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The violence in Egypt is already hurting the country’s tourism industry, and in turn, its economy. It’s also raising fears that other Middle Eastern countries will suffer as well.

Many U.S. travelers have canceled trips to Egypt. Some tour operators are avoiding the country, and Delta Air Lines and EgyptAir suspended flights from the U.S. to Cairo. Stock markets in the Middle East fell sharply during the weekend.

Travelers faced the same question as Rob Solow, who is booked on an Egyptian getaway in February with his wife. “Is it going to be an issue where we are going to have to watch our backs the whole time?”

The Yorktown Heights, N.Y., couple aren’t sure if they’ll make the trip. But Solow said he won’t be going to the Middle East in the future: “I just think it’s a troubled part of the world that’s not necessary to visit.”

The timing of the violence and political uncertainty couldn’t be worse _ winter is the high season for visitors. Large tour operators such as Gate 1 Travel and cruise companies including Norwegian Cruise Line have canceled Egyptian stops. Tours elsewhere in the Middle East haven’t been canceled, but travel agents are getting a steady stream of inquiries about the status of planned trips.

“The ones who haven’t booked are holding off and the ones who have are trying to get out of it,” says Blake Fleetwood, owner of several Cook Travel businesses around New York.

Tourism is a major industry in Egypt, a country that struggles with poverty. It accounts for 5 percent to 6 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, according to several estimates. Egypt is also often a starting point for people exploring Jordan and parts of Northern Africa.

Cairo International Airport is the second-largest airport in Africa after Johannesburg, handling roughly 16 million passengers a year. Most of them _ 15 million a year _ are tourists, according to the Egyptian Tourist Authority in New York.

Investors were clearly concerned the turmoil could spread. Dubai’s major stock market index fell more than 4 percent Sunday, while stocks fell nearly 2 percent in Kuwait and 3 percent in Qatar. Saudi Arabia’s main index rose 2.5 percent, but that was a partial recovery from a 6.5 percent drop on Saturday.

Oil prices spiked 4.3 percent on Friday on fears that the Suez Canal might be closed. Roughly 3,500 oil tankers a year plus thousands of other cargo ships travel through the canal on their way from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the canal was shut down for eight years. A closure today would add 6,000 miles to trips as ships detour around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. Those trips would risk the threat of attack by Somali pirates.

The region’s real economic power player is Dubai, whose airport saw 47.2 million passengers in 2010, according to the Airports Council International. Government-backed Emirates Airlines has also turned Dubai into the region’s cargo hub and FedEx bases it Middle East operations there.

“To affect the (tourism) industry globally, unrest would need to spread to places like Dubai, which is a major port and air hub. This looks very unlikely,” says Ann Wyman, head of emerging market research at investment bank Nomura in London.

Still, Egypt’s problems follow political strife in Lebanon, Yemen, and earlier this month, Tunisia. That has led to a general wariness about the region.

Airlines from Arab states lining the Persian Gulf were still flying in and out of Cairo. Some have had to rearrange their schedules due to the unrest and curfews put in place by Egyptian authorities. The Mideast’s biggest airline, Emirates, advised passengers to “reconsider nonessential travel” but said it was operating on schedule from its Dubai hub.

John Strickland, a London-based aviation consultant, said the turmoil’s effect on the region’s airline industry is yet to be determined. EgyptAir is likely to suffer most, and Gulf carriers could also face trouble, he said. But Strickland said Emirates in particular has shown it can bounce back following challenges including the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

It is not clear how long tourists and businesses might avoid the Middle East, and therefore, how much of an impact the situation in Egypt will have on other countries in the area. Jordanian economist Hani Horani said: “Foreign tourists look at the Middle East as one entity and they will avoid traveling to an area they consider unstable.”

Tourism accounts for 14 percent of Jordan’s GDP. Horani thinks its trade with its neighbor Egypt “will be negatively affected by the turmoil,” he said.

Tourism in the Middle East has recovered after wars and unrest in the past. Egypt has had a number of terrorist acts aimed at tourists. A 1997 attack killed 62 people, including 58 tourists at ruins in Luxor’s Valley of the Kings. But the violence hasn’t deterred visitors from coming to see the pyramids, cruise the Nile River and tour Cairo’s markets.

