Lenon’s main business news

U.S. President Barack Obama called a climate change agreement with China and about 25 other nations an “unprecedented” move to slow global warming. Environmental groups and at least five developing nations called it a failure.

The accord, which pushes off signing a treaty for at least a year, is “a first step,” Obama said yesterday before leaving Copenhagen, where he spent 14 hours cobbling together the agreement in meetings with world leaders, and addressing 8,000 envoys from 193 nations.

Delegates from the countries failed to reach consensus on the accord today after discussing it through the night, agreeing instead to “take note” of the document, or recognize that it exists. The agreement seeks voluntary cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions that scientists blame for global warming without binding countries to take action.

“The meeting was a disaster,” Lars-Erik Liljelund, the director general of Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt’s office, said in an interview today. “The process needs to be changed because if we continue like this, we won’t be any further a year from now.”

Negotiators met in the Danish capital for two weeks of United Nations talks on curbing global warming. Debate stumbled on aid to developing countries facing damage from climate change, pollution-reduction goals and how to verify individual country’s pledges to cut harmful emissions.

Environmentalists said the agreement that includes the U.S. and China — the world’s two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases — falls well short of what’s needed to deal with global warming. Bolivia, Sudan and Venezuela were among countries that spoke out against the accord, which will serve as a framework for continuing talks in 2010.

‘Backroom Deal’

“This is the United Nations and the nations here are not united on this secret backroom declaration,” Kate Horner, policy analyst for the London-based environmental group Friends of the Earth, said in statement. “Copenhagen has been an abject failure.”

The proposal calls for voluntary steps to reduce emissions blamed for heating the atmosphere, melting icecaps and causing destructive weather patterns. For two years, nations from China to members of the 27-country European Union repeatedly called for a binding treaty to be signed in Copenhagen.

“It will not be legally binding, but what it will do is allow for each country to show to the world what they are doing,” Obama told reporters in Copenhagen. “There will be a sense on the part of each country that we’re in this together and we’ll know who is meeting and who’s not meeting the mutual obligations that have been set forth.”

Bleeding Hand

Obama, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva were among about 25 world leaders who spent ten hours “in a rather stuffy room” drafting details normally left to lower-level negotiators, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer told reporters today.

The text, called the Copenhagen Accord, was then introduced to the meeting hall where delegates from all nations were present. Envoys from Bolivia, Sudan and Venezuela rejected the text.

During the meeting, Venezuelan negotiator Claudia Salerno Caldera raised her hand that was bloodied and complained about the way the document was drafted, calling it a “Coup d’état on the UN charter.”

“This hand that is bleeding wants to talk and has as much right as any of those you call a “representative” group of leaders,” she said. “International agreements can’t be imposed by a small and select, as you call it, group of countries.”

Burning the Midnight Oil

Negotiations went through the night yesterday, finally ending today at about 3:30 p quick guaranteed personal loans.m. local time, more than 21 hours after their scheduled conclusion. That followed debate by Brown, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton until about 2:30 a.m. on Dec. 18.

Dessima Williams, Grenadian ambassador who was lead negotiator for a group of 43 small-island and low-lying states, today said she’d been awake for 48 hours.

“Although I’m not ecstatic, I’m not unhappy in a major way. I wish I could’ve gotten more, but I think I’ll live to fight another day.”

Rich countries offered to provide $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor nations reduce carbon emissions, conditional on developing countries cutting gas discharges, according to the text. They may also pay out $30 billion in aid from next year through 2012.

“In terms of finance, it is vague, it is a big soup,” Pa Ousman Jarju, a Gambian delegate, said in an interview in Copenhagen. “It’s well below what is required.”

Move Forward

The agreement was reached after Obama had last-minute talks with Wen, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Brazil’s Lula and South African President, Jacob Zuma. It was then taken to all nations and most backed it.

“There emerged over time a real sense in the room that most countries wanted to move forward with some kind of decision,” said Ruben Kraiem, co-chair of the climate practice for attorneys Covington & Burling LLP in New York.

Nations should try to keep the global temperature increase before industrialization “below 2 degrees” Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), according to the agreement.

Envoys from the U.S., Europe and China have supported the 2 degrees target. Poorer nations and environmental groups wanted 1 or 1.5 degrees, fearing a higher increase will raise sea levels and make coastal cities and some island states uninhabitable.

‘Well Short’

“As President Obama said, its well short of what’s ultimately needed,” Elliot Diringer, vice president for international strategies at Arlington, Virginia-based Pew Center on Global Climate Change, said in a statement. “But it would provide a reasonable basis for negotiating a fair and effective climate treaty.”

