Best financial sourse

China reported a more-than-estimated $11.4 billion trade surplus for April as U.S. officials pushed at talks in Washington for faster gains in the yuan.

Today’s number, released by the customs bureau, compared with a surplus of $140 million the previous month and $1.68 billion a year earlier. Import growth slowed to 21.8 percent in April from a year earlier while exports grew 29.9 percent.

At the start of the two-day Strategic and Economic Dialogue yesterday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said China has been making progress “towards a more flexible exchange rate” and weaning its economy off a dependence on exports. The yuan has strengthened this year to the highest levels since 1993 and the fastest inflation since 2008 may encourage officials to allow more gains to pare import costs.

“The yuan is facing great appreciation pressure” because of inflation, Ma Jun, chief China economist at Deutsche Bank AG, said before the data. Political relations with the U.S. play “a very delicate role” in the nation’s currency policy, he said.

The median forecast of 27 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News was for a $3.2 billion surplus.

The People’s Bank of China set the yuan’s reference rate at a record high of 6.4988 per dollar yesterday and allowed the currency to strengthen 0.9 percent in April, the biggest monthly gain this year.

‘Unjust’ Manipulation

Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, urged the U.S. administration to press China on the currency issue and also said Congress should pass legislation to protect American workers from an undervalued yuan. Brown and Senator Olympia Snowe, a Republican from Maine, have proposed a measure to allow additional sanctions to address currency issues.

“The Obama Administration has a unique opportunity during this meeting to urge Chinese officials to stop the unfair and unjust currency manipulation that threatens American manufacturing and eliminates American jobs,” Brown said in a statement. “China’s unfair currency manipulation has gone on for far too long, and it’s clear that legislation is needed to level the playing field.”

The U.S. has delayed its semi-annual foreign-exchange report, which had been due on April 15, until after this week’s meetings. The previous report, due on Oct. 15, 2010, was released on Feb. 4 and declined to brand China a currency manipulator while saying the No. 2 U.S. trading partner has made “insufficient” progress on allowing the yuan to rise.

China argues that its currency is not a key cause of global economic imbalances, and highlights the role of U.S. restrictions on Chinese purchases of high-technology products in lopsided trade between the two nations.

April Inflation

In China, consumer prices rose 5.4 percent in March, the most in 32 months, and may have climbed 5.2 percent in April, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey. The statistics bureau will release inflation data in Beijing tomorrow.

Exports rose to $155.7 billion in April and imports climbed to $144.3 billion, the customs bureau said today. The median forecast in Bloomberg News surveys was for a 29.5 percent gain in overseas sales and a 28.9 percent jump in inbound shipments.

“The price factors that have boosted the import bill recently are expected to ease markedly due to the recent sharp correction in global commodity prices,” Deutsche Bank’s Ma said.

Commodities had their worst weekly plunge since December 2008 last week, with oil declining 15 percent. Higher fuel and raw-material prices had contributed to the nation recording its first quarterly trade deficit since 2004 in the January-to-March period.

Companies benefiting from the nation’s trade gains this year include Cosco Pacific Ltd., part of China’s largest shipping group. Cosco said it more than doubled first-quarter profit, helped by a 20 percent increase in throughput at its container terminals after it added facilities to cope with rising exports of toys, furniture and auto parts to the U.S. and Europe.

–Victoria Ruan. Editors: Nerys Avery, Paul Panckhurst

To contact Bloomberg News staff on this story: Victoria Ruan in Beijing at +86-10-6649-7570 vruan1@bloomberg.net

Source

Tyson Foods said Monday that its second-quarter earnings were unchanged from a year ago because higher feed costs offset improving demand and higher meat prices.

The company raised prices for chicken, beef and pork, indicating that higher global grain costs are finally working their way to the grocery store meat counter.

CEO Donnie Smith warned investors that the meat industry is still facing at least months of volatility. Higher gasoline prices could crimp consumer demand. At the same time, Tyson’s profits could be squeezed by higher input costs. The company expects feed costs alone to be about $500 million higher during the second half of the fiscal year than they were in 2010.

“We have a wall of costs heading toward us,” Smith told analysts during a conference call.

Its shares tumbled 95 cents, or 5 percent, to $17.94 in morning trading.

The company reported net income was $156 million, or 42 cents per share, in the three months ended March 31. That’s unchanged from $156 million, or 42 cents per share, a year earlier.

The earnings were slightly below the average forecast from analysts surveyed by FactSet of 43 cents per share.

