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Dressed in an electric-blue vest and a white hat, Carlos Santana stopped by Brown Shoe Co.’s Clayton headquarters this afternoon where a small fashion show was held in his honor to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his shoe brand.

So your first question might be: Um, Carlos Santana has a women’s shoe line? Yes, indeed he does.

He may have been wearing sporty white shoes (with no socks), but his women’s line is full of vibrant colors — yellows and oranges and pinks — and eye-popping designs (think leopard print). And many of them have quite high heels, platforms, and wedges.

Brown Shoe, which also designs a line of shoes for Fergie, launched the legendary musician’s shoe brand 10 years ago. And in the years since, the brand has sold 8 million pairs of shoes and tallied up $400 million in retail sales, according to company officials.

A small percentage of the sales go to the Milago Foundation, a charity that Santana founded with his ex-wife in 1998 that gives grants to groups around the world working with children. To date, the shoe brand has donated about $2.5 million to the foundation.

Rick Gelber, the brand’s general manager, recalled that Brown Shoe launched Santana’s show line soon after his hit album, “Supernatural,” came out. The shoes are carried in Macy’s as well as many independent boutiques and online.

“He has transcended the celebrity brand and just become a brand,” Gelber said. “We established a niche that was high-fashion dress shoes and that now has evolved into a whole lifestyle brand.”

During the fashion show of shoes from his upcoming fall and spring collections, Santana held the hand of his wife, Cindy Blackman, who he married last year. He bopped along to the music, which he knew well because, of course, it was his own.

Afterwards, he thanked Brown Shoe employees for their work and passion. He said he wants to take Blackman to Porto Allegre in Brazil, where many of his shoes are made. He visited some of those factories several years ago when he was on tour there.

“When we went there, the floor was so pristine and clean,” he said proudly.

You hear a lot of horror stories about sweatshops, he said. “But it was completely the opposite.”

With so much fear in the world today, he said he wants to make women happy with his shoes.

“When you turn to joy, somehow fear becomes like fog in San Francisco where you can’t see your nose at 6 o’clock in the morning,” he said. “But by 12 o’clock, the sky is blue.”

There’s nothing more attractive in a woman than confidence, he said.

“When I see ladies walk with confidence in these shoes, it’s almost like they turn into an actress,” he said.

He compared it to the transformation that Michael Jackson made when he was on stage. Once he crossed onto the stage, he channeled the likes of James Brown to Marcel Marceau to Fred Astaire, Santana said.

“When you wake up in the morning, it’s OK to enter into character if you don’t like who are right now — if you’re not comfortable in your own skin,” he said. “You need to enter into — it’s not faking it — but entering into character.”

Santana stuck around for a bit to take pictures with employees and to sign some guitairs, too. He performs tonight at the Fox.

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Italy’s government, waffling for weeks on an emergency austerity plan, received a stern warning Saturday from the European central bank chief to promptly implement the deficit-fighting measures and to stay on target.

Premier Silvio Berlusconi is caught between trying to placate allies and satisfying both nervous markets and worried European Union officials.

Italy’s Parliament is preparing to take up approval of the package of spending cuts and new taxes which Berlusconi promised will add up to a euro45.5 billion ($64.86 billion) austerity package. But every few days has seen some measures _ including new levies on high-earners and reform of a generous pension system _ dropped to appease coalition partners.

With Italy’s uncertainty, European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet urged Rome to keep to its word and push the package, announced in early August, toward completion.

“It is essential that the target which was announced to diminish the deficit will be fully confirmed and implemented,” Trichet said at an annual economics forum at a Lake Como resort. “This is absolutely decisive to consolidate and reinforce the quality and the credibility of the Italian strategy and its credit worthiness.”

Italy got a boost last month by the ECB when Rome’s borrowing costs dipped, thanks to the central bank’s program of buying peripheral bonds. The intervention helped stem the widening debt costs.

The Italian foreign minister, Franco Frattini, told reporters as he arrived late Saturday at the forum that his government will insist that the ECB keep buying the bonds, the Italian agency LaPresse reported from Cernobbio.

The outgoing central banker deemed as “extremely important” all measures to improve the “flexibility” of Italy’s economy. Both industrialists and union leaders have denounced the austerity plan as relying too much on slashed spending and new taxes and offering little to stimulate the country’s practically flat growth or to encourage job creation.

But the ECB’s own policies were being taken to task on the sidelines of the annual Ambrosetti forum.