Without emissions curbs, temperatures would rise by 6 degrees Celsius, an increase that “would lead almost certainly to massive climatic change,” the International Energy Agency, an adviser to 28 oil-consuming nations, said in a report. A more-than-2-degree warming will bring more intense flooding and drought and a faster sea-level increase, according to the UN.

“This declaration or outcome or whatever you want to call it, is not a legally binding document,” Indian Environment Minister Ramesh said in an interview. “It’s a political statement.”

For 20 years, scientists working for the United Nations have provided guidance for global climate talks. The result is the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 accord that limits greenhouse-gas emissions among 37 industrialized nations. Those targets are set to expire in 2012, leaving the world without binding goals if Copenhagen doesn’t renew them.

“The objective of these negotiations of securing the future of the planet definitely wasn’t achieved,” Melinda Kimble, the U.S. chief negotiator for the Kyoto Protocol and senior vice president at the United Nations Foundation said in an interview in Copenhagen. “It’s a limited outcome.”

Source

There will be mixed feelings within the University at Buffalo athletic department following the dpearture of head football coach Turner Gill to the University of Kansas.

The Bulls will be sorry to see the coach who lifted the program from the depths of Division I-A to a conference champion depart. Yet, Gill's exit to the Big 12 school is testament to the job he did at UB.

Gill will be officially introduced as the Kansas coach Monday after accepting the Jayhawks' offer over the weekend. UB, meanwhile, has elevated offensive coordinator Danny Barrett to interim head coach while launching a national search for a successor to Gill.

“Today is a day that creates many mixed feelings,” said a statement from Director of Athletics Warde Manuel. “I am saddened to see Turner leave us as he has done an absolutely fantastic job of building our football program to unprecedented success upon a value system that we can all be proud of. That being said, I am extremely happy for Turner and his family that they have been granted this opportunity Low fee payday loans.”

He added that Barrett is a candidate for the UB position and is the only internal staff member that will be considered.

Gill led Buffalo to its first Division I conference championship and bowl appearance in the program’s history when the Bulls won the Mid-American Conference championship game in 2008 and later played in the International Bowl in Toronto. The Bulls compiled an overall record of 20-30 during Gill’s tenure, including a 14-18 record in the MAC, after recording a 7-49 record in their first seven seasons in the league prior to his arrival.

Gill was named the 23rd head coach in school history on Dec. 16, 2005, taking over a program that had won just 10 games in its first seven years as a Division I-A member.

Source

Some of the economists who anticipated the U.S. job market would see marked improvement in November now project job gains are around the corner, and possibly in the rearview mirror.

Payrolls fell by 11,000 workers, while the unemployment rate dropped to 10 percent. Jobs were forecast to decline 125,000, according to the median estimate of 82 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News. Estimates ranged from decreases of 30,000 to 180,000.

The drawdown in inventories and rising corporate profits are the most compelling reasons for payrolls to begin showing sustainable increases as soon as this month, these economists said. What’s more, the recent trend of upward revisions will probably continue, signaling the worst employment slump in the postwar era may have already ended.

“We could see a positive number for November next month,” said Stefane Marion, chief economist at National Bank Financial Inc. in Montreal, whose forecast of a 30,000 payroll drop was the closest. “Firms now are beginning to redeploy some of their cash flows” by hiring new workers, he said.

Revisions added 159,000 jobs to payroll figures previously reported for October and September, a report from the Labor Department showed yesterday in Washington. The previous month’s report added 91,000 for September and August.

Profits, Inventories

Corporate profits climbed 21 percent from January through September, the biggest three-quarter gain in five years, while inventories plunged at a record pace, according figures from the Commerce Department. Leaner stockpiles set the stage for recovery in production.

“If you run down your inventories hard, you also cut your labor force,” said Peter Possing Andersen, an economist at Danske Bank A/S in Denmark who projected a decline of 50,000 jobs for November. He said the ramp up in production means the manufacturing industry, which has cut workers for the past two years, may stabilize and begin hiring in “a couple of months.”

Still, some economists say that even if November’s figures are revised into positive territory, payrolls may not have reached their low point yet. “Revisions lately have been in the favorable direction,” said Neal Soss, chief economist at Credit Suisse in New York who forecast a 50,000 drop in payrolls. “We shouldn’t take that as evidence that we’re at the bottom.”

The improving labor market indicates the deepest U.S. recession since the 1930s may have ended, said the head of the group charged with making the call.