Tyson Foods Inc.’s revenue climbed 16 percent to $8 billion. Analysts expected $7.52 billion. The company said it sold more chicken and pork, but operating income fell 12 percent to $303 million as grain prices rose.

The company said beef prices shot up nearly 20 percent while pork prices jumped 18 percent and chicken prices rose 3.7 percent compared with last year payday loan lenders. Prices for prepared foods rose 11 percent. Overall, prices rose 12 percent across the company’s product lines.

It takes months for higher grain prices to work their way to the grocery store because raw ingredients account for just a fraction of the total cost of food. But meat companies tend to pass on the higher prices first, in part because their products are sold fresh.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts overall meat prices will rise between 6 and 7 percent this year.

Raising prices is key to Tyson’s profitability, because the price of corn is trading near all-time highs. Feed costs are the biggest expense for raising chickens and livestock, and meat companies have been hard pressed to pass on those costs to struggling consumers.

But it appears the market is finally able to support higher prices, with sales volumes rising for chicken and pork, while beef sales fell less than 1 percent amid the price hikes.

Tyson said prepared foods sales fell 4.6 percent during the quarter, indicating that demand is still relatively weak for Tyson’s more expensive, and profitable, products like pre-cooked chicken nuggets. But the lower volumes were offset by an 11.1 percent price hike.

Smith said Tyson expects to match last year’s record net income of $780 million as demand stays strong through the rest of the year.

Source

United Nations investigators on Friday headed to a soccer field in the besieged neighborhood of Yopougon in Ivory Coast’s commercial capital after new reports surfaced that it was being used as a mass grave.

Hamadoun Toure, spokesman for the U.N. mission in Ivory Coast, said by telephone that the Red Cross had received reports from residents that the field was filled with as many as 40 bodies.

“We are told that there is a vast field that is used to play soccer. It is now an open-air cemetery,” he said.

The soccer field is located in Yopougon, an area of the business capital that had voted in large numbers for strongman Laurent Gbagbo, who refused to accept his loss in last November’s presidential election. He was removed militarily in April after unleashing his security forces on the population. Hundreds of people were killed in the months before he was deposed.

His militias are believed to have taken cover in Yopougon, and the neighborhood was the scene of pitched battles until Thursday. The army now backing the country’s democratically elected leader Alassane Ouattara were able to secure the area.

Toure said it’s not clear if the dead were killed by Gbagbo’s forces, or if they are Gbagbo supporters slain in reprisal killings by forces loyal to Ouattara.

Ouattara was prevented from assuming office during the nearly five-month-long standoff with Gbagbo and had lived under 24-hour guard in a resort hotel. He is scheduled to be sworn in at a ceremony in the presidential palace later Friday.

Gbagbo is under house arrest in Korhogo, a town in the interior. His French lawyers traveled to Ivory Coast this week and are due to accompany him to an interview with the police Friday. He is facing possible charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the army in the postelection period.

Source

The data breach that hit Sony’s PlayStation Network resulted from a “very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyber-attack designed to steal personal and credit card information for illegal purposes,” a Sony executive said.

In a letter to members of the House Commerce Committee released Wednesday, Kazuo Hirai, chairman of Sony Computer Entertainment America LLC, defended the company’s handling of the breach.

Sony first disclosed the attack last week and said it may have compromised credit card data, email addresses and other personal information from 77 million user accounts. On Monday, Sony said data from an additional 24.6 million online gaming accounts also may have been stolen.

The company has shut down the affected systems while it investigates the attacks and beefs up security. Hirai said Sony is working “around the clock to get the systems back up and to make sure all our customers are informed of the data breach and our responses to it.”

Addressing criticism that the company waited too long to inform customers, Hirai said Sony waited until it had a solid understanding and confirmation of the extent of the attack and its implications.

“Throughout the process, Sony Network Entertainment America was very concerned that announcing partial or tentative information to consumers could cause confusion and lead them to take unnecessary actions if the information was not fully corroborated by forensic evidence,” he wrote.

Although Sony began investigating unusual activity on the PlayStation network on April 19, it did not notify consumers of the breach until April 26.

Hirai’s letter said the company knows who is responsible for the attack and is working with outside security and forensics consultants and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The letter also noted that the breach came on the heels of large-scale, coordinated denial-of-service attacks launched by a loose international group of hackers called Anonymous against several Sony operations in retaliation for a complaint filed by the company against a hacker in U no fax payday loan.S. District Court in San Francisco.

