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Want some crushed bugs with your Starbucks frappuccino?

Well, you’d better get on it, because soon it will be too late. The coffee franchise announced that it’s phasing out the use of insects as food coloring in its drinks and food products.

Starbucks (, Fortune 500) President Cliff Burrows wrote, in a Thursday blog, that Starbucks is "transitioning" away from the use of an insect called the cochineal.

Burrows blogged that Starbucks "fell short of your expectations by using natural cochineal extract as a colorant in four food and two beverage offerings in the United States."

He identified the products in question as the Strawberries & Crème Frappuccino, Strawberry Banana Smoothie, Raspberry Swirl Cake, Birthday Cake Pop, Mini Donut with pink icing and Red Velvet Whoopie Pie.

Burrows said that use of the insect dye will be "fully transitioned from existing product inventories" by the end of June.

From that point on, he said that Starbucks will use lycopene, a tomato-based extract.

An earlier Burrows blog from March 29 described the cochineal as a natural product, approved by the Food and Drug Administration, with no health risk.

Starbucks: Venti-sized stock at all-time high

Starbucks spokesman Jim Olson said the company was responding to numerous petitions and individual requests from customers who were concerned about the use of an insect-based extract.

The organization Change.org contacted CNNMoney to claim partial responsibility for pressuring Starbucks with its petition of 6,000 signatures gathered by blogger Daelyn Fortney. The purpose, according to Fortney, was to switch to a "vegan-friendly" extract.

The cochineal has a long history as being used as a red dye, according to Richard Levine, communications program manager for the Entomological Society of America.

"The red in the uniforms of the British soldiers during the Revolutionary War came from cochineal dye," he said. "The same goes for the uniforms of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police." 

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Americans took out more loans to buy cars and attend school in February but used their credit cards less frequently for the second straight month.

The Federal Reserve said Friday that consumer increased borrowing by $8.7 billion, the sixth straight monthly increase.

The jump in borrowing was driven by $11 billion increase in the category that mostly measures demand for auto and student loans. Borrowing on credit cards fell $2 billion after a $3 billion decline in January.

In February, total consumer borrowing rose to seasonally adjusted $2.52 trillion. That’s nearly at pre-recession levels and up from a post-recession low point of $2.39 billion reached in September 2010. Borrowing had tumbled for more than two years during and immediately after the recession.

Consumer borrowing rose by $18.6 billion in January, following similar gains in December and November. The gains for those three months were the largest in a decade.

A rise in borrowing could suggest that consumers are feeling more confident about the economy. However, few are comfortable enough to step up credit card use. Consumers carried $799 billion in credit card debt in February _ 15 percent less than they held in December 2007, the first month of the Great Recession

The job market slowed in March after three of the best months of hiring since the recession. Employers added just 120,000 jobs last month _ half the December-February pace pay day loans. The unemployment rate fell from 8.3 percent to 8.2 percent, the lowest since January 2009.

Many economists blamed seasonal factors for much of Friday’s disappointing jobs report from the Labor Department. Even with the March pullback, the economy has added an average of 212,000 jobs per month from January through March.

The increase in hiring has helped boost consumer spending, which jumped in February by the most in seven months.

But consumers are also borrowing more at a time when their wages have not kept pace with inflation. And they are paying more for gas _ the average price per gallon nationally was $3.94 on Friday.

Households began borrowing less and saving more when the 2007-2009 recession began and unemployment surged. While the expectation is that consumers are ready to resume borrowing, they are not expected to load up on debt the way they did during the housing boom of the last decade.

The Federal Reserve’s borrowing report covers auto loans, student loans and credit cards. It excludes mortgages, home equity loans and other loans tied to real estate.

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The recent New Democratic Party convention in Toronto may have done more than just select Thomas Mulcair as the party

Sometime in the past year, St. Louis slipped into an uncomfortable, but familiar  pattern. When the rest of the country is creating jobs, we lag behind.

So it has been for decades. We seem to miss out on the hot sectors and we were saddled, until recently, with a shrinking manufacturing base. We don’t seem to have the workforce that makes employers want to expand here.

There used to be a mythology that the St. Louis economy did OK during recessions, even if it lagged during expansions. That’s no longer true, if it ever was.

During the Great Recession and for a while afterward, the metro area’s employment reports tracked national trends closely. We suffered the same devastating job losses, percentage wise, as the rest of the country in 2008 and 2009, and we experienced the same halting recovery in 2010.

