After three years of rising federal budget deficits, a surge of April tax receipts brought unexpected good news to fiscal policymakers -- the tide of government red ink appears to be receding. The Treasury Department this week reported there would be a $54 billion swing from projected deficit to surplus in the April-to-June quarter, after an unanticipated gush of tax payments poured into the Treasury before the April 15 deadline. That prompted private forecasters to lower their deficit projections for the fiscal year that ends in September.(Washington Post)
Up and down Wall Street yesterday, the refrain on trading desks was: Kirk Kerkorian must see something that we have been missing (in GM). (WSJ)
International Business Machines Corp., stung by weak financial results, will take a pretax charge of $1.3 billion to $1.7 billion to cut jobs and restructure operations, primarily in Western Europe….IBM also signaled that it would turn its focus increasingly toward the lower-cost, higher-growth markets of Eastern Europe. "That clearly is the direction in which IBM should be going," said Bob Djurdjevic, an analyst at Annex Research in Phoenix. "These countries have barely been touched by" information technology. (WSJ)
WASHINGTON — The U.S. government has opened a criminal inquiry into suspected embezzlement by officials who failed to account for almost $100 million they disbursed for Iraqi reconstruction projects, federal investigators said Wednesday. (LA Times)
Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, has expressed "grave and growing concerns about the credibility and independence" of the U.N.'s inquiry, led by Volcker; and he has complained loudly about Volcker's refusal to let Parton and a second investigator cooperate with various congressional committees. (CNS.NEWS)
UNITED NATIONS - Two well-known European supporters of Saddam Hussein received large quantities of oil allocations in a bribery scheme devised under the oil-for-food program to gain political influence, according to a Senate report released yesterday. (NY SUN)
UNITED NATIONS - The United Nations is investigating whether a senior official at one of its agencies, Justin Leites, violated U.N. rules and the organization's spirit of international neutrality by taking a paid leave of absence last year to work as a Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign official in his home state of Maine.(NY SUN)
"If there is no progress, we have to think of other options, such as taking this matter to the United Nations Security Council." (Nobutaka Machimura The Japanese foreign minister threatened on Friday to purse the North Korean nuclear weapons program before the U.N. Security Council next month unless six-nation talks on the dispute show progress.)
UN nuclear watchdog Chief Mohammed ElBaradei has told US television his agency estimates that North Korea could have up to six nuclear weapons. (BBC)
May 6 (Bloomberg) -- Crude oil rose for a third day on concern refiners in the U.S. and Europe will struggle to produce enough gasoline and diesel to meet rising demand.
May 11 (Bloomberg)-- The U.S. trade deficit unexpectedly shrank in March to $55 billion, the narrowest in half a year, as imports of consumer goods fell and exports grew to a record. The deficit dropped 9.2 percent from an all-time high of $60.6 billion in February, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. The median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey of 67 economists called for a deficit of $61.9 billion.
WASHINGTON -- U.S. employers created far more jobs in April than Wall Street expected, suggesting the economy may be regaining speed after hitting a "soft patch" in the first three months of the year. Non-farm payrolls grew by a robust 274,000 last month -- nearly a 100,000 more than financial markets expected, the Labor Department said Friday. The department also said employers created 93,000 more non-farm jobs in March and February, raising the monthly average for the year so far to a healthy 211,000. (WSJ)
The AARP is spending its members' money on opposing personal Social Security accounts, even though the accounts wouldn't affect most of the AARP's current members, who are too old to be affected by the policy changes. Most of the organization's members joined the AARP for discounts at hotels and on insurance, not to fund a lobbying campaign against President Bush's domestic agenda of putting their children's and grandchildren's retirement on a sounder financial footing. In an era with a renewed focus on boards' responsiveness to shareholders, it can't be long before some enterprising regulator, lawyer, or member-activist takes a careful look at what the AARP's self-perpetuating board has been up to in the name of the 35 million members that the group claims to represent (NY SUN)
``This is a case about mutual funds,'' Assistant Attorney General Harold J. Wilson declared simply as he began describing the charges against Theodore Sihpol III, a former broker at Bank of America. (Bloomberg)
``You will see that this defendant, Theodore Sihpol III, motivated by financial gain and to aid and abet a hedge fund to make millions of dollars, intentionally and continually subverted the notion of mutuality.'' (Assistant Attorney General Harold J. Wilson)'
To get a sense of how much prices might drop, check out the early 1990s performance of two of today's hotter (real-estate) markets, Boston and Los Angeles. According to Freddie Mac, prices in the greater Boston area sank 10% during the 30 months through mid-1992, while Los Angeles was hit with a grueling six-year 21% decline. (WSJ)
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