On Sunday Sony discovered that intruders had planted a file named “Anonymous” on one server that had been breached, Hirai said. Late last year, Anonymous distributed hacking software to be used against companies that stopped doing business with the anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks after it released thousands of classified government documents.

Hirai’s letter added that Sony may not have immediately detected the PlayStation breach in part because its security teams were busy trying to defend against the denial-of-service attacks.

“Whether those who participated in the denial-of-service attacks were conspirators or whether they were simply duped into providing cover for a very clever thief, we may never know,” Hirai wrote.

Hirai was one of three Sony executives who bowed in apology for the data breaches for several seconds at the company’s Tokyo headquarters on Sunday.

His letter was in response to an inquiry by Rep. Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif., who chairs the House Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade, and Rep. G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina, the subcommittee’s top Democrat.

Sony officials were invited to testify at a subcommittee hearing on data breaches held Wednesday, but did not appear.

One witness, David Vladeck, director of Federal Trade Commission’s bureau of consumer protection, during his testimony called for legislation that would require companies to implement reasonable data security policies and procedures, and notify consumers in the event of a breach.

Source

ST. LOUIS

Stock in Lee Enterprises rose 5 percent Monday after the company announced plans to refinance $1.05 billion in loans.

The publisher, owner of the St no fax payday advances. Louis Post-Dispatch and other newspapers, said it would issue bonds to replace virtually all its debt. Moody’s Investor Services rated the company Caa1

Federal regulators say the number of banks on their confidential “problem” list increased by 24 in the final quarter of last year, even as the industry continued to heal with the recovering economy.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. reported Wednesday that banks earned $21.7 billion in the fourth quarter. That compared with a net loss of $1.8 billion a year earlier. The agency said bank earnings were buoyed in the latest quarter by reduced charges for soured loans.

The FDIC called 2010 a turnaround year for the banking industry, with net income reaching a three-year high of $87 bad credit payday loans.5 billion. It contrasted with a loss of $10.6 billion in 2009.

The FDIC said the number of troubled banks rose to 884 in the quarter from 860 in the third quarter. That was the slowest rate of increase to the problem list since the first quarter of 2008.

Source

Portuguese train engineers went on strike Tuesday, stoking pressure on the government as it cuts pay and hikes taxes to tackle a debt crisis that is threatening to engulf the country.

Thousands of commuters were left stranded during morning rush hour as the national rail company said over 90 percent of trains didn’t run.

Portugal ran up high debts during the past decade amid frail growth, and the government is scrambling to avoid asking for a bailout like the ones needed by fellow eurozone countries Greece and Ireland last year.

But the interest rate on Portuguese 10-year bonds rose to 7.46 percent Tuesday _ not far shy of the level that forced Dublin to ask for help.

The battle to solve Portugal’s financial crisis is taking a political and financial toll, and the country’s failure to escape a bailout would add new momentum to Europe’s economic troubles.

European finance ministers meeting in Brussels on Monday announced no new decisions on boosting the size and powers of the bloc’s fund to rescue its heavily-indebted members. The delay is worrying markets, and investors are asking for higher returns on what are perceived as risky loans to Portugal _ compounding the country’s already huge financial problems.

Finance Minister Fernando Teixeira dos Santos said in Brussels he wanted the European fund to be able to buy bonds on the open market, thereby helping to stabilize their prices, but finding a compromise among the 17 nations that use the euro was proving hard.

“This process is taking longer than it ought to, in my opinion, and I think the delays and hesitation in taking the steps we need are affecting the eurozone and the stabilization of the euro and, consequently, all the countries which belong to the eurozone,” Teixeira dos Santos told Portuguese media.

Portugal plans to raise up to euro1 billion ($1.3 billion) in a sale of 12-month Treasury bills Wednesday. So far it has had no problems getting funds on international markets, but the rates are punishingly high.

The center-left Socialist government says it reduced the budget deficit to 7.3 percent last year from 9.6 percent _ the fourth-highest in the eurozone _ in 2009. Its austerity plan aims to cut the deficit to 4.6 percent this year.

However, analysts expect the money-saving measures to send Portugal into recession. That would hurt tax revenue and place further stress on the budget, which is already being drained by high interest rates on its borrowings and increased welfare payments resulting from an unemployment rate close to 11 percent.

There was some good news for the minority government, though, when a small party said it would abstain from a no-confidence vote, ensuring the attempt to force an early election will fail.

