Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said the government will focus more on bolstering growth, indicating policies may be loosened further as inflation moderates.
China will
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Disney movie studio boss Rich Ross is stepping down, a month after the family entertainment giant booked a huge loss on the movie “John Carter.”
Two and a half years ago, Ross took over for then-studio chair Dick Cook.
Ross said in a memo to staff Friday that the role of chairman of Walt Disney Studios was no longer the right professional fit for him.
A month ago, Disney booked a $200 million loss on “John Carter,” the sci-fi epic based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs book series cash advance loan. The loss will pull the entire studio into a loss of $80 million to $120 million in the quarter through March.
The Walt Disney Co. did not name a successor.
The Federal Reserve paid $75.4 billion to the U.S. Treasury as an expanded bond portfolio generated $83.6 billion in interest income from its open-market operations last year.
The Fed
Chinese state television has accused McDonald’s and French retrailer Carrefour of selling expired chicken products in separate incidents amid public anxiety in China over food safety.
McDonald’s Corp. and Carrefour Inc. issued public apologies Friday and said they were investigating the report by China Central Television.
The report Thursday said a McDonald’s restaurant in Beijing sold chicken wings 90 minutes after they were cooked while the company’s rules set a 30-minute limit. It said employees at a Carrefour store in the central city of Zhengzhou changed expiration dates on some chicken and sold regular chickens as more expensive free-range birds.
Food safety is a sensitive issue in China, which has been rocked by scandals ranging from deadly infant formula to chemical-laced pork and recycled restaurant oil.
“McDonald’s China attaches great importance to this. We will immediately investigate this isolated incident, resolutely deal with it earnestly and take concrete actions to apologize to consumers,” said a statement by the U low fee payday advance.S.-based restaurant chain on its website.
Employees who answered the phone at McDonald’s China headquarters in Shanghai said a spokeswoman was not available and declined to give any other details.
Carrefour, based in Paris, said it was setting up a team to investigate and would cooperate with Chinese authorities.
“We will further enhance the training and take measures to ensure to earnestly implement the relevant provisions to safeguard the interests of consumers,” said a statement on the website of Carrefour’s China unit.
Last year, U.S. retailer Walmart Stores Inc. was fined by authorities in the southwestern city and 13 stores were ordered to close for two weeks on charges of passing off regular pork as higher-priced organic meat.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke spent six years pushing for an inflation goal. Now that he has it, some investors are betting he
Even as lawmakers spent the fall debating its fate, the use of Missouri’s Historic Preservation Tax Credit surged at the end of 2011.
State officials authorized $90.8 million worth of the credits – which pay back a developer one-fourth of the cost to rehab a historic building – in the six months from July 1 to Dec. 31, 2011. That’s $18 million more than the entire 12 months prior and a pace similar to the program’s pre-recession heyday in the mid-2000s, when it funded the rehab of countless lofts, office buildings and single-family homes across St. Louis.
The quick clip of authorizations – which happen before a building is rehabbed (credits are cashed in after the project is done) – suggest that, after a few slow years, a new wave of redevelopment may be kicking off in St. Louis and Kansas City. But it also comes amid unrelenting pressure from Jefferson City lawmakers who say the historic tax credit, which is awarded to any rehab that qualifies, is gobbling up too much of the state budget.
The $91 million already approved this fiscal year is a bit higher than the full-year cap proposed in tax credit bills last fall — and well above the $75 million limit that a state tax credit panel endorsed in 2010. At this pace, authorizations would hit even the $140 million cap set on the program in 2009, before demand dried up in the recession.
A big reason for the surge is simple economics. Commercial real estate is starting to pick up. Building projects – including tax-credit funded rehabs – are moving again.
The activity also has Fred Lafser’s phone ringing. Lafser, a redevelopment consultant in Creve Coeur, does a lot of front-end tax-credit work, such as getting a building listed on the National Register of Historic Places and filing the historic credit application with the state.
“During the recession, people just weren’t calling with new projects. We went from the phone ringing all the time to the phone not ringing at all,” he said. “In the last six to nine months we’re getting a lot more phone calls.”
A company like Lafser’s will often start working nine months or a year before the state actually OKs a tax credit award, making him an early indicator, of sorts, for historic redevelopment. If Lafser is busy, the pipeline of tax credit projects likely will grow.
Still, it’s not clear that the state will hit its $140 million cap by July. Of the $90.8 million in authorizations through December, $3.9 million went to small projects that are exempt from the cap. And nearly two-thirds went to just two buildings: $31.3 million to turn the old Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City into a hotel; and $27.5 million over four phases to renovate the Railway Exchange Building in downtown St. Louis. If no more large rehabs win authorization, there should be funds to spare.