Lebanon’s recent political turmoil is likely to scare off Western travelers. But the Lebanese capital, Beirut, has repeatedly proven repeatedly its resilience, emerging from civil war and conflict with Israel to rebuild and live up to its image as the “Switzerland of the Middle East” _ a reference to the snow-capped mountains as well as its banking laws.

“People’s memories are surprisingly short,” says Janet Moore, owner of Distant Horizons, a Long Beach, Calif., travel agency specializing in the Middle East.

For now, though, many Americans are staying away. Moore predicts that 80 percent of her customers who have already booked trips to Egypt will try to cancel. And she doesn’t expect any calls for new bookings during the next six months. Moore expects travel to the rest of the region, including Israel and Lebanon, to be hurt too.

“People will fear that the whole region will be falling apart,” Moore says. “I think the next year is going to be a quiet one.”

Not everybody is so worried. Malaka Hilton owns Admiral Travel International in Sarasota, Fla., specializing in Egypt. The biggest concern for her clients: a government curfew from 6 p.m. to 7 a.m., essentially trapping tourists in hotels.

One of those clients, Robert Kendis, 67, and his wife Hilary, 55, have been planning a three-week trip to Egypt since May. The Cleveland couple is supposed to fly to Cairo Tuesday but Delta has indefinitely suspended flights. If flights resume, the couple is going.

“This is not a civil war. This is a civil protest concerning their government,” says Robert Kendis, an attorney. “It’s not like they are shooting at each other. It’s not like what you would see in Afghanistan or Iraq.”

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Many investors have dramatically expanded their vocabulary over the past few months.

On a smoke break or huddled around the water cooler they

China is pushing ahead of the U.S. and Europe in developing clean- and low-carbon energy as a way to spur the nation’s economy, the diplomat leading United Nations Climate talks said.

“China is going to leave all of us in the dust,” Christiana Figueres, head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said at a panel discussion today at the World Economic Forum today in Davos, Switzerland. “They’re committed to winning the green economy race.

China last year boosted spending on low-carbon energy by 30 percent to $51.1 billion, ‘‘by far the largest figure for any country,’’ Bloomberg New Energy Finance said Jan. 11. Global accounting firm Ernst & Young said in September that China for the first time overtook the U.S. in its quarterly index of the most attractive countries for renewable energy projects.

‘‘You can leapfrog — you don’t have to follow the model of the north,’’ Figueres said. ‘‘China is showing this.’’

Chinese officials including lead climate negotiator Su Wei have said the country will push energy efficiency in its next five-year plan to be detailed this year.

At today’s panel, Mexican President Felipe Calderon said the world is waiting for action from the U.S. in fighting climate change, while European Union Commissioner for Climate Action Connie Hedegaard said that U.S. businesses stand to lose out by stalling in taking action.

‘‘American business should be aware that we’re up here saying this is a race,” Hedegaard said. “It’s bad economics, it’s bad business not to be among the front runners but to be hesitating. I hope that even more American business people would understand that they need to put the pressure on their politicians.”

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United Continental Holdings Inc. said it lost $325 million in the fourth quarter because of expenses from combining United and Continental airlines.

Excluding those costs, the world’s biggest airline earned $160 million, or 44 cents per share, topping the expectations of Wall Street analysts, as passengers paid more to fly.

Revenue rose 15 percent to $8.4 billion.

Increased fares and traffic have helped the airline industry report improved fourth-quarter results. But rising fuel costs are a concern. United Continental paid $2 cash advance to savings account.5 billion for fuel in the last three months of 2010, up 27 percent from a year ago.

United and Continental closed their merger on Oct. 1, and are now working to combine the two airlines. More than 200 planes have been repainted with United’s name and Continental’s globe logo on the tail. The company has also begun to integrate some computer systems.

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You might think this is a great time for the offshore-banking industry. There is a lot of spare cash sloshing around the world. The mega-rich are still piling up money. Taxes are likely to go up as every developed country tries to cope with huge deficits, creating even more incentive to shift money to some island hideaway.

