Business and Finance

Inflation in Germany, Europe’s largest economy, accelerated more than initially estimated in April after energy costs surged.

The inflation rate, calculated using a harmonized European Union method, jumped to 2.7 percent from 2.3 percent in March, the Federal Statistics Office in Wiesbaden said today. That’s an upward revision from the first estimate of 2.6 percent on April 27. From March, consumer prices rose 0.3 percent, more than the 0.2 percent initially reported.

The price of crude oil rose above $113 a barrel in April, helping to drive euro-area inflation to 2.8 percent. The European Central Bank, which aims to keep inflation just below 2 percent, last month raised its benchmark interest rate for the first time in almost three years. With economic growth gathering speed, the ECB is concerned workers will demand compensation for higher food and energy costs, entrenching faster inflation.

“All the signs are that inflation risks are increasing,” Joerg Kraemer, chief economist at Commerzbank AG in Frankfurt, told Bloomberg Television. “It’s a clear signal for the ECB to deliver a series of rate hikes.”

Wholesale prices rose 0.2 percent in April from March and 9.2 percent from a year earlier, the statistics office said in a separate release. Energy costs were the main driver of consumer- price inflation, with light heating oil up 26.7 percent in the year and fuel 12 percent more expensive.

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COLUMBIA, Mo.

Some day, America’s shrunken job market is going to boom again. When that happens, expect a “tsunami of résumés” hitting HR offices around the country, along with a thunderous pounding of feet as dissatisfied employees head out their employers’ door for good.

So says Dr. Ronald Leopold, vice president of U.S. Business for MetLife.

The insurance firm surveyed 1,400 employees and 1,500 business executives last fall on their work attitudes. The American worker, they found, is ticked off and hoping to bail out.

“This year’s findings reveal a workforce that has grown more dissatisfied and disloyal, to the point where a startling one in three employees hopes to be working elsewhere in the next 12 months,” the study said.

That’s not surprising after three years of recession, layoffs, wage cuts and benefit reductions. Some companies treat employees like light bulbs. Burn them out; throw them away.

“Employees aren’t feeling the love,” says Leopold. Instead, they’re feeling the whip. According to the study, 40 percent of us worked harder last year, while 25 percent felt less secure in their jobs.

“These burnt-out employees are the most likely to say that they hope to be working elsewhere in 2011,” the study said.

For the moment, employers can ignore this. There aren’t many jobs to flee to.

Workers “hold on like little barnacles to the side of the ship when things are bad. As soon as things loosen up, they’ll go,” says Rose Jonas, who bills her Clayton career coaching business as the Job Doctor.

Employers are still concentrating on cutting costs (you and I are costs), and not worrying much about how they’ll retain workers when the boom resumes.

That might be a mistake. “When people leave an organization, the top achievers leave first,” notes David Hults, a Sunset Hills career coach.

Unemployment is coming down

Rumours of Rona

Prime Minister Stephen Harper spent much of Canada’s televised debate last night fending off opposition attacks that he’s misspent public funds and undermined the country’s finances with business tax reductions.

Harper, and leaders of the Liberal, New Democratic and Bloc Quebecois parties, squared off over the economy, health care, crime, international affairs, and immigration at a government conference center in Ottawa.

Harper, 51, countered the criticism by saying opposition parties triggered elections unnecessarily, adding the tax cuts were approved by Parliament four years ago and their reversal would undermine the nation’s economic outlook. A French-language debate will be held tonight.

Canada “is emerging from this recession stronger and faster than just about anyone,” Harper said. “That’s what we need Parliament to focus on. That’s why we’re asking for a renewed mandate.”

At stake in the vote is leadership of the world’s 10th- largest economy, which grew at the fastest pace among Group of Seven nations in the fourth quarter. Canada’s currency has been the strongest in the G-7 over the past two years. Government bonds have returned 4.6 percent over the past year as of April 11, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch index data, compared with a 2.7 percent average for the G-7.

Key Message

Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, 63, has yet to shrink the roughly 10 percentage-point lead that Harper has held through the campaign, which began March 26. He kept to his key message last night, attacking Harper for agreeing to buy 65 of Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT)’s F-35 fighter jets, building “mega-prisons” and moving ahead with corporate tax cuts.

