’re not going to be out of the woods by any stretch, but I suspect six months from now people are going to feel that this recovery is better established than they do today,” Summers said in an interview to be broadcast on Bloomberg Television’s “Conversations with Judy Woodruff” at 6 p.m. New York time today.

Summers added the nation is not “too far” from the beginning of a rebound in jobs. He said economic recoveries normally play out “in a sequence” that begins with growth in gross domestic product and then the length of the average work- week, both of which have already occurred. Growth in payrolls follows and eventually the unemployment rate drops, he added.

A Labor Department report today may show that nonfarm payrolls rose by 15,000 in January, according to the median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey of economists. Employment has grown in only one previous month since the end of 2007, by 4,000 jobs last November.

Summers also pressed the case for passage of the Obama administration’s financial regulatory overhaul this year.

“American consumers will be much more vulnerable to being ripped off than they need to be” if the plan isn’t passed, he said. “Taxpayers would be at greater risk of having to be called on again for bailouts.”

Bank Tax

He defended the tax the president has proposed on large banks to recover the costs of rescuing financial firms. Summers said it’s not “punitive” for the government to “seek to recoup just its direct outlays of cost, that’s a small, small fraction of their profits or market value.”

Summers said he supported Obama’s proposal last month to bar commercial banks from using their own capital to conduct proprietary trading or from owning hedge funds and private equity funds. Still, he said he didn’t regret promoting legislation, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1999, that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act’s separation of commercial from investment banking.

Summers pointed to the performance during the financial crisis of banks in Canada, which permits banks to combine commercial and investment banking.

“If you ask which country’s been most successful in weathering these financial problems, Canada has a banking system with so-called universal banking,” Summers said.

Regulatory Failures

He attributed the crisis to the failures of regulators who supervised the banking system.

“The failures took the full form of regulators who were asleep at the switch, who didn’t recognize the erosion of capital and liquidity positions,” Summers said.

Summers downplayed friction between the U.S. and China, including charges that a recent computer attack targeting Google Inc. came from China. The relationship between the two nations is resilient enough to withstand occasional dust-ups, he said.

“This is a mature relationship,” Summers said. No one is under the “illusion that there’s going to be agreement in every area.”

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Kansas City-area employers are ramping up online advertising of job vacancies, posting 15,000 new ads in January, more than the prior month and significantly more than in January 2009.

The new ads posted in January increased 3.4 percent from the 14,500 new ads posted the prior month and 40 percent from the 10,700 new ads posted at the beginning of 2009, The Conference Board reported Monday.

“You picked up 500 or so ads between December and January, which is not a month where you typically see increases,” said June Shelp, who worked on the report and is a vice president with The Conference Board. “To me, that’s a pretty positive sign.”

Total online advertised job vacancies for the metro area rose 7.9 percent compared with 24,100 in December and 28.7 percent compared with 20,200 in January 2009. The numbers are not seasonally adjusted.

Nationwide, job demand rose by 382,000 in January to 4.02 million in January, using seasonally adjusted numbers. The number follows a 255,000 increase in December and a 107,000 increase in November. The Conference Board called those numbers consistent with the gross domestic product results for the fourth quarter.

“The last three months have shown a sharp upturn in employer demand for workers,” Gad Levanon, associate director for macroeconomic research at The Conference Board, said in a release. “These increases have brought us back near the labor demand levels that existed in November 2008 just prior to the huge losses resulting from the financial turmoil in the last quarter of 2008.”

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The Philippines increased its so- called rediscounting rate, one of the interest rates it charges lenders for borrowing money from the central bank, as it began to unwind stimulus measures amid accelerating economic growth.

Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas raised the rediscounting rate by half a percentage point to 4 percent, effective Feb. 1, and kept the benchmark interest rate at a record-low 4 percent for a fifth straight meeting, it said in Manila yesterday. The decision on the main interest rate was expected by all 15 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.

The global economic recovery and surging commodity prices are fanning inflation, prompting countries from Australia to Vietnam to raise borrowing costs. Philippine growth accelerated to the fastest pace in a year last quarter, a report showed yesterday, and the central bank signaled it may require banks to set aside more money as reserves.