But it’s not so easy anymore.

A former Julius Baer Group Ltd. banker has handed over the names of hundreds of high-profile clients with offshore bank accounts to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks.

The old model of secrecy and confidentiality is dead. In an age of hyper-transparency, when everything is revealed about everyone, it is useless to think they can keep their client affairs quiet.

Instead, the offshore banks must adapt or die. Instead of being secrecy hubs, they should be low-tax ones. That is the only way they can survive.

These are nervous times for the smartly suited private bankers of Geneva, Liechtenstein and Grand Cayman.

Rudolf Elmer, the former Julius Baer staffer, has the potential to blow the business sky-high. He has handed over a pile of data on about 2,000 accounts to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. The material hasn’t been published online yet, but it’s only a matter of time before it turns up somewhere. It will make fascinating reading for financial journalists, real-estate agents, and, more importantly, tax inspectors in the home countries of the people on Elmer’s list.

Elmer Appeal

The Swiss are fighting back. A court found Elmer guilty of breaking that country’s bank-secrecy laws, though he is appealing that verdict. He faces additional charges regarding the handing-over of data to WikiLeaks.

It wasn’t the first time offshore banking has been attacked. In 2008, a former employee of the Liechtenstein bank LGT sold the details of hundreds of clients to the German tax authorities.

If nations will pay good money to staff willing to reveal who has cash stashed away in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands, it is likely that somebody will decide to take it. Likewise, if websites such as WikiLeaks are willing and able to publish vast quantities of sensitive data, we can only assume that more and more sources will come forward.

Disaffected Banker

There is always a disaffected banker somewhere in the system. In the past, he or she might have grumbled in a bar. That was harmless. Now, they can use the Internet to get revenge on a spectacular scale paydayloans.

The authorities in offshore-banking centers can hit back if they want to. They can prosecute the whistleblowers, and they may well have a point: There’s nothing commendable about selling stolen data, or breaking laws that protect financial secrecy.

In reality, they are fighting a losing battle.

Technology has made secrecy about anything almost impossible. It is too easy to e-mail account details to a website or blog where they can be published at the press of a button. Just about everything you might want to know about anyone can be found out on Facebook or Google.

We live in an age of hyper-transparency. Our whole lives are recorded online somewhere. We have little respect for old- fashioned ideas of privacy. It is crazy to think finance is somehow exempt from that. It can no more step aside from it than it can from any other aspect of the modern world.

So what should the offshore banking industry do?

Go Elsewhere

First, quit trying to fight it. It won’t work, and you’ll only end up looking stupid, at best, and nasty, at worst. If the U.S. government can’t stop WikiLeaks from publishing sensitive military information, small nations won’t be able to prevent the release of this kind of data. There will always be another whistleblower — and you can’t prosecute them all. So just tell your clients their financial details may well be published somewhere. If they can’t live with that, they can go elsewhere.

Two, create tax havens. Technology isn’t just a threat, it’s also an opportunity. Publishing data is now easier, but businesses and people are more mobile than ever. Work doesn’t have to be done in any particular place anymore, and the higher up the ladder you get, the truer that is.

Monaco doesn’t charge people income tax, so if you go to live there, you don’t have to worry about tax evasion. No crime has been committed. Emerging markets, such as Bulgaria, only charge a flat tax of 10 percent. You hardly need to hide money offshore if you live there, either. The point is that financial centers need to be low-tax hubs, rather than secrecy hubs.

The old model of banking confidentiality is dead. That might be a good or bad thing. But it’s a fact, and there is no point in trying to resist it. The offshore-banking industry has to adapt to that — or else it will die.

(Matthew Lynn is a Bloomberg News columnist and the author of “Bust,” a book on the Greek debt crisis. The opinions expressed are his own.)

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Most of us might be cursing the cold weather, but for ski resorts and other parts of Ontario

It should come as no surprise that Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America Corp., wants to put 2010 behind him.

“Last year was a necessary repair and rebuilding year,” Moynihan said Friday. His comments came as the nation’s largest bank reported a fourth-quarter loss of $1.6 billion and a full-year loss of $3.6 billion.