Polls suggest the Conservatives would win the most seats in the election, although it isn’t clear if they would win a majority. The Conservatives were supported by 39.7 percent of decided voters, followed by 31.2 percent who supported the Liberals, according to a CTV/Globe/Nanos election survey published yesterday. The telephone survey of 1,200 people was conducted April 10-12 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 pay day loan lenders.8 percent.

Harper, who has been prime minister since 2006, won 38 percent of the vote in 2008 elections, which gave the Conservatives 143 seats in the 308-member House of Commons. He has never held a majority of seats in the Parliament.

“The prime minister simply had to get through the debate and I think he did,” said John Wright of polling company Ipsos Reid in Toronto. “Not a lot of minds were changed tonight.”

The format of the debate had the four party leaders in a semi-circle, standing in front of podiums. Questions were submitted by Canadians and videotaped earlier. Harper rarely looked at the other leaders while responding to questions, speaking to the camera and the television audience.

Misused Funds

The three opposition leaders often ganged up on the Conservative leader over media articles that cited a draft report by Auditor General Sheila Fraser, which said the government misused funds hosting last year’s Group of Eight nations leaders’ summit.

“This wasn’t stimulus; this was just scattering money around to build gazebos and fake lakes, and Canadians don’t have confidence in your management because you waste public money,” Ignatieff said. Harper said all funds were fully accounted for.

Fraser, in a statement released April 11, said she is prohibited from releasing her report on costs associated with last year’s G-8 leaders’ summit until Parliament resumes.

New Democratic Leader Jack Layton, 60, whose party held 36 seats in the 308-seat House of Commons, said both of the main parties have failed Canadians and urged voters to give him a mandate to run the country.

“You have a choice, contrary to what some might try to suggest,” Layton said. “You’ve got a great chance to exercise that choice by voting New Democrat.”

Stop Majority

Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe, 63, who runs a regional party that runs candidates only in the French-speaking province, said Quebec voters need to stop the Conservatives from forming a majority.

“The Bloc is still the only party in Quebec able to stop Stephen Harper,” Duceppe said.

About two hours before the debate began, about 200 supporters of the various parties gathered in front of Ottawa’s Government Conference Centre, trading chants and mostly good- natured insults.

A Green Party supporter, Anika Sparling, stood in front of the hall with a piece of duct tape over her mouth to symbolize the exclusion of party leader Elizabeth May from the debate. Sparling, 20, removed the tape long enough to give her name, age, home town of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, and say that she was a student at Ottawa’s Carleton University.

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A year after a public spat with Beijing over censorship, Google Inc. says its business with Chinese advertisers is growing even as the Internet giant’s share of online searches in China plunges.

A major Chinese portal announced last week it would no longer use Google for search, compounding its rapid loss of market share since March last year when it closed its local search engine. The future of a Google map service that is a key part of its remaining appeal in China is in doubt.

Google’s main presence in China has become its advertising sales offices, an unusual situation for a company that dominates the Internet elsewhere.

Google risked being completely shut out of China after it angered Beijing by announcing last January it no longer wanted to comply with Web censorship. It dodged that fate but without a flagship local online presence, analysts say Google will fall further behind local industry leader Baidu Inc. as a search provider, while the controversy makes it hard to line up Chinese partners for other ventures.

“Chinese companies will think twice before they can have any kind of relationship with Google,” said Edward Yu, president of Analysys International, a research firm in Beijing.

Google, based in Mountain View, California, says it sees its biggest opportunities in China in selling advertising on behalf of local websites or to companies that want to reach customers abroad through its global sites.

Google was allowed to keep advertising sales offices in China. Beijing had an incentive to let those stay, because they benefit local websites and advertisers.

“Google’s revenue in China has grown year-on-year,” said a company spokeswoman, Jessica Powell, in an e-mail. “Our business in China is doing well. We have hundreds of partners _ large and small _ who we continue to work with.”

Yet its public relationship with Beijing is chilly. After Chinese authorities stepped up Web censorship following pro-democracy protests in the Middle East, Google said last month the government was obstructing access to its Gmail e-mail service and trying to make the blockage look like a technical problem. The government denied the accusation.

