World financial news

Finance ministers sought to bolster confidence in the International Monetary Fund as they began discussing a successor to Managing Director Dominique Strauss- Kahn, who was jailed on charges including attempted rape.

Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said he is “absolutely confident” the IMF will “carry on with its business” under Acting Managing Director John Lipsky. French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said the 187-member lender to governments is “solid.” Kaoru Yosano, Japan’s economy minister, said the flap won’t compromise the fund’s mission.

Germany and Belgium said they prefer another European as head of the agency, responding to a push by developing countries to throw open its leadership. There are “good reasons” for Europe to keep the post amid the euro area’s debt crisis, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters in Berlin. A European has always run the lender, which has helped bail out Portugal, Greece and Ireland, while an American heads the World Bank.

The IMF’s executive board, meeting in Washington, agreed to seek contact with Strauss-Kahn about his intentions, according to an official briefed on the deliberations. Strauss-Kahn, a 62- year-old former French finance minister accused of sexually assaulting a hotel housekeeper, was sent to New York’s Riker’s Island prison yesterday after being denied bail.

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The choice of the next IMF leader “should be absolutely merit-based,” said former Bank of Canada Governor David Dodge. “I would argue that, all other things being equal, it would be very nice to have someone who has at least deep roots in, if not necessarily a current representative of, one of the major emerging-market countries.”

The process to select Strauss-Kahn’s replacement should be “fair, transparent” and aimed at finding the best person for the job, China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said at a regular briefing in Beijing today.

Strauss-Kahn would have been the overwhelming favorite if he had chosen to enter next year’s French presidential race, public opinion polls say. He was taken off an Air France flight about to leave John F. Kennedy International Airport for Paris on May 14. He will plead not guilty, his lawyer Benjamin Brafman has said. He faces as long as 25 years in prison if convicted of the most serious charges pay day loans.

IMF spokeswoman Caroline Atkinson told reporters yesterday that the fund is “fully operational” and working on matters for its member countries around the world. She said IMF business is continuing “uninterrupted.”

Potential Successor

Still, much of the talk in Washington and in European capitals focused on who would replace Strauss-Kahn if he leaves office before the scheduled end of his term more than 17 months from now.

Belgian Finance Minister Didier Reynders said Europe and the U.S. should maintain the arrangement, dating to the end of World War II, of dividing the IMF and World Bank leadership between them.

“It would be preferable if we continued to hold these posts in the future,” Reynders told reporters in Brussels. Robert Zoellick, a former U.S. deputy secretary of state, is the World Bank’s president.

Policy makers such as Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega say the choice should be based on merit, and that candidates from developing economies should also be considered for the posts.

Potential candidates to succeed Strauss-Kahn include Singapore Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam, former South African Finance Minister Trevor Manuel and Kemal Dervis, who was Turkey’s minister of economic affairs at a time his country got IMF aid, according to Eswar Prasad, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a former IMF official.

Brown Support

Former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has told friends that he has global support for his candidacy for the top job at the IMF that could prevail over Prime Minister David Cameron’s opposition, the Financial Times reported, citing unidentified colleagues.

France’s Lagarde, speaking to reporters in Brussels yesterday after a meeting of European Union finance ministers, said the events surrounding Strauss-Kahn’s arrest were “painful,” and she declined to comment on speculation that she may be a candidate to succeed him.

“To see Dominique Strauss-Kahn in handcuffs on television this morning has deeply saddened me,” Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker told reporters in Brussels. “It was deeply sad and traumatic.”

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European industrial production unexpectedly declined in March, led by a drop in output of capital goods such as machines.

Production in the 17-member euro area slipped 0.2 percent from February, when it advanced 0.6 percent, the European Union’s statistics office in Luxembourg said today. Economists had forecast a gain of 0.3 percent, the median of 25 estimates in a Bloomberg News survey showed. Production rose 5.3 from March 2010 after increasing an annual 7.7 percent in February.

European manufacturers have fueled the region’s economic recovery as companies boost spending and hiring to meet global export demand, helping shield the economy from the impact of a spreading debt crisis. Continental AG (CON), Europe’s second-largest auto-parts maker, on May 5 reported its highest profit in more than three years and Siemens AG (SIE), Europe’s biggest engineering company, earlier this month forecast surging full-year profit.