Yesterday’s report “makes it seem that the trough in employment will be around this month,” Robert Hall, who heads the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Business Cycle Dating Committee, said in an interview.

Source

The Toronto stock market closed lower Friday as strength in the greenback punished commodity stocks and Royal Bank lost ground even as the bank met expectations in its latest earnings report.

The S&P/TSX composite index dropped 125.75 points to 11,510.8, weighed down by a sharp decline in the gold sector. The TSX finished up 46.39 points, or 0.4 per cent, on the week

The U.S. dollar posted gains as the U.S. Labor Department said 11,000 people lost their jobs last month, far below the 120,000 that had been expected. The jobless rate came in at 10 per cent, down from 10.2 per cent in October.

"This may be the point where people really start to feel good about the economy and the people who have been calling for the sky to fall will start changing their mind," said Paul Thornton of Investor Boot Camp Online.

In Canada, 79,100 jobs were created last month while the unemployment rate moved down one-tenth of a point to 8.5 per cent in November, according to Statistics Canada. Economists had been looking for a drop in employment of 43,000.

The rising greenback reversed early Canadian dollar gains, with the loonie down 0.28 of a U.S. cent to 94.53 cents (U.S.).

Shares of Royal Bank fell $1.50 (Canadian), or 2 payday loans with no fax.6 per cent, to $55.98 after it reported its fourth-quarter profit rose 10 per cent from a year ago to $1.2 billion. Overall, the financial services sector in Toronto was down 0.56 per cent.

The Dow Jones industrial average closed up a slight 22.75 points to 10,388.9 – for a gain of 78.98 points or 0.77 per cent this week – as the latest sign of economic strength raised worries about higher interest rates. The Nasdaq composite index climbed 21.21 points to 2,194.35, while the S&P 500 index rose 6.06 points to 1,105.98 as U.S. markets also suffered from lower commodity stocks.

The gold sector was a major weight on the TSX, down 5.5 per cent as the February bullion contract on the Nymex lost $48.80 (U.S.) from its most recent record close to $1,169.50 an ounce.

The TSX energy sector dropped 0.76 per cent as the December crude contract on the New York Mercantile Exchange fell 99 cents to $75.47 a barrel. The decline followed two days of losses resulting from a report Wednesday that showed a big build-up in crude inventories in the U.S. last week.

The Canadian Press

Source

A surge in pre-holiday listings was blamed for troubles with eBay Inc.'s search system for much of the weekend.

The problem began Saturday morning when shoppers began noticing that they couldn't find items for sale using eBay's search in the U.S. and some overseas marketplaces.

The company reported the problem at 11:17 a.m. on Saturday in a note on its site, but eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) reported full service was restored by Sunday afternoon.

The company said that it saw a 33 percent increase in live listings, compared to last year, which triggered its weekend problems.

Ebay further said full credits for all affected items will be issued for this title search outage, according to its outage policy, referring users to its page here fast payday loans.

President Lorrie Norrington issued an apology, saying, "We know this is a really busy time for sellers ramping up for the holiday season. We’re sorry that this technical issue occurred, causing search to return limited or no results throughout the day Saturday, and we regret any potential impact to your business."

Source

Facebook Inc. stock's price on private exchanges has jumped up to 42 percent in the past four months as membership of the social networking site topped 300 million and the company turned cash flow positive, according to Bloomberg News.

Facebook shares are currently selling for about $21 each at SecondMarket, up from $14 .77 in July.

Source

Hyatt Hotels Corp shares climbed 12 percent in their debut on Thursday as investors bet the company’s strong balance sheet means it will be able to grow at a rapid pace when the industry eventually rebounds.

Hyatt’s initial public offering comes as lodging stocks are on the mend. The Dow Jones U.S. Hotels index has shot up 55 percent this year on signs of an economic recovery.

The company sold 38 Class-A million shares at $25 apiece on Wednesday, to raise $950 million for the controlling Pritzker family. The company’s market capitalization after its first day of trading was $1.06 billion.

In trading on Thursday, shares rose as high as $28.25 and closed at $28 on the New York Stock Exchange.

Hyatt’s IPO is the second-largest on the NYSE this year after Banco Santander. Ancestry.com Inc also went public on the Nasdaq and its shares closed more than 5 percent higher to $14.20.

“Finally we had two deals that were a lot better quality than what we had been seeing in the last several weeks,” said Scott Sweet, a senior managing partner at advisory firm IPO Boutique. “It gives quality deals (next week) momentum.”

Discount retailer Dollar General and youth clothing chain rue21 Inc are slated to go public next week.