“This is a definite step to normalization,” said Vishnu Varathan, an economist at Forecast Singapore Pte. “The central bank is reversing an emergency measure they implemented last year now that the economy is no longer in a state of crisis.”

The yield on the benchmark 6.25 percent debt due January 2014 fell two basis points to 6.07 percent, according to Tradition Financial Services. The peso erased earlier losses and gained 0.2 percent to 46.595 per dollar at the 4 p.m. close of trading, before the rate decision.

Earlier Move

The central bank set the rediscount rate at 0.5 percentage point below the benchmark rate in March 2009 to boost lenders’ access to funds amid the global financial crisis, Governor Amando Tetangco said yesterday.

“Since the risk of contagion from global financial stresses is markedly reduced, with the sustained stability in global financial markets, the need for more liberalized pricing of rediscounting loans is now less,” he said. “With the favorable inflation outlook, keeping policy rates steady would continue to support economic activity.”

The move came earlier than anticipated, said Prakriti Sofat, a regional economist at Barclays Capital in Singapore. Still, the first increase in the benchmark rate won’t come until the third quarter to support the recovery, she said.

“There’s still so much liquidity in the system; the adjustment in the rediscounting rate won’t have a tightening impact,” Sofat said. “Definitely they’re taking the right step, giving the signals, trying to control inflation expectations.”

Inflation, Growth

Inflation in the Philippines accelerated to an eight-month high of 4.4 percent in December, driven by rising oil and food costs. The central bank raised its forecast for price gains this year to 4.7 percent from 4 percent to take into account higher utility costs, Assistant Governor Cyd Amador said yesterday, adding that inflation will remain within targets in 2010 and 2011.

Bangko Sentral will review the level of reserves it requires banks to maintain, with a possible increase depending on money supply, Amador said after the rate decision.

Gross domestic product increased 1.8 percent from a year earlier last quarter, compared with a revised 0.4 percent gain in the three months through September, the National Statistical Coordination Board said in Manila yesterday.

Ayala Land Inc., the Philippines’ largest builder, expects a “very strong” start in 2010 as low interest rates spur home purchases, Chairman Fernando Zobel de Ayala said this month. The company forecasts it will sell 9,200 residential units this year, up from 2,500 units last year, Zobel said Jan. 19.

Stimulus Measures

Easing inflation last year allowed Bangko Sentral to slash the benchmark overnight borrowing rate by 2 percentage points from December 2008 to July 2009 to support economic growth as exports collapsed. Policy makers also reduced the amount of cash banks need to set aside as reserves and raised the amount of money available for loans to local lenders in late 2008.

The main interest rate is at the lowest level since central bank data started in 1990.

The People’s Bank of China increased the proportion of deposits that banks must set aside as reserves this month. Malaysia’s central bank said this week borrowing costs cannot be kept “too low” for too long even as it kept the benchmark rate unchanged. Australia and Vietnam raised interest rates last quarter.

“With the increase in the rediscounting rate, the central bank is sending a signal to the market that it is beginning to slow the flow of liquidity,” said Jonathan Ravelas, a market strategist at Banco de Oro Unibank Inc. in Manila.

Ravelas expects the benchmark rate to rise at the end of the second quarter as uncertainty about the global recovery and “election-related concerns” ease, he said. Forecast’s Varathan said the central bank may consider a rate increase in April.

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Canadian officials travel to Guadalajara, Mexico this week to resume negotiations on the still-secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The discussion is likely to turn to the prospect of supporting three strikes and you’re out systems that could result in thousands of people losing access to the Internet based on three allegations of copyright infringement. Leaked ACTA documents indicate that encouraging the adoption of three-strikes - often euphemistically described as “graduated response” for the way Internet providers gradually send increasingly threatening warnings to subscribers - has been proposed for possible inclusion in the treaty.

While supporters claim that three strikes is garnering increasing international acceptance, the truth is implementation in many countries is a mixed bag. Countries such as Germany and Spain have rejected it, acknowledging criticisms that loss of Internet access for up to a year for an entire household is a disproportionate punishment for unproven, non-commercial infringement.