In Germany, which has powered European growth, industrial output rose 0.4 percent in March from the previous month, when it gained 1 fast cash advance.6 percent, today’s report showed. In France, production slipped 0.9 percent. It also declined in Ireland, Greece and Spain, the statistics office said.

Euro-region companies have relied on export demand to bolster sales as tougher austerity measures at home eroded consumers’ willingness to spend. Siemens on May 4 forecast full- year profit to jump at least 75 percent, more than previously projected, after orders in India and China surged 58 percent and 15 percent respectively in the quarter ended March 31. Emerging- market orders rose 52 percent, the Munich-based company said.

Record Profit

Energy production dropped 0.7 percent from February, when it slipped 0.2 percent, today’s report showed. Output of intermediate goods remained unchanged and production of capital goods fell 0.9 percent. Output of non-durable consumer goods declined 0.7 percent from the previous month.

Continental, based in Hanover, Germany, said on May 5 that first-quarter sales rose 23 percent as a global recovery fueled demand for tires and car components. Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, the world’s largest maker of luxury vehicles, last week reported record profit per car on surging orders.

The euro-region economy may struggle to gather strength as rising energy costs threaten to hurt earnings and sap household demand. European economic confidence weakened in April and German executives also grew less optimistic. BASF SE, the world’s largest chemical maker, is among companies that raised prices to offset spiraling raw-material costs.

While European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet has signaled concern about surging costs feeding into wage demands and sparking more persistent inflation, the central bank last week kept borrowing costs at 1.25 percent. Trichet said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on May 6 that policy makers remain “extremely alert” on developments.

“It’s clear that the risks to the inflation outlook have shifted to the upside,” ECB council member Luc Coene said at a conference in Brussels yesterday. “The Governing Council has shown that it will do whatever is necessary to deliver price stability.”

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St. Louis has lost many headquarters over the years, and each one is a blow to civic pride.

When the takeover target is one of our fastest-growing high-tech companies, the blow hurts even more. Someday, though, St. Louis may find reasons to celebrate the day that Savvis accepted an offer from a phone company in little Monroe, La.

The buyer, CenturyLink, says it wants to build its data-center and cloud-computing business in St. Louis. When CenturyLink bought Qwest earlier this year to become the nation’s third-largest telephone company, Chief Executive Glen Post III said data services were the company’s future.

The Savvis deal proves that he meant it. Qwest operates 17 data centers in the western and central U.S. Savvis has 31 data centers in North America, Europe and Asia, and offers a richer array of services.

That includes cloud computing, which is rapidly becoming everyone’s favorite Internet buzzword. Offering services “in the cloud” saves companies the expense and trouble of maintaining their own servers; they access the computing power they need over the Internet, through a provider like Savvis.

Donna Jaegers, an analyst with D.A. Davidson & Co. in Denver, says Savvis’ strength in cloud computing was what attracted CenturyLink. “I think this is good news for people in St. Louis,” Jaegers said. “The reason they bought Savvis is because of its information technology expertise. I think it would be difficult to attract a lot of IT people to a small town in rural Louisiana.”

Jim Ousley, Savvis’ chief executive, predicts that job losses from the merger will be “very minimal,” and that the company’s St. Louis workforce will still grow this year. “The plan here is to make this a dramatic growth business for CenturyLink,” he said.

Savvis was already growing, but CenturyLink may be able to step on the accelerator. It can cross-sell Savvis’ cloud services to its existing corporate customers, and it can use its stronger balance sheet to finance Savvis’ expansion into growth markets like China and India.

So, St. Louis has every reason to hope for continued job growth inside One Savvis Parkway. There’s also a good chance that the merger will have beneficial effects outside the company walls.

Every technology firm has plenty of bright, motivated people, some of whom own shares in the company. A sale creates a cadre of smart people with ready cash who may be frustrated inside a larger organization. That’s a recipe for unleashing entrepreneurial energy.

“Often these things do spawn a lot of new companies,” says Ken Harrington, director of the Skandalaris Entrepreneurship Program at Washington University.

“If our ecosystem is attractive enough, and they have capital, they may start them here.”