This week, the government newspaper Economic Daily said three Google units that deal with research and development, customer support and advertising were under investigation for possible tax offenses. State media played up the report and one newspaper called the company “Brother Trouble,” a play on its Chinese name. Google said in a statement, “We believe we are, and always have been, in full compliance with Chinese tax law.”

Mainland users can reach Google’s Chinese-language site in Hong Kong, a self-governing Chinese territory without Web censorship. That comes with a big drawback: Beijing’s filters can make access sluggish, reducing the site’s appeal in China, which has more than 450 million people online.

Google does not break out sales by country, but Analysys estimated its 2010 China revenue at 2 personal business card.6 billion yuan ($409 million) _ or less than 1.5 percent of Google’s global revenues of $29.3 billion.

Last year’s dispute testified to the complex Internet landscape in China, which promotes Web use for business and education but has strict controls on content and blocks social media sites including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Google’s China site still offers music downloads, business services and other features that are not subject to censorship. Users can click a link to reach the Hong Kong site.

Google’s share of China’s search traffic fell to 19.6 percent in the final quarter of 2010 from 30.9 percent in the first quarter, according to Analysys. It said Baidu’s share rose to 75 percent.

Citigroup analyst Alicia Yap said data from other researchers show an even sharper plunge in Google’s traffic share to 11 percent in the fourth quarter while Baidu rose to 84 percent.

Google still is China’s second-most-popular search service based on use of the Hong Kong site and others abroad. It leads rivals such as Sogou, Tencent Soso and Zhongsou, which have market shares at or below 1 percent.

But the lack of a local presence will hurt as competition for new users spreads to mobile phones and the countryside, where users speak little English and will want a Chinese search engine, Yu said.

“Baidu is in a very good position to grab more market share,” he said.

In a new blow to its public visibility, a leading a Chinese portal, Sina.com, said this week it would no longer use Google. The search giant has ended a series of such partnerships as it stopped providing censored results.

Baidu has expanded aggressively, rolling out new services in the past year in an effort to differentiate a company long seen as a Google imitator.

New competitors including state media also are jumping into the market with search and social media products. The government’s Xinhua News Agency launched a search engine last year in a partnership with state-owned China Mobile Ltd., the world’s biggest phone carrier by subscribers.

Google faces another challenge from new regulations that tighten control over online map services. On Thursday, the deadline to apply for licenses, Google said it was “in discussions with the government about how we could offer a maps product in China.”

“Google maps is one of the services that people still like a lot,” said Yap. “If they can’t provide the service in the future, people will use Google less and less.”

Yu said Google’s situation might change if a planned handover of power next year from President Hu Jintao and other Chinese leaders to a younger generation leads to a shift in official attitudes.

“New officials will be in place,” he said, “so things could change at that time.”

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Japan’s top government spokesman says Tokyo is willing to accept U.S. help in dealing with the country’s nuclear crisis, and is discussing the matter with Washington.

Top government spokesman Yukio Edano says that “We are coordinating with the U.S. government as to what the U.S. can provide and what people really need.”

He says: “We have repeatedly asked for specific support, and indeed, they are responding to that.”

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

YAMAGATA, Japan (AP) _ Japan’s nuclear safety agency says smoke is rising from a building housing a damaged nuclear reactor at a power plant crippled by last week’s tsunami payday loans guaranteed no fax.

A spokesman for Japan’s nuclear safety agency said the smoke was seen rising from Unit 2 at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant on Friday morning. The spokesman says the agency does not know the cause, but an explosion occurred in Unit 2 earlier in the week, possibly damaging a chamber next to the reactor core.

Meanwhile, the utility that runs the nuclear plant says workers are laying a cable to restore power to the cooling systems. The military is also preparing to spray more water on the plant by helicopter and fire trucks.

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The Bank of Korea may raise borrowing costs again as early as March to counter inflation pressures after unexpectedly leaving policy unchanged yesterday.

Governor Kim Choong Soo and his officials held the seven- day repurchase rate at 2.75 percent in a split decision, after economists had forecast a quarter-point increase.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and HSBC Holdings Plc say the next move will be next month after inflation breached the central bank’s 4 percent ceiling last month and producer prices jumped the most in two years. President Lee Myung Bak’s government pledged yesterday to boost imports of pork and milk powder and review oil pricing in the latest efforts to restrain prices.