In his first year as CEO, Moynihan spent much of his time on the defensive as BofA teetered from one crisis to another. Two of its key businesses were under fire: its credit card unit took a $10.4 billion write-down due to new regulations, and its home loan business struggled with fallout from the implosion of the housing bubble.

Investors weren’t impressed with Moynihan’s first full year in charge. BofA’s stock was the laggard among large banks in the last year. Now in his second year, Moynihan needs to prove he can get the bank back on a growth track as the economy recovers.

The issues facing Bank of America are so varied and deep that some frustrated investors are already giving up.

“It’s a hornet’s nest of issues that they are dealing with that will be very hard for the bank to overcome in the near term,” said Walter Todd, principal at Greenwood Capital Associates. A long time Bank of America shareholder, Todd’s firm had bought additional shares in 2008 at the height of the financial crisis. However, Todd’s patience ran out after the stock’s 11 percent decline last year and he sold all of the firm’s Bank of America shares in December.

Investors are especially worried that regulations enacted after the financial crisis will make it difficult for Bank of America to increase profits and grow many of its businesses, especially its credit and debit card business. The bank has warned that it would lose at least $2 billion in annual revenue for a few years in its card business.

Most of the Charlotte, N.C. bank’s problems stem from its 2008 purchase of Countrywide Financial, the country’s largest mortgage company at the time cash advance. The deep slump in the real estate market has hampered all its competitors, but Bank of America has been at the center of almost every controversy involving bad home loans.

It paid $2.8 billion last month to the government-owned mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to settle claims the bank sold them defective mortgages. In the fourth quarter, it kept aside $4.1 billion for more bad home loans that it could be forced to buy back from the two government agencies and other investors. It also set aside another $1.5 billion for litigation expenses related to bad mortgages.

“The year 2011 could be another year of continued repair,” said Nancy Bush, a banking analyst with NAB Research.

Moynihan is now in charge of a company that’s smaller than when he took over. The bank’s revenue for the year declined 8 percent to $110 billion. All of its major businesses saw declines. Its credit card loans declined 16 percent to $167 billion, home loans declined 5 percent to $125 billion, and commercial loans fell 11 percent to $195 billion.

Moynihan’s challenge will be to grow all these businesses. If the U.S. economic recovery picks up, it might help him. Signs are good for now. For the sixth consecutive quarter, fewer people were late in their monthly loan payments at his bank. The bank’s losses from lending in its credit card and home loan business declined $414 million from the third quarter of 2010 because of a drop in delinquencies and bankruptcies.

“We still face . the realities of sticky unemployment in this country and a slow and stagnant recovery in housing and modest overall U.S. growth,” Moynihan said in a conference call with analysts Friday.

Still, he is optimistic that the bank is in a stronger position and might be able to raise its dividend modestly towards the second half of the year.

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Japanese housewives’ “secret savings” fell 18 percent to the lowest in three years in 2010 as slumping family incomes and rising prices for food and energy forced them to tap reserves, a survey shows.

The value of so-called hesokuri, the cash and investments that housewives stash without telling their husbands, fell to an average 3.1 million yen ($37,700) in 2010 from 3.7 million yen a year earlier, the lowest since 2007, according to a Sompo Japan Insurance Inc. report published today. Women traditionally handle family finances in Japan, collecting their husbands’ paychecks and making investment decisions.

Higher energy bills sparked by the country’s hottest summer on record and an 18 percent jump in vegetable prices prompted housewives to tap savings and cut pocket money doled to husbands from their bonuses. The use of savings to manage everyday expenses reversed last year’s trend of using hesokuri funds for one-time purchases such as travel or dining out, the report said.

“Because they’re charged with household finances, housewives can tell where Japan’s economy is going,” Minoru Sugiyama, an official at Sompo Japan who helped lead the survey, said in an interview. “Japanese people will be more defensive this year after cutting expenses and facing falling income. Family finances and Japan’s economy seem to be getting worse.”

Income Squeeze

Household confidence has slumped for six straight months as the economic recovery loses steam. Japan’s gross domestic product contracted at an annual 0.8 percent pace last quarter after consumer stimulus programs ended, according to the median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg.