Then, early last year, the lines diverged. The nation continued to add jobs, slowly but steadily, and St. Louis didn’t. For all of 2011, the metro area lost 3,900 jobs, a shrinkage of 0.3 percent.

The U.S. economy added 1.8 million jobs last year, for growth of 1.4 percent. The St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, commenting on the trend in a recent report, said the metro area’s job growth has been “systematically below the nation’s” since the first quarter of 2011.

David Rapach, associate professor of economics at St. Louis University, predicts that area employment will grow just 1.0 percent this year, compared with a national forecast of 1.7 percent.

St. Louis knows this territory well us fast cash.

“It’s just our usual thing of being behind,” says Howard Wall, chairman of the economics department at Lindenwood University. “The industries that are doing well, we don’t have.”

Of late, that’s the oil and gas industry. Until someone discovers shale gas under the Gateway Arch, we won’t keep pace with states like Texas, North Dakota and Pennsylvania.

We shouldn’t, however, just throw up our hands and complain that geology is destiny.

Some of the big industries we do have aren’t doing especially well. The health and education sector shrank slightly in St. Louis last year even as it grew 2 percent nationally.

Manufacturing, on the other hand, grew at about the national average. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the loss of factory jobs was a major reason why St. Louis lagged the nation. If that’s no longer an issue, why are we slipping into the old pattern?

“Our long-term problem,” Wall continues, “is human capital. We have not enough workers who are highly educated and too many of the poorly educated.”

Political leaders, however, don’t get it. Instead of figuring out how to improve Missouri’s education system, elected officials debate tax-credit programs that shift money to favored industries.

They’re fighting over pieces of the pie rather than making the pie bigger.

By just keeping pace with the nation, St. Louis could have had 22,000 more jobs than it actually did at the end of 2011. If Rapach’s forecast is correct, that jobs gap will grow by an additional 9,000 in 2012.

Those aren’t huge numbers, but they make a big difference over time. If the worst recession in 70 years wasn’t enough, what will it take to force a major rethinking of the region’s economic policies?

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Mitt Romney’s new tax plan would mean lower taxes for most Americans. But some would benefit more than others.

According to a new analysis from the Tax Policy Center, wealthy Americans would see their taxes fall precipitously under Mitt Romney’s new plan — which scraps the Alternative Minimum Tax and cuts marginal tax rates by 20%.

Assuming the Bush tax cuts are extended, the Romney plan would give the top 1% of earners an average tax cut of $150,000, a 7.8% reduction in their average federal tax rate, according to the Tax Policy Center.

Americans in the middle 20% of income-earners would get an average tax cut of $810, a 1.4% tax rate reduction.

Those making $1 million or more would receive an average tax cut of $250,000, an 8.1% tax rate reduction, while the average American would get $2,800, a 3.5% rate drop.

The plan would also add to the deficit — $480 billion in calendar year 2015 alone, according to the study.

For its part, the Romney campaign disputes any claim that his plan would add to the deficit. The cuts "will be fully paid for through a combination of economic growth, base broadening and spending restraint," campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul told CNNMoney on Wednesday.

But the campaign has not spelled out which tax cuts it wants to kill, making it difficult to score.

Taxing the rich is not enough

"Romney seems to be trying to walk a fine line between responsible fiscal policy and pandering to his base," Howard Gleckman, a resident fellow at the Urban Institute, wrote in a blog post savings account payday advance. "But by not identifying how he’d pay for his generous tax cuts, his tightrope is getting pretty wobbly."

The campaign has also said the tax cuts will spur growth that will, in turn, create additional revenue for the federal government. The TPC analysis does not take that growth into account.

The updated plan reiterates other proposals that were first laid out in September, including provisions that would eliminate taxes on interest, dividends and capital gains for taxpayers who make less than $200,000.

It also calls for the elimination of the estate tax, and a reduction in the tax rate paid by corporations from 35% to 25%.

The candidate’s initial economic plan — released in September — was billed by the Romney campaign as "the most detailed plan for economic growth and job creation of any presidential candidate."

But it would only "maintain current tax rates on personal income" as president before moving to a "fairer, flatter, simpler tax structure" in the future.

That plan fell flat with some influential conservatives, including the Wall Street Journal editorial board, which labeled the proposals "surprisingly timid and tactical."