Little more than half of Hyatt’s shares exchanged hands Thursday, Sweet said. Typically 80 percent of shares or more trade in a stock’s debut online payday advance.

“Goldman did a good job locking these shares up and putting it in good hands that are likely to hold,” Sweet said. “That would account for the reasoning behind why this stock has continued to advance from $27 to $28.”

The company’s underwriters, led by Goldman Sachs Group Inc, will have one month to exercise an option to buy more shares. If so, that fresh capital will go straight to Hyatt.

FIVE TIMES THE CASH

Hyatt’s debut may also be good news for privately-held Hilton Worldwide, should owner Blackstone Group decide to try and exit it in the future. Blackstone is in talks over reducing debt at the chain, according to a source.

Sluggish corporate demand has forced hotels to lower room rates and next year is unlikely to bring much reprieve. Both Marriott International Inc and Starwood Hotels & Resorts, have forecast a lackluster 2010.

But analysts expect the industry to rebound sharply in the subsequent three years as the supply of new rooms slows and business demand recovers.

“People are assuming that there’s going to be significant recovery in the outer years,” said John Arabia, a lodging analyst with Green Street Advisors. “That’s the only way we can make sense of these share prices.” 

Read more

JPMorgan Chase chief executive officer defended the dollar — and the size of his company — at a securities industry conference Tuesday.

"The ultimate strength of the dollar will depend on the strength of the United States," Dimon said.

Dimon discussed the dollar and other key financial topics with PBS host Charlie Rose as part of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) annual meeting held in New York.

He said that the dollar needs two things to remain strong: the economy must grow and, equally as important, the government must demonstrate fiscal responsibility.

The fate of the dollar is not about "the deficit over the next year or two," said Dimon, but about proving that the country’s long-term plan is to rein in spending and reduce the nation’s debt over time.

"We’ll be voting on this," Dimon told the crowd. "It’s not only a matter of what happens at the [Federal Reserve] but about what happens in Congress."

The dollar has spent much of October bouncing around its 14-month low against the euro as investors worried that low U.S. interest rates and months of stimulus injections would spark inflation. Moreover, the market recovery has made stocks more attractive to investors than super safe assets like the dollar.

The dollar got a bit of a lift earlier this month when Fed chairman Ben Bernanke said that the central bank is poised to raise interest rates if the economic recovery strengthens in order to avoid a surge in inflation. But given that employment remains weak, many analysts and economists believe that the government would rather not boost rates rise anytime soon.

In his wide ranging remarks, Dimon also noted that the economic recovery was not tied to hotly debated issues in Congress such as health care reform and cap and trade energy proposals.

Dimon said that these are long-term issues the administration must tackle, but added that "getting people back to work" is the most important ingredient in a true economic recovery bad credit payday advance. If Congress does pass another stimulus bill, Dimon said he hopes that it will focus on job creation.

Chase isn’t too big to fail

Dimon also defended his company’s role as one of the largest banks in the country, arguing that it had not reached a point that it was "too big to fail." He stressed that the firm’s size was appropriate given the number of its clients and their business needs.

"Large businesses are large for a reason," Dimon said. "You can’t do an $8 billion loan if you are a small bank."

JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500) has been one of the nation’s fastest growing banks in recent years. In the wake of last year’s financial chaos, it bought investment bank Bear Stearns and the savings-and-loan giant Washington Mutual.

Both deals were done at what analysts felt were relatively low prices. JPMorgan Chase bought WaMu after it was seized by the FDIC in the nation’s largest bank failure.

But the size of the nation’s largest financial firms has been a key issue among regulators and lawmakers following the near collapses and government bailouts of AIG (AIG, Fortune 500) and Citigroup (C, Fortune 500). Congress continues to debate how best to reform the U.S. financial system.

One leading proposal in Washington has been for regulators to create a system that would allow regulators to handle the failure of a large financial institution. Many have argued the absence of such a system exacerbated the problems associated with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers last fall.

Dimon, echoing previous comments, threw his support behind such a system. But he added that there would need to be coordination with international regulators to work effectively.

"We think failure is a good thing," he said. "But you don’t want a failure that destroys America." 

Source

Demand for hand sanitizer has gone through the roof since the first cases of swine flu broke out earlier this year, and some makers of the germ-fighting gels are scrambling to keep up.

Market research firm Panjiva recently estimated that 3 million kilograms of hand sanitizer were shipped in the third quarter, compared with 1 million kilograms in the same quarter last year.

Josh Green, chief executive of Panjiva, said concern about the H1N1 virus, also known as the swine flu, is the "most likely explanation" for the surge in volume.