“We need more stimulus, we need a weaker euro,” which could spur exports, said New York University economist Nouriel Roubini. “You can’t just talk about austerity.” He urged the ECB to “at least send a signal there is going to be monetary easing” soon.

Asked by The Associated Press to respond to Roubini’s criticism, Trichet, during a brief stroll of the posh lakeside Villa d’Este grounds at lunch time, declined to comment, saying he wouldn’t talk about matters related to policy.

With Berlusconi widely considered to be distracted by a sex scandal linked to his self-acknowledged penchant for young, beautiful women, Roubini expressed concern that whatever the measures are, markets won’t be reassured.

“Italy is always bickering,” the economist, who has warned of a possible double-dip recession in some European countries, told reporters during a break in the closed-door forum sessions.

“Investors have lost credibility in this government,” Roubini added, noting the repeated widening of the spread between Italy’s bond interest rates and that of benchmark German rates.

The latest Berlusconi government proposal to achieve several billion euros in deficit reduction through a crackdown on widespread tax evasion could also rattle the markets since it’s impossible to predict just how much revenue that strategy could achieve.

Earlier in the day, Italian President Giorgio Napolitano echoed Trichet’s call to his country, saying the proposed measures must be quickly “translated into concrete terms” to achieve Berlusconi’s goal of balancing the budget by 2013.

“In effect, we need now and in the near future from Italy clarity and certainty of intentions and of results,” said Napolitano, who noted that an earlier austerity plan in July failed to placate nervous markets.

Napolitano urged Berlusconi’s bickering government to be “coherent and courageous” in meeting the economic crisis. He recalled that Italy, suffering from lackluster productivity, already was lagging before the latest global economic crisis.

“There is no doubt that in general the political (arena) is struggling, in the face of the tensions of the crisis and the risks to which the eurozone is exposed, and that the internal political and social equilibrium of individual countries are being put to a tough test,” Napolitano said in a video hookup from the presidential palace in Rome.

Austria’s former chancellor, Wolfgang Schuessel, went further in characterizing the effects of the crisis on citizens.

“This loss of confidence and trust is much more damaging than any economic data,” he said.

The three-day meeting of bankers, economists and politicians began on Friday and has been marked by generally gloomy assessments of global economic prospects.

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Europe’s largest retailer Carrefour SA Wednesday posted an unexpected net loss in the first half and abandoned its growth target for the year amid the economic slowdown.

The French retailer reported a net loss of euro249 million ($359 million) in the first six months of the year, compared with a profit of euro97 million a year earlier.

Carrefour said it expects its operating profit to decline this year, reversing a target the retailer set in March when it said an ongoing and expensive “transformation plan” would raise profits this year.

The company’s share price slumped on the Paris stock exchange as investors took fright at the suddenly worsened outlook for the giant retailer, which which operates chains of grocery stores and hypermarkets across Europe as well as in Latin America and Asia.

By mid-morning Carrefour shares were down 4 percent at euro17.88.

As it did last year, Carrefour booked what it calls “significant one-off charges” again in the first half. They amounted to euro884 million in the first half, over half of which went to writing down the value of Carrefour’s Italian assets.

Worringly for Carrefour, after years of failed attempts to turn-around profitability in its core French market, earnings fell 40 percent in the first half. The company blamed a reorganization of its processes and systems which caused large inventory shortages, as well as rising raw commodity costs and sharpened price competition among retailers fighting to draw in increasingly budget-minded consumers.

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The past month wasn’t exactly a confidence-booster for would-be home buyers and sellers.

They’ve witnessed a turbulent stock market, a downgrade of U.S. credit, a spreading European debt crisis and a U.S. economy that seems to be running in place.

And now many say they’re even more hesitant _ a retreat that could further delay a rebound in housing. It could hold back the overall economy, too.

“I have people who are just waiting and waiting, who just haven’t pulled the trigger even though they have the down payment,” said John Stearns, senior mortgage banker at American Fidelity Mortgage outside Milwaukee. “There’s a lot of kicking tires. A lot of people saying they just won’t do it.”

Their unease explains why applications for home mortgages sank last week to a nearly 15-year low. What’s more, sales of new homes fell more than expected in July _ and analysts think the financial turmoil may be accelerating that slide this month.

“Buyers just don’t want to commit to anything right now,” said Joel Naroff of Pennsylvania-based Naroff Economic Advisors.