The Tax Foundation, a think tank that generally advocates for lower tax rates, said that Romney’s initial plan for the individual code "really takes no step toward fundamental reform." 

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Manufacturing probably accelerated for a fourth straight month in February, consumer confidence improved and Americans picked up the pace of spending a month earlier, economists said reports this week will show.

The Institute for Supply Management

Nokia Corp. plans to stop assembling cell phones in Europe by year-end as it shifts production to Asia and will cut another 4,000 jobs, its latest attempts to cushion itself from stiff competition in the smartphone sector.

The Finnish company said Wednesday it will make the new job cuts at three plants in Finland, Mexico and Hungary this year as it reorganizes global manufacturing operations to compete better with the likes of Apple Inc.’s iPhone and handsets using Google Inc.’s Android operating software.

The cuts come on top of nearly 10,000 layoffs announced last year.

Nokia said it had increasingly shifted cell phone assembly from Europe to Asia, where the majority of component suppliers are based, to help it reach markets faster. The company said it would not close the three factories, however.

“There will be no assembling of mobile phones at our plants in Europe after this,” Nokia spokesman James Etheridge said. “We plan to focus product assembly at our plants in Asia where the majority of our suppliers are based, while our facilities in Salo, Komarom and Reynosa will focus on the software-heavy aspects of the production process.”

Neil Mawston from Strategy Analytics said Nokia’s move “made sense” and was in line with what other cell phone makers had been doing for years, such as Samsung Electronics Co., Motorola Inc., and Sony Ericsson, which had large assembly plants in Europe.

“It’s an unstoppable trend really. Essentially, labor costs, land costs and other associated costs are so much lower in Asia,” Mawston said. “Also, Asia is so much closer to the biggest pool of users now so from a supply and demand side Asia looks a lot more attractive than Europe.”

Nokia said the shift to Asia would enable it to introduce innovations into the market more quickly and “ultimately be more competitive.”

Once the bellwether of the industry, Nokia has lost its dominant position in the global mobile phone market, with Android phones and iPhones overtaking it in the growing smartphone segment. It’s also been squeezed in the low-end by Asian manufacturers making cheaper phones, such as ZTE.

Nokia has been the leading handset maker since 1998 but after reaching its global goal of 40 percent market share in 2008, the company has gradually lost overall market share. It plummeted to below 30 percent last year.

In an attempt to remedy the slide, Nokia launched its new Windows Phone 7 in October, eight months after CEO Stephen Elop announced a partnership with Microsoft Corp. That heralded a major strategy shift for the Espoo-based company as it adopted the Windows operating system in its new phones.

But analysts have said it could take a few quarters before Nokia’s success can be measured.

Last month, Nokia reported that smartphone sales plummeted 23 percent globally in the fourth quarter as net revenue fell 20 percent to euro10 billion ($13.11 billion) compared to a year earlier.

Nokia share price closed up slightly at euro3.88 ($5.09) on the Helsinki Stock Exchange.

Nokia, based in Espoo near the Finnish capital, employs 130,000 people _ down from more than 132,000 a year ago.

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Online:

http://www.nokia.com

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Sales of previously owned homes rose to an 11-month high in December and the supply of properties on the market tumbled to a near 7-year low, pointing to a nascent recovery in the housing market.

The National Association of Realtors said on Friday existing home sales increased 5 percent month over month to an annual rate of 4.61 million units.

November’s sales pace was revised down to a 4.39 million-unit pace, previously reported as a 4.42 million-unit rate.

Economists polled by Reuters had expected sales to rise to a 4.65 million-unit sales pace. Sales in December were up 3.6 percent from a year ago. A total of 4.26 million homes were sold in 2011, up 1.7 percent from the prior year.

“A sector of the economy that has been a large weight on growth has started to stabilize over the last few months and we will continue to look for momentum in 2012,” said John Doyle, currency strategist at Tempus Consulting in Washington.

The third straight month of gains in sales added to hopes that a tentative recovery in the housing market was starting to take shape, but progress will be painfully slow given a glut of unsold properties that is weighing down on prices.

Data this week showed single-family home starts rose for a third straight month in December and optimism among builders this month was the highest in four-and-a-half years.

But the sector, responsible for the 2007-09 recession, remains challenged by an oversupply of homes amid an 8.5 percent unemployment rate. In addition, declining prices have left many Americans with homes that are worth less than their mortgages.