While some food prices rose last year, the country has struggled for more than a decade with deflation that has squeezed corporate earnings and workers’ pay, weakened consumption and made debts harder to pay off. Wages dropped at an average 1 percent pace in the past decade, and monthly pay slid 0.2 percent in November, Labor Ministry data show.

Housewives gave their husbands a smaller share of this winter’s bonuses to spend, today’s report showed, with the allocation falling 5.5 percent from a year earlier to 69,000 yen, the lowest since 2003.

Among the 500 respondents to the survey, 141 said the increase in vegetable prices had the biggest impact on their family budgets last year. The rise in energy bills due to torrid summer was the second and higher tobacco taxes ranked third.

Hot Weather

The average price of vegetables jumped last year in part because of hot weather, according to the Ministry of Agriculture. Onions rose 42 percent to 125 yen a kilogram, potatoes climbed 37 percent and tomatoes increased 21 percent.

Japan in 2010 had the hottest summer since records started in 1898, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency. Ten Japanese power companies sold 84.9 billion kilowatt hours in August, up 9.2 percent from a year earlier, according to the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan.

About 37 percent of housewives said declining cash flow forced them to use the secret savings to cover living expenses, while 21 percent used it to pay for one-time luxury spending — almost the exact inverse of a year earlier, the survey said.

The housewives plan to save money by cutting costs of food using spices to and cheap stretch meals. Some 233 respondents said they will use more bean sprouts to cook meals, while 80 housewives will consider tofu for breakfast and dinner, compared with 72 last year and 40 a year earlier. Five said they plan to use traditional seasonings on plain rice to stretch budgets.

More people said total financial assets, excluding hesokuri savings, dropped last year than people who said those assets rose, and the average decline per family was 1.2 million yen, the research said.

Sompo Japan DIY Life Insurance Co., a venture between Sompo Japan Insurance Inc. and Dai-Ichi Life Insurance Co., targeted 57,000 Japanese housewives in their 20s through 50s from Dec. 10 to Dec. 14. Of those, 8,300 responded to the survey, of which 500 answers were used. The average age of participants was 39.7.

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Asian shares were slightly higher in early trading Tuesday, with markets stuck in a tight range ahead of the reopening of U.S. financial markets.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 stock average added 0.1 percent to 10,516.08 after opening the session lower.

Automakers including Toyota Motor Corp. and Nissan Motor Co. advanced. Elpida Memory Inc., Japan’s biggest semiconductor maker, jumped 2.6 percent after the Nikkei financial daily reported that the company plans to raise prices of DRAM chips used in personal computers.

Elsewhere, South Korea’s Kospi rose 0.3 percent to 2,106.8 and Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 climbed 0.3 percent to S&P ASX 200 as investors bought banking shares. Benchmarks in Taiwan and Singapore also advanced, while New Zealand shares fell slightly.

U.S. financial markets are set to reopen later in the day after a holiday Monday. News that Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs would be taking medical leave of absence is expected to hammer the company’s shares and overall sentiment when trading opens. The company made the announcement a day before its quarterly earnings report.

In Europe Monday, investors reacted sharply. Apple shares closed in Frankfurt a staggering 6.6 percent lower at 243 euros ($323.02).

In currencies, the dollar fell to 82.65 yen from 82.72 yen late Monday. The euro stood at $1.3260 from $1.3291.

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European finance chiefs start work today on a revamped debt-crisis-fighting strategy with Germany easing its opposition to an expanded arsenal and Portugal insisting it will get by without an aid package.

Germany, the leading power in the 17-nation euro region, is eyeing a March deadline for bolstering the 440 billion-euro ($589 billion) rescue fund, drawing up a permanent aid facility and rewriting the bloc’s budget-deficit rules.

A rising euro and successful bond auctions in Portugal, Spain and Italy offered a respite last week from market pressure for steps that go beyond the emergency aid program and the European Central Bank’s unprecedented bond purchases.