Those countries that have ventured forward have faced formidable barriers. New Zealand withdrew a three-strikes proposal in the face of public protests (a much watered-down version was floated at the end of last year), the U.K.’s proposal has been hit with hundreds of proposed amendments at the House of Lords - and France’s adventure with three strikes has included initial defeat in the French National Assembly, a Constitutional Court ruling that the plan was unconstitutional - and delayed implementation due to privacy concerns from the country’s data protection commissioner.

Much of the three-strikes debate has focused on its impact on Internet users, yet the price of establishing such systems has scarcely been discussed. That may be changing due to the U.K. government’s own estimates on the likely costs borne by Internet providers and taxpayers in establishing and maintaining a three-strikes system.

Initial government estimates peg the expense to Internet providers alone at as much as £500 million ($850 million Canadian) over 10 years.

This includes the costs of identifying subscribers, notifying them of alleged infringements, running call centres to answer questions and investing in new equipment to manage the system. As a result, the U payday loans guaranteed no fax.K. government estimates that 40,000 people could lose Internet access due to anticipated increases in subscriber fees.

The U.K. recording industry has challenged these numbers, but there is reason to believe they actually understate the actual economic impact. The U.K. estimates focus exclusively on the Internet provider costs, but provide no accounting for actual enforcement of the system. When court and regulatory costs are factored into the equation, the taxpayer burden runs into the hundreds of millions.

Moreover, the U.K. estimates are consistent with a 2006 Industry Canada commissioned study on the costs of Internet provider notification schemes. The study concluded that the cost of a single notification was $11.73 for larger Internet providers (more than 100,000 subscribers) and $32.73 for smaller Internet providers. Considering the sheer number of notifications - last summer Bell Canada acknowledged receiving 15,000 notifications each month - the costs quickly run into the millions of dollars.

The disparate impact between big and small Internet providers highlights another hidden cost of three-strikes systems - the negative effect on the competitive landscape for Internet services. The U.K. estimates that the costs for small Internet providers are so great that consideration should be given to exempting them entirely, since the additional burden would result in decreased competition. The same report identifies the disproportionate harm to wireless carriers, who would face massive capital costs and be placed at a competitive disadvantage.

Reducing competition and increasing costs runs counter to Industry Minister Tony Clement’s commitment to improving the competitive environment for wireless and Internet services. Yet the ACTA talks move in that direction, potentially leading to huge costs for an unproven system that could lead thousands to conclude they can no longer afford Internet access.

Michael Geist holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law. He can reached at mgeist@uottawa.ca or at michaelgeist.ca

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Suddenlink has promoted Patty McCaskill to chief programming officer.

McCaskill, who joined the cable broadband company’s programming department in 2003, has more than 30 years of experience in the cable industry.

Before Suddenlink, McCaskill was vice president for programming and pay-per-view for Charter Communications. And before joining Charter, she was the founder and president of McCaskill Communications Consultants.

She also had been vice president for the central region for the Travel Channel and advertising product manager for Southwestern Bell Publications us fast cash.
McCaskill founded and served as a past president of the St. Louis chapter of Women in Cable Telecommunications. She serves as a member of the board of directors of the

National Cable Television Cooperative.

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A proposed development agreement calling for a new 18,000-seat soccer stadium for the Kansas City Wizards and a first-class office campus for 4,000 new Cerner Corp. employees is scheduled to be acted on by the Unified Government of Wyandotte County/Kansas City, Kan., during a special meeting at 5 p.m. Tuesday.

The agreement is between the Unified Government and Kansas Unified Development LLC, a single-purpose entity created to develop the $400 million-plus project in the Village West retail district of Kansas City, Kan. Completion of the agreement comes three months after the Kansas Department of Commerce offered the developers a roughly $230 million incentive package to lure the project from the former Bannister Mall redevelopment site in south Kansas City.

The agreement calls for the new stadium to be completed by 2012 or before on an 11-acre site between Nebraska Furniture Mart and the Kansas Speedway. It will be financed with private investment and $147 million in state sales tax revenue (STAR) bonds.