Urban appeal
Of the 66 projects authorized for credits, just two – one each in Columbia and Boonville – were located outside the St. Louis or Kansas City metropolitan areas. In the 12 months ending last June 30, 15 of 125 recipients were outside the state’s two largest metropolitan areas, with much of the money going to two big projects in Springfield.
That urban-rural split helps to explain divisions in the General Assembly about the future of the historic tax credit. While The credits enjoy strong support from urban lawmakers – and House Speaker Steven Tilley, R-Perryville – Senate budget hawks, particularly from outstate districts, have long targeted them for cuts.
After last fall’s failed special session, few in Jefferson City expect anything to happen on the topic in this election year spring. Still, some are trying. Sen. Jason Crowell, R-Cape Girardeau, has filed a bill that would halt historic tax credit authorizations entirely for a year, and another that would place a one-year stop on redemptions of them.
In a recent hearing on the bills, Crowell blasted the credits, and the developers who use them, noting they consume more than $100 million a year from the state budget while funding for education gets cut.
“Our priorities are all screwed up,” he said. “If the No. 1 priority is rehabbing old buildings, and the hell with the children, it’s shameful.”
The historic program’s many supporters see it differently. They point to studies saying the credit drives enough investment to recoup its cost, and – coupled with schools and businesses – it has rebuilt both downtowns and neighborhoods across the state.
That’s what Brent Crittenden is trying to do.
An architect and developer, he was approved last year for about $1.6 million worth of historic tax credits to rehab 11 buildings in McRee Town, a long-battered neighborhood just north of the Missouri Botanical Garden. The biggest building is a new home for the City Garden Montessori school, and the rest will be rehabbed townhouses, with some infill new construction mixed in.
The townhouses are priced between $165,000 and the mid-$200,000s, which is comparable to similar-sized rehabs in many parts of south St. Louis. Absent the credits, Crittenden said, they would cost much more, too much to sell in this market. The project wouldn’t happen.
“It just wouldn’t make sense,” he said.
Where the money goes
Historic tax credit authorizations, July 1 - Dec. 31, 2012
County Number Value
STL City 50 $49.2 million
Jackson 9 $35.5 million
Clay 3 $4.7 million
Boone 1 $1.2 million
STL County 1 $250,000
Cooper 1 $25,475
St. Charles 1 $17,500
Source: Mo. Dept. of Economic Development
European financial chiefs are trying to soothe global CEOs and political leaders, insisting they have a handle on the eurozone’s troubles.
Germany’s Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble says he’s “quite optimistic” about a Greek debt restructuring deal, despite recent strains in the complex talks. He says he doesn’t expect Greece to default.
He stressed that recent developments in markets have been “positive” for Italy and Spain.
France’s Finance Minister Francois Baroin welcomed actions by the European Central Bank that he says have helped “reduce tensions in the European banking system payday loans.”
Both spoke Friday at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss ski resort of Davos, where many business and political VIPs fear that Europe’s debt crisis will drag the global economy into a new recession.
The Czech Republic should sell Eurobonds this year at better terms than other eastern European Union states because of government plans to trim the budget deficit, Deputy Finance Minister Jan Gregor said.
The Finance Ministry will be ready to sell between 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) and 2 billion euros of debt from the start of February after the ministry updates its macroeconomic forecasts, Gregor said yesterday in an interview in Prague. The ministry may sell a bond on foreign markets denominated in other currencies if terms for a Eurobond issue aren
In a Dec. 30 story about iceberg lettuce being removed from grocery stores after salmonella was found in an Arizona field adjacent to the grower’s property, The Associated Press, relying on information from Kroger and its affiliated Smith’s Food and Drug, erroneously reported the lettuce had been removed from stores in North Carolina, among at least six other states. Kroger said Saturday the product never made it to its North Carolina stores.
A judge on Monday used unusually harsh language to strike down a $285 million settlement between Citigroup and the Securities and Exchange Commission over toxic mortgage securities, saying he couldn’t tell whether the deal was fair and criticizing regulators for hiding the details of the firm’s wrongdoing from the public.
U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff said the public has a right to know what happens in cases that touch on “the transparency of financial markets whose gyrations have so depressed our economy and debilitated our lives.” In such cases, the SEC has a responsibility to ensure that the truth emerges, he wrote.
Rakoff said he had spent hours trying to assess the settlement but concluded that he had not been given “any proven or admitted facts upon which to exercise even a modest degree of independent judgment.”
The SEC replied in a statement issued by enforcement director Robert Khuzami, saying the deal “reasonably reflects the scope of relief that would be obtained after a successful trial.”
The SEC had accused the bank of betting against a complex mortgage investment in 2007