But there are tentative signs of improvement. There were 2.38 million unsold homes on the market last month, the fewest since March 2005. That represented a 6.2 months’ supply at December’s sales pace, the lowest since April 2006, and compared to 7.2 months’ supply in November.

However, the inventory of unsold homes tends to decline in winter. A supply of 6 months is generally considered as ideal and anything above indicates further declines in house prices. The median sales price fell 2.5 percent to $164,500 from a year ago.

Sales last month rose across all four regions, with gains in both the multifamily home and single-family home segments.

Single family home sales rose 4.6 percent, while multi-family dwellings advanced 8.7 percent.

But the road to recovery will be bumpy. Distressed properties, foreclosures and short sales which typically occur at deep discounts, accounted for 32 percent of overall sales last month, little changed from November.

A third of pending existing home sales contracts were canceled, the NAR said.

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Several times each year, the nation faces a widespread, food borne illness crisis. But there’s an easy, cheap technological solution that could stop scares and outbreaks in their tracks.

A relatively simple system of QR codes — those funny-looking, two-dimensional barcodes you see everywhere today — could instantaneously link a product sold on store shelves back to the farm where it was grown or raised with a snap of a smartphone camera. It would no longer take days or weeks to determine what food is safe and what isn’t.

The system could even prevent the contaminated food from reaching store shelves in the first place.

IBM (, Fortune 500) has developed a technology called the InfoSphere Traceability Server, which assigns unique barcodes to every step of the food distribution chain.

The farms, slaughterhouses, food palates, shipping containers, trucks, grocery stores and individual products that are using InfoSphere are all affixed with QR codes and tracked. Even specific animals are being tagged and scanned, so you could find out which specific cow your milk came from or which pig became your pork.

Using this system, the orange juice crisis could have potentially been avoided. Rather than halting all shipments of orange juice to test for a fungicide and testing OJ at grocery stores, as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has done, the juice could have been scanned and instantly linked back to a particular farm.

How RFID tags will change the future

"Someday soon, this will become the minimum requirement to participate in the food supply chain," said Paul Chang, IBM’s traceability program director.

But the system has yet to be widely adopted. There are some high hurdles to mass-adoption, most notably that for the system to work, every actor in the supply chain has to participate. And participation requires some level of investment in order to feed data into the network and extract results.

IBM already has a small handful of large retailers in the United States and Europe on its system, including Germany’s Metro Group, the third-largest food retailer in the world. But IBM believes it has found a way to get even the smallest mom & pop shops and farms on board as well.

IBM developed the InfoSphere system as a cloud-based service, meaning the only infrastructure needed to operate it is an Internet connection and a smartphone.

Though IBM’s Chang wouldn’t get specific about pricing, he said the costs are "minimal," pointing to the fact that that there are already small, rural farms in Thailand using the system no fax needed payday loans.

"We’ve developed the technology in such a way that it’s just a nominal cost to share and access information," Chang said. "We’re at an inflection point where this could be deployed more broadly."

But even if the majority of vendors, farms, shipping companies and grocery stores adopt it, it would really take everyone to join in to link your OJ to a particular farm.

To make such a global food traceability network a possibility, the food industry has developed an open standard for data recording and tracking. That means customers using IBM rivals’ systems could communicate with the InfoSphere server so a farm, a supplier and a grocery store all doing business with one another would not necessary need to be using the same system.

IBM says a very small percentage of companies in the food industry have adopted the technology so far. But with recalls happening on a weekly basis, and costs of technology falling, some regulators are becoming tempted to impose requirements that companies adopt traceability systems. IBM said is currently working with a small number of government regulators from around the world.

If widespread adoption does occur, it may help stop outbreaks before they start.

Today, testing products for contamination is a difficult and ineffective process. Food companies can’t test every batch, so choosing which ones to test is essentially random.

For instance, Coca-Cola (, Fortune 500) tested its batch of orange juice and found that the fungicide was present. But it also noticed that competitors’ juice was contaminated as well and had gone unnoticed.

Using advanced analytics, companies could know exactly which batches to test. As an example, a sensor in a shipping container of tomatoes that is several degrees warmer than normal could tip off the company to check the product that was shipped on that vessel. With QR tags, testers could know which palates were on that container and test them before they reach store shelves.

The technology is cheap and easy to implement. But until everyone adopts it, contaminated food outbreaks will continue. 

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Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been calling for Russia, the world