The Cerner campus is to be developed on 58 acres between Great Wolf Lodge and Chateau Avalon and financed with private investment and state incentives for new office jobs. The agreement calls for the first 100,000 square feet of construction in the Cerner office campus to begin by Dec. 1, 2011, and for the campus to house 4,000 new jobs with an average annual salary of $54,000 by 2016.

If Cerner fails to meet the jobs milestone, the agreement states, the developer would be obligated to pay the Unified Government $30.4 million in 10 equal installments of $3.04 million beginning on Jan. 1, 2017. The state of Kansas is requiring the Unified Government to forward any such payments to the state.

The agreement also calls for the developer to build 18 tournament-quality youth soccer fields in Wyandotte County Park and three recreational soccer fields at locations within Wyandotte County to be determined by the Unified Government and the developer by May 1.

The developer also is required to pay $18 million to the Unified Government for the stadium and office campus sites. The Unified Government will convey the title to the campus site to Cerner, and it will convey the title to the stadium site to the developer.

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Roswell Park Cancer Institute signed a $1 million licensing deal with a Chinese pharmaceutical company.

The agreement for Roswell’s tumor imaging technology was signed with Zhejiang Hisun Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., one of China’s largest producers of oncology drugs.

The technology, developed by Roswell researcher Ravindra Pandey, shows potential as an anticancer treatment agent and may help improve treatment options for people with cancer. Pandey is director of pharmaceutical chemistry in Roswell’s Photodynamic Therapy Center, and is also a research professor in the University at Buffalo’s Institute of Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics.

Pandey worked with Roswell’s technology transfer office, which works with researchers and clinicians to identify discoveries that have commercial potential and to market that potential to prospective business partners guaranteed personal loan approval.

Roswell’s President and CEO Donald Trump said the new licensing agreement is a good example of Roswell’s commitment to bringing therapies to market. In a prepared release, Zhejiang Hisun President and CEO Hua Bai said a drug developed with the technology would be “extremely valuable” for patients in China and would greatly enrich the company’s growing oncology drug pipeline.

The announcement follows licensing deals inked this fall with pharmaceutical companies in India and China for Roswell’s photodynamic therapy (PDT) technology using intense doses of red light to treat skin, lung and esophageal cancers.

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The Bank of England should pause its bond-purchase plan after completing the current 200 billion- pound ($323 billion) tranche as the economy shifts toward a recovery, the British Chambers of Commerce said.

“The Bank of England has done as much as it can at this stage,” David Frost, director general of the BCC, told Bloomberg Television in London yesterday. “If it emerges in the spring and towards the middle of the year that the economy is not sustaining itself, then we have to come back and look to see where we need additional money pumped in.”

Confidence about sales at manufacturers and services companies rose in the fourth quarter to the highest level since the first three months of 2008, before the onset of the recession, the BCC said in a survey released today. The data shows the economy is on the brink of exiting the slump, the lobby group said.

The Bank of England last week pledged to complete its bond program as policy makers gauged the strength of the economic recovery against a backdrop of political squabbles on how to cut the nation’s budget deficit. Prime Minister Gordon Brown yesterday told his ruling Labour Party lawmakers that they can still win this year’s general election.

The index for manufacturing domestic sales rose to 3 from minus 10 in the previous three months, and the index for export sales climbed to 20 from zero, the BCC’s report showed.

For service companies, the domestic sales index slipped 1 point to minus 2, while the exports index increased to 8 from 6, the BCC said. The survey covered more than 5,400 companies.

‘Primary Concern’

“There was an improvement in the economy, but it’s not at the rate that we saw in the third quarter,” Frost said. “There was a sharp improvement in the third quarter, but it’s not been maintained. That’s got to be a primary concern.”

The lobby group, which has supported policy makers’ moves to expand the bank’s asset-purchase program to its current size, said the plan hasn’t done enough to aid bank lending, which is now a key obstacle to sustaining the recovery.

Economic reports paint a mixed picture of the U.K.’s route out of recession. Consumer confidence fell in December by the most in more than a year as expectations for the economy deteriorated, Nationwide Building Society said Jan. 6. Manufacturing activity increased to the strongest in more than two years, and mortgage approvals rose to the highest since March 2008, separate surveys showed on Jan. 4.