The Left Bloc, a small, radical party which competes for support with the Communist Party, intends to present the motion in Parliament on March 10. The Popular Party announced late Monday it would abstain in the vote.

The government is also resisting a popular outcry against the austerity package, which includes a 5 percent pay cut for staff at state-owned companies this year. Those companies have total debts of more than euro21 billion ($28.2 billion) with public transport companies, including the national rail company.

The government is demanding that state companies save 15 percent on operating costs this year.

Tuesday’s rail strike was the latest in a wave of walkouts.

Source

Wal-Mart CEO Mike Duke leads the world’s biggest retailer, which has 2.1 million employees and serves 200 million customers each week. He crisscrosses the globe every month, yet still finds time to spend with his family.

Here are excerpts from a recent interview Duke did with The Associated Press in New York:

Q. When does the day start for you?

A. I usually get up between 5:30 and 6. The good news in Bentonville, Arkansas, is I can be in the office seven minutes later. I like to get in, work on e-mails and catch up. I like to have no e-mails (in my inbox).

Q. How does a CEO keep his inbox empty?

A. If you looked at my garage, you’d probably see there’s a relationship between my garage and my e-mail. I just don’t like things undone. I’d rather work five minutes longer and have it (done) today than to carry five minutes over (to) tomorrow and start tomorrow five minutes in the hole.

Q. How do you balance the nitty-gritty of the business with looking at the big picture?

A. If I spend all of my day in the details as a CEO of a company like Wal-Mart, I think it would be trouble, because I wouldn’t really be prepared to speak to the big issues that the country or the world should face. But at the same time, if you spend all of the time at 50,000 feet, (you) really are not out talking to customers and know real people. … I think it’s often the interaction directly with customers in the details of their family and their issues is what inspires me to want to help solve the big issues.

Q. Consumers retrenched during the Great Recession. Which habits are sticking?

A. Customers are shopping smarter, and I think customers are proud of that. It can be the customer that has to shop smarter because of maybe limited income, but also the middle-income and higher-income customer wants to shop smarter today. They want to feel proud of the way that they use their financial resources.

Q. Wal-Mart has struggled more than competitors to grow its revenue post-recession. Part of that was veering away from everyday low prices and part was weeding out too many products and brands. How do you react when Wal-Mart makes a mistake?

A. I don’t know that there’s a business model that says, `You’re going to empower the organization. You’re going to experiment. You’re going to change and try new things all the time, but you’re not going to make any mistakes.’ I’m probably not willing to commit that we’re positioned to do that.

Q. How often do you check Wal-Mart’s stock price?

A. Maybe every other day … I look at sales every day, and customer traffic, and (the) average (shopping) basket. I look to see how we’re doing in Brazil and the UK and China every day low fee payday loans. I don’t necessarily check the stock price every day. I think if I were a shareholder and the CEO spent all of his time focused on the share price, then I would probably be concerned, because the share price follows the results of the company.

Q. Wal-Mart’s reputation seems to have improved markedly. Is that a function of the recession?

A. It’s interesting the letters I get from mayors that want Wal-Mart to look and invest in their community. I like to start with looking in the mirror, and I think we have improved and changed who we are in many ways. I think we are more desirable to come to a community. … I think we’ve done a better job of communicating about the jobs that we create and the opportunity that we create in the area of jobs.

Q. What ideals from Sam Walton do you embrace?

A. (Leadership is) about showing respect to every individual, about humility over arrogance, about listening and getting feedback from a broad array of constituents. It’s about a passion for customers and knowing customers firsthand, not theoretical, not through some data only, but by having personal, passionate communication with customers. And leadership is about striving for excellence. It’s about setting aggressive goals and not being afraid to go after very aggressive goals and targets. I think it’s even better for a leader to set an aggressive goal and come up a little short than it would be to set a soft goal and to exceed it.

Q. What should a leader value most?

A. Integrity and trust. If a leader doesn’t have the trust of associates, of customers, of shareholders, then all the other things, the ability to speak eloquently and to sing and dance and entertain, (don’t) mean a thing if a leader’s not trusted.

Q: Outside of the results of the company and the stock price, how do you know how you are doing at Wal-Mart? How are you evaluated?

A: Hard feedback is in some environments viewed in a very threatening way, and people don’t want to hear feedback. In our environment, I think there is a desire to hear candid feedback. When we leave a meeting, before we’ll even drive away, I’ll ask, `Well, give me feedback.’ I think a leader asking for feedback sets a good tone.