Interviews with more than three dozen agents, brokers and would-be buyers and sellers indicate that the heightened uncertainty in the financial markets and the economy has made people even more cautious than before.

Consider:

_ Eric Younan, a marketing professional at an accounting firm who was about to buy a home in July in Farmington Hills, Mich. Then along came August. “What really scared me is that I’m a single guy, and I don’t want to have a mortgage by myself,” Younan says. “The economy is taking a pounding, and my friends who are getting laid off are leaving the state. Prices are still falling. So I’d rather have money in the bank than money in a house.”

_ Fernando Maza, a security system programmer in Broward County, Fla., who was about to buy a second home, right before the stream of unnerving developments on the economy and the stock market. Now, he’s less sure. “House prices could go down,” he says. “There’s so much inventory and not a lot of qualified buyers.”

_ Kurt Winiecki, a financial planner in Chicago who has been counseling a young couple on whether to buy or continue to rent. August made Winiecki’s decision easier: He’s telling them to rent. “What if they lose 20 percent of their equity and they can’t sell the house? It’s just too big a risk.”

Even before the recent financial upheavals, the home market was being depressed by the economy’s many problems: High unemployment. Stagnant pay. Rising health care expenses. High debt loads pay day loans. A wave of foreclosures. Shrunken home equity.

And real estate agents were saying that more buyers were walking away at the last minute. In June, the latest month for which figures are available, about 16 percent of closings were canceled. That was the highest figure since record keeping started more than a year ago.

This year is on pace to be the worst for home sales in 14 years. Nationally, prices are at 2002 levels, and even lower in areas like Phoenix, Las Vegas and Tampa, Fla.

But the past few weeks’ turmoil may be making everything worse. Homebuilder stocks, for instance, have been battered _ even more than the stock market as a whole. As a group, they’ve shed nearly 23 percent, according to a Standard & Poor’s analysis, compared with about 12 percent for the Dow Jones industrial average.

In normal times, today’s record-low mortgage rates would energize buying. Yet while more people are refinancing, applications for new mortgages are stuck at 10-year lows, according to Inside Mortgage Finance.

Part of the problem is that many people can’t buy even if they want to. More than 23 percent of homeowners owe more on their homes than they’re worth. An additional 25 percent have less than 20 percent equity in their homes, according to Capital Economics.

That means that nearly half of homeowners couldn’t qualify for a new mortgage because they couldn’t produce a big enough down payment.

Add to that a chaotic stock market and a weak economy, and the belief is taking hold among many that now isn’t the time to invest in the biggest purchase in most people’s lives.

“There’s a reassessment of risk across the planet,” says Jonathan Miller of New York-based real estate consultancy Miller Samuel. “Volatility breeds uncertainty, and this is intimidating for consumers.”

Consider the lack of interest in Eric Johannson’s home. A pilot for cargo hauler Atlas Air, Johannson put his lakefront Houston home on the market in July 2010. He planned to upgrade to a home in Orlando, where his wife took a new job.

Yet despite the house’s excellent condition, it has drawn not a single offer, even after the price was slashed to $249,000 _ $100,000 less than what Johannson and his wife paid in 2008.

“If this economic situation drags out much longer, my wife just may have to quit her job and career” and move back to Houston, Johansson says.

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President Barack Obama played golf and enjoyed some beach time with his family Sunday on Martha’s Vineyard, though not before getting briefed on developments in Libya.

Under sunny skies, Obama, wife Michelle, and daughters Malia and Sasha spent the morning on a private beach in Edgartown. The outing came on the third full day of Obama’s 10-day summer vacation and was his first excursion with his full family in tow. The president then parted ways with his family to play a round of golf at the Vineyard Golf Club.

First, though, Obama was briefed by national security aides on developments in Libya, where rebels advanced on Tripoli, threatening Moammar Gadhafi’s hold on power. White House aides have been at pains to show Obama is carrying out his duties as president even while on vacation amid international unrest, a shaky economy and high joblessness.

Obama also appeared on CBS News in an interview taped during his bus tour of the Midwest last week instant payday loans. He said he understood his low standing in the polls of late given public dissatisfaction with Washington and the poor economy. And he said he expected to be judged on the economy in next year’s presidential election.