Bank of England policy makers last week kept the benchmark interest rate at a record low of 0.5 percent to nurture the recovery. They will next assess the effectiveness of their monetary policy in February, when officials produce quarterly economic forecasts.

“I don’t expect them to put up interest rates any time soon,” David Kern, chief economist at the BCC said in an interview. “They will not do anything until September. My focus is that by the end of the year, they’ll be 1 percent. They’ll be 2.5 percent by the end of 2011.”

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Canada unexpectedly lost jobs in December, led by transportation and public administration, keeping the jobless rate close to the highest in more than a decade.

Employment fell by 2,600 last month, after a November gain of 79,100, Statistics Canada said today in Ottawa. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 8.5 percent, close to an 11- 1/2 year high of 8.7 percent set in August. The median forecast of 22 economists surveyed by Bloomberg was for a 20,000 gain in employment and an unchanged jobless rate.

The country lost 239,700 jobs last year, the first decline since 1992, and 323,400 jobs since employment peaked in October 2008. Prime Minister Stephen Harper told reporters today he is “disappointed” by the report. The country’s first recession since 1992 ended in the third quarter last year, and the Bank of Canada has pledged to keep its key lending rate at a record low 0.25 percent through June to sustain demand.

The decline of 274,600 jobs in goods-producing industries in 2009 was only partly offset by a gain of 34,900 in service industries.

Setting the Stage

“I would still look past” the job decline, Derek Holt, economist at Scotia Capital in Toronto, said in a telephone interview. “It’s largely just volatility before we set the stage for sustained job growth going into 2010.” Government stimulus packages around the world should have their maximum effect this year, boosting demand, Holt said.

The Canadian dollar appreciated 0.4 percent to C$1.0309 per U fast payday loans.S. dollar at 3:48 p.m. in Toronto, compared with C$1.0347 yesterday.

Full-time employment fell by 2,400 in December, while part- time jobs decreased by about 200, Statistics Canada said. Transportation and warehousing companies fired 23,900 workers, and public administration employment fell by 21,600. Health care jobs rose by 35,300.

Linamar Corp. said Dec. 3 it will close a plant with 134 workers in Batawa, Ontario. The Guelph, Ontario-based company manufacturers automobile parts. Manufacturers eliminated 9,700 jobs in December and 190,800 in 2009, or four out of every five jobs lost nationwide.

Average hourly wage growth accelerated to 2.4 percent in December from a year ago, Statistics Canada said, compared with 2.3 percent in the previous month, the slowest since March 2007.

“Even with the setback, it’s looking increasingly likely that August marked the peak in the unemployment rate,” said Doug Porter, deputy chief economist with BMO Capital Markets in Toronto. “Compared to past recessions, that’s a very mild peak. It’s way below the 13 percent we hit in 1982.”

Canada’s unemployment rate is 1.5 percentage points less than the 10 percent mark reported by the U.S. today, along with an unexpected job loss of 85,000. Over the last three decades, Canada’s unemployment rate has been on average 2.5 percentage points higher than the U.S. rate.

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A German investor bought the distressed note on a Lauderdale-by-the-Sea hotel and apartment property for less than half of the bank’s foreclosure judgment.

Ptolsemaios Property paid $1.65 million to Fifth Third Bank for the mortgage to El Mar Place Developers on Dec. 30, according to Leyla Semenov, a director with Fort Lauderdale-based KW Commercial who arranged the deal. She said it was an all-cash transaction.

The price represents a 58 percent discount from the $3.9 million foreclosure judgment Fifth Third won against El Mar Place in December and a 53 percent discount from the $3.55 million mortgage it granted the developer in 2006. Ptolsemaios is set to take control of the property on March 9 unless a higher bidder shows up at the foreclosure auction cheap business cards.

The properties, at 4321-4341 El Mar Drive, are a block west of the beach. They contain 30 units, with 27 licensed as hotel and the other three as multifamily. The hotels are called the Beach Apartments and the Eastwood Inn.

Semenov said Ptolsemaios officials have experience operating hotels and will make repairs to the properties.

“My client will repair it and use it for hotel purposes, and then market it in Europe and locally,” she said.

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