St. Louis’ real economic handicap isn’t the number of lost headquarters; it’s the relative rarity of successful startups like Savvis, which was founded in 1994. If this $2.5 billion sale inspires some would-be entrepreneurs to hope for similar rewards, that’s a gain for the local business culture.

“It used to be that having a corporate headquarters was a big thing, but that’s not the way it is anymore,” Harrington said. “You can see how fast companies grow and die or get acquired; they don’t have the same 1950s sense of community.”

Perhaps, then, St. Louis should focus more on what it’s keeping than what it’s losing. The important parts of Savvis

Isle of Capri Corp. has set a date to turn over its top job.

Company president Virginia McDowell will take over as chief executive on April 25, the Creve Coeur-based casino operator said Monday. She will succeed current CEO James Perry, who will stay on as executive chairman.

In January, Isle announced the plans for the handover at some point in 2011 payday advance low fees. Now the date is official. Both McDowell and Perry will start new three-year contracts on that day.

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Stocks are poised for modest gains ahead of a key report on the state of the job market.

The Labor Department will release its March jobs report at 8:30 am Eastern. Analysts expect that the unemployment rate was unchanged at 8.9 percent. Separately, the Institute of Supply Management will issue its manufacturing index for March.

Auto companies will release March sales figures throughout the day.

Nasdaq OMX Group and IntercontinentalExchange are making a bid for NYSE Euronext, offering a 19 percent premium to the deal the company struck with the operator of the German exchange instant credit report.

Dow Jones industrial average futures are up 53, or 0.4 percent, to 12,305. S&P 500 futures are up 6, or 0.4 percent, to 1,327. Nasdaq 100 futures are up 12, or 0.5 percent, to 2,348.

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President Barack Obama says he won’t accept failure in the country’s education system, or listen to “naysayers” who argue that some schools are beyond repair.

Obama told high school students in Miami on Friday that companies hire where the talent is and that the single most important thing businesses are looking for are skilled, educated workers.

Giving a bipartisan boost to his education agenda, Obama appeared with Florida’s former GOP Gov. Jeb Bush at Miami Central Senior High School. The president said that the status quo on education is unacceptable. A good education equals a good job, Obama said, and warned his audience: “You can’t even think about dropping out.”

Miami Central is one of hundreds of low-performing schools across the nation that have received federal turnaround money, and Obama used it as an example of how a school can succeed.

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

Bridging partisan divides, President Barack Obama sought Friday to lift up his education reform agenda in the politically crucial state of Florida. Touring a low-performing school that is undergoing a turnaround of academic achievement, Obama paired up with the state’s former Republican governor, Jeb Bush, the brother of Obama’s White House predecessor.

The president was greeted in Miami by the state’s ardently conservative governor, Rick Scott, who just rejected billions in federal dollars for the president’s cherished high-speed rail initiative. From there, Obama headed to Miami Central Senior High School for another unlikely political pairing, with Jeb Bush, Florida’s popular GOP ex-governor. Bush has championed education and has found common ground with Obama even though the current president blamed Bush’s brother, President George W. Bush, for overseeing disastrous economic times.

“Education and education reform are not Democratic issues, not Republican issues,” presidential spokesman Jay Carney told reporters flying with the president to Florida. A major element of Obama’s trip was to show the bipartisan imagery of appearing with Jeb Bush, part of a broader outreach effort after Obama’s party took a pounding in the midterm congressional elections.

At the school, Obama and Bush toured a classroom where students built robots. Several of the students said they wanted to be engineers, to which Obama said: “I can say this because I’m a lawyer: We need more engineers. Few lawyers and investment bankers and more engineers.”

Miami Central Senior High is one of hundreds of low-performing schools across the nation that has received money from the Education Department aimed at bringing turnarounds. Obama aides said Bush recommended the school as an example of how gains can be made through reform.

Scott met Obama on the tarmac after the president arrived in Air Force One, a greeting role state and local politicians often play when the president arrives in town. It was notable Friday because of Scott’s ideological tussle with Obama over $2.4 billion intended to build a high-speed rail route between Tampa and Orlando. High-speed rail is one of the priorities Obama promotes as part of an agenda designed to boost U.S. competitiveness, but Scott dismissed the project as a boondoggle that Florida taxpayers would end up saddled with.