“You’ve got an unemployment rate that is still too high, an economy that’s not growing fast enough,” he said. “And for me to argue, look, we’ve actually made the right decisions, things would have been much worse has we not made those decisions _ that’s not that satisfying if you don’t have a job right now. And I understand that and I expect to be judged a year from now on whether or not things have continued to get better.”

The president is scheduled to return to Washington next Saturday.

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Acknowledging the severity of the global economic storm, the Bank of Canada signalled no likely increases in interest rates any time soon while Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said Ottawa might need to step in with another round of stimulus spending if conditions get worse.

Mark Carney, governor of the central bank, told a Commons committee Canada’s economy may show little growth or negative growth when the statistics are finalized for the April-through-June period because of the economic troubles in the United States and Europe. But he said growth will pick up a bit in the second half of 2011.

As expected, given the gloomy state of financial markets and world business conditions, Carney made it clear that the Bank of Canada would be hesitant to increase its trend-setting interest rate above the current 1 per cent in the near future. Lower rates spur business and consumer borrowing and add momentum to the economy.

“Since the crisis erupted, the Bank has demonstrated its flexibility and nimbleness in the conduct of monetary policy,” he told a special session of the Commons finance committee studying the economic crisis. “As the Canadian recovery has progressed, we have emphasized that we would be prudent with respect to the possible withdrawal of any degree of monetary stimulus,” he said.

Under questioning from opposition MPs, Flaherty said for the first time that the Conservative government would move in with another round of stimulus spending if the world economy suffers a double-dip recession.

“We would obviously do what is needed” if there was a “dramatic deterioration” in the economies of the United States and Europe, he told the committee.

But for now, Flaherty said, the government is not changing its budget plan despite the turmoil on financial markets and debt crises in the United States and Europe. The plan calls for spending cuts of $4 billion a year to eliminate the annual federal budget deficit — now $32-billion annually — in a few years.

Pressed by opposition MPs about how Ottawa would react to a renewed global slowdown, Flaherty said he would change course and develop a pro-growth spending plan as the Conservatives did during the recent recession.

There is no need yet to move away from the government’s deficit-reduction strategy, however, he told MPs. Canada’s economy is still growing, if modestly, Flaherty said.

NDP finance critic Peggy Nash said later that she was disappointed that Flaherty didn’t show more flexibility. Her party would like to see the government embark on a round of infrastructure spending to spur economic growth, improve job-creation and prepare Canada for the future. Liberal MP Scott Brison said Flaherty failed to offer Canadians the assurances needed at a time of extreme economic uncertainty.

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Coca Cola Co. said Thursday it plans to invest $4 billion in China as food brands scramble to expand in its fast-growing consumer market.

The investments will take place over three years beginning in 2012 and raise Coca Cola’s total investment in China between 2009 and 2014 to $7 billion, the company said.

Global food brands are investing heavily in China, looking to a relatively healthy economy that expanded by 9.5 percent in the quarter ending in June to drive sales amid global uncertainty.

“China is one of our most important growth markets,” said Coca Cola chairman and CEO Muhtar Kent in a statement announcing the plans.

Chinese retail spending in June rose 17.7 percent over a year earlier, according to the government.

In July, Nestle SA announced the purchase of a 60 percent stake in candy maker Hsu Fu Chi for $1 no fax payday loans.7 billion. Earlier this year, Nestle also bought a controlling stake in Chinese food processor Yinlu Foods Group.

Restaurant chains such as McDonald’s Corp. and Yum Brands Inc.’s Pizza Hut and KFC also are expanding.

Kent said Coca Cola’s sales volume in China for the first half of 2011 was double that of five years ago.

Coca Cola, based in Atlanta, opened five new facilities in China in 2009-10 and this year has opened one and plans to open a second and break ground for a third, according the company.

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OTTAWA

Government-controlled mortgage company Fannie Mae says its second-quarter loss attributable to shareholders widened as it continues to seek out loan modifications to help lower defaults amid the ongoing difficulties in the housing and mortgage markets.

Fannie Mae lost $5.18 billion, or 90 cents per share, for the period ended June 30. That compares with a loss of $3.13 billion, or 55 cents per share, a year earlier.

The quarter included $6.1 billion in credit-related expenses tied to its pre-2009 book of loans cash advance now. Fannie Mae said Friday that it aims to lower its credit losses while keeping as many families as possible in their homes.

The period’s results also included $2.3 billion in dividend payments to the U.S. Treasury.

Revenue climbed to $5.24 billion from $4.5 billion.

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