“The Bank of Korea still has a long way to go,” Kim Song Yi and Frederic Neumann, economists at HSBC, said yesterday, adding that the normalization of monetary policy has “barely begun.” They see the key rate at 3.75 percent by year-end.

Yesterday’s decision was forecast by only three of 12 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News, with the others predicting a quarter-point move after the bank raised rates by that margin in January.

The won fell 1 percent to close at 1,128.47 per dollar in Seoul yesterday and touched 1,128.70, the weakest level since Jan. 20. The Kospi dropped 1.6 percent, finishing below 2,000 for the first time since Dec. 13.

‘Not Too Slow’

“We will move ahead with normalizing interest rates at a pace that’s not too slow, nor too fast,” Governor Kim said at a press briefing in Seoul.

South Korea’s pause contrasts with the People’s Bank of China this week raising interest rates for the third time since mid-October. While Asian policy makers face heightened inflation risks as money flows into the region, Korean officials may still be assessing the effects of last month’s boost to borrowing costs after economic growth cooled in the fourth quarter.

Consumer prices rose 4.1 percent last month from a year earlier and producer prices jumped 6.2 percent. Inflation may stay at about 4 percent for “some time,” Kim said yesterday.

While policy makers remain concerned about inflationary pressures, higher borrowing costs could add to the burdens of debt-bearing households, small businesses and low-income earners, he said. Lending to households fell for the first time in 11 months in January.

The Bank of Korea’s decision “failed to stabilize inflation expectations,” said Kwon Young Sun, an economist at Nomura Holdings Inc. in Hong Kong.

Policy Split

Borrowing costs have lagged behind the pace of inflation for 15 straight months, a sign that further rate increases may be warranted. Details of the split among the six members of the monetary-policy board will be disclosed in six weeks’ time, when the minutes of the meeting are released.

“It was a close call, but we thought that it’s more likely for them not to raise this time and pause and signal a hike later in March,” Goohoon Kwon, a Seoul-based economist at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., said on Bloomberg Television. He expects the rate to rise to 3.5 percent by the end of this year.

Policy makers will allow gains by the won, along with rate increases, to cool inflation, Kwon said.

The Bank of Korea targets inflation of 2 percent to 4 percent through 2012 and aims for the midpoint of the range in the medium term. Its policy board raised the benchmark rate by a quarter of a percentage point in July, November and January from a record-low 2 percent.

Foreign Investors

If the Bank of Korea “fails to anchor inflation expectations, foreign investors will question the authorities’ willingness to tackle inflation and may decide to leave the country,” said Kong Dong Rak, a fixed-income analyst at Taurus Investment & Securities Co. in Seoul.

Foreign investors’ net holdings of South Korean debt fell for the second straight month in January.

The central bank forecasts a 4.5 percent economic expansion in 2011, slowing from the 6.1 percent pace last year, and predicts inflation will accelerate to 3.5 percent from 2.9 percent. Asia’s fourth-largest economy expanded 0.5 percent in the three months through December from the previous quarter, when it grew 0.7 percent.

Exports, which account for about half of the $833 billion economy, rose 46 percent in January from a year earlier, the most since August 1988. The resurgence in demand has bolstered earnings at companies including Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s second-largest maker of mobile phones.

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Taiwan’s top smartphone maker HTC said Friday its fourth-quarter earnings more than doubled from a year earlier amid strong demand in global markets.

Net profit for the October-December quarter surged to New Taiwan dollars 14.59 billion ($500 million), up 160 percent from a year earlier, and a 31 percent increase from the third quarter, the company said in a statement.

Unconsolidated revenue totaled NT$104 billion in the final quarter, up from NT$41.07 billion the year before.

HTC experienced fast business growth last year on the strength of its design and production of the first handset based on Google Inc.’s Android operating system.

HTC shipped 24.6 million handsets in total last year, up 111 percent from 2009. First quarter sales are expected to reach 8.5 million handsets this year, officials said.

It’s 4th-generation smartphone _ launched late last year _ will be marketed by U.S. carriers Verizon and AT&T, officials said.