Just Friday morning the Florida Supreme Court sided with Scott on the issue, saying the governor had the authority to kill the rail line. It was a defeat for federal officials who will now send the money to other states.

Nonetheless, Obama and Scott shook hands and smiled after Obama walked down the stairs in sunny Miami. It was a quick greeting but one with some symbolism for a president navigating the new realities of divided government following the Republican takeover of the House in the November elections.

Obama’s bipartisan overture comes as the president and Democrats are in the midst of partisan warfare with Republicans over budget cuts. Obama he will need at least some GOP support if he’s to resolve that divide and pass any substantial legislation, including education reform, in the second half of his term.

One of his education imperatives this year is to rewrite the No Child Left Behind Act, a signature initiative of former President George W. Bush.

Obama assailed the president during his own 2008 campaign and often refers to Bush’s eight years in office as a period of decline for middle-class Americans.

That frequent criticism didn’t sit well with Jeb Bush. In an interview last year, he said Obama’s tendency to blame his brother’s administration for problems, including the economic crisis, was “childish.”

“He apparently likes to act like he’s still campaigning, and he likes to blame George’s administration for everything,” he said at the time.

Education, however, is an area where Obama and Jeb Bush agree. Both support increasing the number of charter schools, tying teacher evaluations to student performance on standardized tests, and setting high standards and accountability. They also believe education is key to invigorating U.S. competitiveness.

Obama has called for fresh spending on education in the 2012 budget he unveiled last month, saying that improving America’s schools isn’t an area where the government can cut back, even as Congress looks for ways to reduce spending and bring down the nation’s mounting deficit.

The federal government has spent about $800,000 on Central Senior High School to help its efforts to turn itself around.

“America can no longer afford a collective shrug when disadvantaged students are trapped in inferior schools and cheated of a quality education for years on end,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan wrote in an opinion piece in the Miami Herald that previewed Friday’s trip.

Despite sharing the spotlight with Republicans early in the day, Obama will wrap up his trip to Miami on a partisan note. He’ll headline two fundraisers for Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

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Parasitic nematodes are pesky microscopic worms that cause about $80 billion in crop damage around the world each year and remain one of the most stubborn pests in agriculture.

But biotech giant Monsanto aims to put a dent in their impact.

On Tuesday, the Creve Coeur-based company announced it had snapped up Divergence Inc., a neighboring biotechnology company in Creve Coeur that has worked for the past dozen years on products that control crop parasites. The companies have worked together since 2004 on nematode-resistant soybeans, and in 2008 released the sequence of the soybean cyst nematode genome Payday Loan for Bad Credit. Going forward, research and development will focus on a seed treatment product to prevent damage from soybean cyst nematodes.

“It’s a great fit,” said Derek Rapp, CEO of Divergence Inc. “… We’ll come together to make great things happen.”

For the biotechnology business community in the St. Louis area, the acquisition represents a major success.

Divergence Inc.

China led resistance to making bulging foreign-exchange reserves a measure of economic imbalances as Group of 20 finance officials struggled for consensus on realigning the skewed world economy.

Sparring over early warning indicators reflected the split among fast-growing emerging countries and debt-laden advanced economies over how to prevent a repeat of the harshest recession since World War II. A deal remained elusive as of early afternoon, two G-20 officials said.

“G-20 discussions to date have revealed a limited willingness of countries genuinely to coordinate over policies outside a global crisis,” Bank of England Governor Mervyn King said as the two-day Paris meeting got under way yesterday. “The major surplus and deficit countries are currently pursuing economic strategies that are in conflict.”

With the world recovery entering a second year, the unity forged during the crisis is dissipating as up-and-coming powers challenge the deficit-scarred West’s formula for managing the international economy.

China will remain the world’s fastest growing major economy in 2011, with a 9.6 percent expansion, the International Monetary Fund predicts. The Washington-based lender sees 3 percent growth in the U.S. and 1.5 percent in the 17-nation euro area.