Q. Does work ever stop for you?

A. I do spend really focused time with my wife, my kids, grandkids, and so when I’m doing something or on a golf course, work has stopped. I’m not always thinking and working. … I think a leader has to really be a balanced, whole and healthy person personally in order to be the best leader on the job.

Source

In the late 1990s, Marty Tenenbaum was a hotshot e-commerce entrepreneur riding high on the dot-com boom when he noticed a lump on his body.

His doctor told him it was nothing, but when he finally had it removed, he learned he had melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer.

He beat the disease, but he never got over the sense of frustration he felt as he clawed his way through the maze of treatment options, clinical trials and research in search of a way to survive.

Now 67, Tenenbaum still believes he would not have made it if he hadn’t had personal connections at the National Cancer Institute who guided him toward cutting-edge experimental treatments that saved his life.

The experience convinced him that the key to advancing cancer treatment and research is forging connections on as large a scale as possible. On Tuesday, he plans to launch a Web application to bring together patients, physicians and scientists regardless of where they work, live or went to college in hopes that the so-called wisdom of the crowd can lead to the best therapies.

“I’m just trying to pull together all the pieces that are needed to do a real, rational attack on cancer,” Tenenbaum says. The way to do that, he says, is to pull people out of their individual labs, offices and hospitals to collaborate in a way not possible before the Web and mobile technologies made it easy to pool vast amounts of information.

“How much of cancer could be turned into a manageable disease if we only knew what we knew?”

Tenenbaum is one of a growing number of supporters of the so-called open science movement, which calls for greater sharing of research and the lowering of institutional, financial, legal and geographical barriers to bringing the best minds and data together to solve science’s toughest problems.

In its fledgling form, the Cancer Commons app integrates the existing data on different forms of melanoma and the most promising experimental treatments. Patients or their doctors input how far the disease has progressed, where it started and whether tests have discovered any specific genetic mutations believed to contribute to the cancer’s spread.

From that information, the app tells patients what specific cancer “subtype” they have as determined by an expert panel. They also learn what drugs have shown the most promise in treating that specific form of the disease and where clinical trials are being conducted that could allow patients access to that treatment.

The app itself was built by CollabRx, Tenenbaum’s for-profit health care startup. It’s free for doctors and patients. The company would make money through pharmaceutical company sponsorships of different apps, though Cancer Commons does not endorse specific drugs.

The data itself generated by the Cancer Commons project will be free and available for anyone to use, Tenenbaum says.

At Harvard University’s Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. Keith Flaherty studies melanoma treatments and sees patients with the most advanced forms of the disease. He volunteered to help lead the Cancer Commons melanoma project, which he says lets doctors and patients plug into a complex collection of data distilled into a simple set of treatment options.

Though Flaherty treats only melanoma, oncologists across the country are called on to treat all kinds of cancers. They don’t have time to troll through obscure journals or websites to become experts on every variation of the disease, Flaherty says. An app like Cancer Commons lets those physicians plug into the knowledge of researchers like himself directly, he says.

“It’s to empower that doctor with the same information we have access to.” The hope is that patients also will be better able to advocate for themselves.

As the service expands, Tenenbaum also plans to make it possible for physicians and patients to add their own data on what has worked and what hasn’t. While researchers cannot rely on one person’s experience alone as a measure of success or failure, Flaherty says researchers could sift a large enough collection of anecdotes for leads.

The ease of sharing information among scientists and between nonscientists and professional researchers are two key developments made possible by the Internet that open science advocates say could speed discoveries.

“We have a chance at a new kind of digitally enabled collaboration,” says Joseph Jackson, organizer of the Open Science Summit at the University of California, Berkeley last summer. “But the hardest thing to do is change human behaviors and practices.”

Jackson is also working to help open a community biotech lab in Silicon Valley intended to provide space for ideas and research to take place outside traditional academic and corporate venues.

The San Francisco-based Science Commons project helps research institutions and scientific journals find ways to make valuable scientific data more widely available.

The group sees bright spots in their effort, such as the National Institutes of Health’s mandate that all NIH-funded research be made available free to the public within a year of being published.

But big challenges remain, both technological and in the culture of how science is done, says Alan Ruttenberg, principal scientist at Science Commons.

Ruttenberg focuses on solving the problem of “data integration”: how to put different scientific databases together to enable researchers to find new connections. Part of that effort involves developing a common language for data that Ruttenberg hopes someday will make possible a search engine for science.

“We ought to be able to ask a scientific question about anything that’s been done and get a straight answer to that,” he says.

Source