“European leaders need their backs to the wall in order to complete their monetary union,” Barry Eichengreen, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said on Bloomberg Television’s “Surveillance Midday” with Tom Keene. “I’m still convinced that’s what they’re about to do.”

Germany endorsed the need for a “comprehensive” approach to stemming the debt contagion amid concern that Greece and Ireland, recipients of 178 billion euros in European and International Monetary Fund loans last year, will struggle to nurse their economies back to health.

Still, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble resisted an appeal by the European Commission, the bloc’s central regulator, for an upgraded anti-crisis toolbox to be unveiled as soon as a Feb. 4 summit of national leaders.

“We’re working on a comprehensive package so that we don’t find ourselves in a situation every few months in which we have to start discussions all over again,” Schaeuble said on Jan. 13. “A fundamental decision is to be taken in March.”

Meeting, Briefing

Euro-area finance ministers meet at 5 p.m. today in Brussels. Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, the chairman, and European Union Economic and Monetary Commissioner Olli Rehn will brief the press in late evening.

Europe’s political sands are shifting even as Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates says the country is beating deficit-cutting targets and doesn’t need a rescue. The ECB indicated that its focus may move from maintaining interest rates at a record-low 1 percent to combating inflation, which reached a two-year high of 2.2 percent in December.

Portugal gained breathing space with the sale of 599 million euros in 10-year bonds on Jan. 12, with borrowing costs dropping to 6.72 percent from 6.81 percent. For the week, the extra yield on Portuguese 10-year debt over German levels fell 45 basis points to 379 basis points. The euro rose 3.7 percent to $1.3388, the biggest weekly gain since May 2009.

‘Portuguese Saga’

Portugal will eventually be put under the umbrella of an EU-IMF bailout,” London-based Citigroup Inc. economists Juergen Michels and Giada Giani said in a research note. “Until the Portuguese saga around the access into a rescue package finds a resolution, market tensions are unlikely to abate ceramic flat iron.”

In response to ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet’s call for “quantitative and qualitative” improvements to the aid program, governments are considering putting more money on the table and using it more flexibly.

“It’s up to governments to assume their responsibilities,” Trichet said on France’s LCI television yesterday.

The need for a capital buffer to cinch a AAA rating cuts the lending capacity of the rescue fund to about 250 billion euros. Boosting its firepower needs to be part of a retooled approach, French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said.

Lagarde said one option is to use the fund — known as the European Financial Stability Facility — to buy ailing countries’ bonds in the secondary market, easing strains on the ECB.

Weber’s Opposition

So far the central bank has spent 74 billion euros on bonds, in a policy that lacks the backing of Axel Weber, Germany’s representative on the ECB council and a potential successor to Trichet when his term ends in October.

“We need a global package, not a series of individual parcels,” Lagarde said on Jan. 14. “Just adding several hundred million won’t be enough.”

At meetings of lower-level officials last week, only the Netherlands spoke out against cutting the interest rate on emergency loans from the 5.8 percent charged to Ireland, two people familiar with the discussions said.

The rate is around 300 basis points higher than the EU’s cost of borrowing, a markup that was designed under German pressure to make EU aid a last-ditch option. EU policy makers view 50 to 100 basis points as a more suitable margin, a person familiar with the discussions said.

Debt Drag

Instead, with the EU predicting growth of only 0.9 percent in Ireland in 2011 and a contraction of 3 percent in Greece, the lending bill looms as an additional drag on the economy.

Aid talks are running in parallel with the drafting of new EU legislation to strengthen fiscal restraints that failed, for example, to sanction Greece for never meeting the euro area’s limit on deficits of 3 percent of gross domestic product.

Germany sent mixed signals on the new rules, first calling for “quasi-automatic” sanctions, then bowing to French insistence that fines on high-deficit countries be left up to a political vote.

EU governments plan to sign off on their version of the rules by the end of March. The next step will be a compromise with the European Parliament, which last week backed the ECB in seeking to make the sanctions as automatic as possible.

The proposals include a new standard for “prudent” budget policy, a nod toward Germany’s call for debt-limitation rules in national constitutions. France took a step in that direction last week when President Nicolas Sarkozy pressed ahead with a planned balanced-budget amendment.

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