And demand is only expected to rise given the outlook for an exceptionally bad flu season.

In response, the companies that make and distribute Purell, the most popular name-brand hand sanitizer, are ramping up production and urging customers to not hoard the product.

Heavy demand

Johnson & Johnson (JNJ, Fortune 500), which makes Purell and distributes it to retailers, does not provide figures on sales or shipments of items such as hand sanitizer. But the company said demand for Purell has been "heavy" since the first cases of swine flu broke.

"Due to the influenza A (H1N1) virus outbreak this past spring and resurgence this fall, Johnson & Johnson Consumer Companies Inc. has experienced heavy demand on supplies of Purell," said J&J spokesman Marc Boston in a statement.

The company is working to increase production for the remainder of the year and the beginning of 2010, but Boston acknowledged that supplies may be limited in some areas.

"Because of this increase in demand, consumers may currently find limited supplies of Purell Instant Hand Sanitizer at certain retailers," he said.

Don’t stockpile

GOJO Industries, the company that invented Purell and distributes it in professional markets, described the increase in demand as "unprecedented."

The Akron, Ohio-based company said it has been running its plants "24/7" and has hired additional workers to help increase output.

"Even with increased manufacturing capacity, there is a limit to how much we can produce in a short period of time," Mark Lerner, GOJO’s chief operating officer, said in a prepared statement.

GOJO said it will provide U.S. distributors with more than their normal supply of Purell, but warned that it may not ship the full quantity ordered.

Lerner said the backlog is temporary and that GOJO expects to increase overall production "significantly" through 2010. "There is absolutely no need to stockpile product," Lerner said. "In fact, stockpiling could cause an actual shortage which, in turn, could threaten public health."

Nearly 400,000 people worldwide have contracted laboratory-confirmed cases of swine flu and more than 4,700 people have died from the illness since it was first identified in Mexico and the United States in April, the World Health Organization (WHO) said earlier this month.

Many countries have stopped counting individual cases, particularly of milder illness, according to the WHO. That means the total case count could be significantly lower than the number of swine flu cases that have actually occurred. 

Source

Bank of Japan Deputy Governor Kiyohiko Nishimura said financial markets are improving and keeping the central bank’s emergency credit programs in place for too long may cause distortions.

“Excessive concerns are easing considerably and market functions are improving significantly,” Nishimura said at a press conference today in Kobe, western Japan. “Prolonging safety-net measures may cause the problem of moral hazard.”

Earlier in a speech, Nishimura stressed that ending the programs of buying corporate debt from lenders is a separate matter to interest-rate policy. Economists expect the central bank to end the credit steps by the end of the year, while leaving the benchmark rate at 0.1 percent through all of 2010 amid prolonged deflation and tepid economic growth.

“The central bank wants to make it clear that ending some measures doesn’t mean raising rates soon,” said Masamichi Adachi, senior economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in Tokyo. Adachi predicts the corporate asset-purchase programs will expire in December as scheduled and the BOJ will “be one of the last central banks to raise interest rates.”

Nishimura, 56, said policy makers will decide the fate of the credit measures “after determining the extent to which market functions recover and whether excessive concerns among investors will return.” The bank will make an assessment by looking at the financial market “overall,” rather than the market for specific securities.

Easier to Sell

In the speech, he said companies with higher credit ratings are finding it easier to sell bonds and commercial paper payday loans no fax. Since lowering the key interest rate to 0.1 percent in December, the bank has been buying the assets and offering banks unlimited loans backed by collateral to channel funds to companies. The three programs are due to expire on Dec. 31.

Japan’s “road to recovery will be very bumpy,” the deputy governor said at the news briefing, while adding that stimulus from governments and central banks worldwide will ensure it avoids a “double-dip” slump. In the speech he said it will take “a while” before consumer prices stop falling and return to a “desirable” level.

“It’s all too true that deflation is already putting some pressure on Japan’s economy by squeezing corporate profits and wages,” said Yoshimasa Maruyama, senior economist at Itochu Corp. in Tokyo. “The Bank of Japan is very far from raising rates.”

Consumer prices excluding fresh food slid a record 2.4 percent in August from a year earlier. The central bank is likely to forecast price declines will extend to 2011 when they release their twice-annual economic outlook on Oct. 30, analysts say.

The central bank will probably hold interest rates near zero at least through the end of 2010, according to 16 of 17 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News this month.

Nishimura said the policy board will continue to focus on the risks to growth, and uncertainty over the global economic outlook is the biggest concern.

Source