‘Reasonable Forecast’

“Most people see a world in which the emerging world’s growing 5, 6 percent; we’re growing between 3 and 4 percent, Europe and Japan somewhere between 1 and 2 percent,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said in Paris yesterday. “That seems a reasonable forecast.”

In a concession to U.S.-led pressure to push up its currency, China raised bank-reserve requirements yesterday for the eighth time in a year and indicated that a four-month old cycle of interest-rate rises will go on.

The yuan advanced to 6.5732 per dollar, the highest since late 1993, and Chinese officials signaled that further gains are in the offing to muffle domestic inflation and spur export-led growth in the U.S. and Europe.

Higher reserve standards are not “the only method that we’ll use to battle inflation, it’s about using all means including rates and currency,” People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan said in an interview in Paris yesterday. “One method doesn’t exclude the other.”

Defusing Tension

While the Chinese moves may have defused some tension at the meeting, western officials continued to push for a longer- term yuan boost and a realignment of the global economy to stoke growth.

China’s “moves with respect to their currency have been relatively minor,” Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty told Bloomberg Television yesterday. “It’s important as part of rebalancing they are more flexible with respect to their currency. China promised to do more.”

Finance ministers and central bankers from the G-20, representing about 80 percent of world output, came with scaled- back ambitions guaranteed unsecured personal loan. French President Nicolas Sarkozy welcomed them to Paris by dropping last year’s talk of a relaunch of the global monetary system to end the U.S. dollar’s supremacy.

France’s main aim for the meeting, which ends in late afternoon, is to move toward an accord on the use of economic indicators to monitor the trade and investment distortions that pitched the world into crisis.

‘Endless Discussion’

“I hope that your discussions will avoid getting bogged down in endless discussions on these indicators,” Sarkozy told the finance officials late yesterday at his Elysee Palace.

European Union officials want the scorecard to include the current-account balance, public deficit and debt, savings ratio, net foreign assets, reserve adequacy, real effective exchange rate and private debt, according to an EU position paper.

Chafing at restraints imposed by the richer world, the rapidly growing BRIC states — Brazil, Russia, India and China - - don’t want the scorecard to include the current account, the broadest measure of trade in goods and services.

China has “its own view” on the current account, Flaherty told reporters. He said it is “likely” that the imbalance measure will include public and private debt. Germany plumped for those two along with current account, the real exchange rate and currency reserves.

Russia refused to make management of its foreign-exchange reserves — the world’s third-biggest stash, at $449 billion — the subject of international bargaining.

Imbalances Ebbing

“If the U.S. and the U.K. will put an amount of reserves as a kind of indicator, that’s our biggest concern,” Russian Deputy Finance Minister Dmitry Pankin told reporters in Paris yesterday.

In any event, imbalances are ebbing. The IMF predicts that China’s current-account surplus will narrow to 5.1 percent of gross domestic product in 2011 from as high as 10.6 percent in 2007, while the U.S. shortfall slims to 2.6 percent from 5.1 percent.

Moves are also afoot to bind China more closely into the world economy by adding the yuan to the IMF’s synthetic currency basket, known as special drawing rights.

Created in 1969 and last reweighted in November, the SDR is a composite of the dollar, euro, Japanese yen and British pound, though its role in financial markets is minimal.

Current SDR rules would require China to first make the yuan fully convertible, a step that would put it on the upward track desired by the U.S. and Europe.

“We will discuss ways to enlarge the SDR basket,” German Deputy Finance Minister Joerg Asmussen said in a Bloomberg Television interview yesterday. “One might think of adapting the rules in order to ease the way for more currencies to be part of the SDR.”

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Credit Suisse Group has reported fourth-quarter earnings of 841 million Swiss francs ($876 million) and cut its goal for profitability.

The results Thursday rose above those from the same period the previous year, when the second-largest Swiss bank reported a net profit of 793 million francs.

Credit Suisse managed to avoid the worst of the financial crisis and will now aim for a return on equity of more than 15 percent, down from more than 18 percent earlier. The return in 2010 was 14.4 percent.

the Zurich-based bank trails behind its larger cross-town rival UBS, which reported fourth-quarter earnings of 1.29 billion francs on Tuesday.

For 2010, Credit Suisse generated $5.1 billion net profit, about a quarter less than last year.

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