Peter Chou, HTC chief executive, said the company began building its brand awareness globally in 2009 to seize on last year’s “explosive growth” in smartphone demand.

To meet expected double-digit world market growth in 2011, Chou said HTC will double its monthly capacity in its Shanghai factory to 2 million handsets and will consider outsourcing if that becomes necessary.

Chou also said that HTC will branch out into tablet computers, but declined to give details.

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Belgium’s king will make a fresh bid to end the 211-day post-election deadlock that has left the country without a full-time government and fanned concern that Europe’s debt crisis will widen.

Belgium’s 10-year borrowing costs jumped to an almost two- year high last week, prompting business leaders to demand an immediate coalition deal between feuding parties in the Dutch- speaking north and French-speaking south.

“Financial markets will be merciless if the country doesn’t extricate itself from this unprecedented hell as soon as possible,” billionaire financier Albert Frere told Le Soir newspaper.

Belgium is in the crossfire as bond auctions this week in Portugal and Spain will test whether investors have faith in steps by European governments to quell the debt woes haunting the 17-nation euro economy. For the first time, investors view western European government bonds as riskier than emerging- market debt, the Markit iTraxx SovX Western Europe Index of credit-default swaps showed last week.

European leaders may discuss expanding the 750 billion-euro ($965 billion) financial backstop for indebted nations at their next summit, Handelsblatt reported yesterday, citing German government officials it didn’t identify. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said she opposes increasing government-funded aid for euro countries and her chief spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said yesterday that “no decision has been taken about widening the rescue fund.”

Coalition Talks

In Brussels, King Albert II meets today with Johan Vande Lanotte, author of a constitutional compromise that last week failed to jump-start seven-party coalition talks almost seven months after inconclusive federal elections.

Vande Lanotte, a Socialist from the richer Flanders region, awaits a royal response to his plea to be relieved of the job of trying to shepherd the four Flemish and three French-speaking parties back to negotiations that were broken off on Sept. 3.

The caretaker finance minister, Didier Reynders of the French-speaking Liberals, made little headway over the weekend with a call for emergency powers for the current administration to confront the budget shortfall.

Belgium, the third most-indebted euro country after Greece and Italy, needs to save an additional 1.8 billion euros to meet a European Union target of cutting the deficit to 4.1 percent of gross domestic product in 2011 from an estimated 4 check cash advance.8 percent last year.

‘Budgetary Questions’

“We have to work in the coming days on a government with a limited program to deal with the budgetary questions,” Reynders, whose party hasn’t been in the coalition talks, told Het Laatste Nieuws.

The two top Flemish parties rejected that formula, last used to overcome the 194-day deadlock after the election of 2007, then the country’s longest political stalemate.

Belgian 10-year yields rose 16 basis points last week to 4.13 percent, the highest since March 2009. The extra borrowing cost over German bonds, a gauge of the risk of investing in Belgium, has risen to 126 basis points from 79 basis points on election day June 13.

The spotlight shifts later this week to southern Europe for sales of some of the $1.1 trillion that euro-region governments need to borrow on bond markets in 2011. Portugal will auction bonds maturing in 2014 and 2020 on Jan. 12. Spain follows on Jan. 13 with the sale of bonds maturing in 2016.

“If yields drift higher again, then we’ll surely be one step closer to the announcement of rescue packages for these two countries,” Erik Nielsen, London-based chief European economist at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., said in an e-mailed note to investors.

Greece, Ireland

Both countries were the subject of weekend speculation that they will follow Greece and Ireland in tapping European and International Monetary Fund aid to stave off default.

German Finance Ministry spokesman Tobias Romeis yesterday denied as “speculation” a Der Spiegel magazine report that Germany and France are pressing Portugal to fall back on a support package.

Spain was urged in December by a group of European finance ministers to tap the IMF’s Flexible Credit Line, El Mundo newspaper reported yesterday, without saying how it got the information.

“It is possible that market pressure will force Portugal and Spain into seeking external support during 2011,” JPMorgan Chase & Co. economist David Mackie said in a research note.

Portugal’s 10-year yields rose 50 basis points to 7.10 percent last week, while Spain’s rose 6 basis points to 5.51 percent.

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