Asking prices for London homes rose to close to a record in February, helping push national values the most in almost a decade, Rightmove Plc said.
Average asking prices in the U.K. capital rose 2.5 percent from January to 449,252 pounds ($710,300), less than 1,000 pounds below the record reached in October, the operator of Britain
The Federal Reserve appears open to the idea of a third round of bond purchases to boost a still-modest recovery. But members remain divided over when or whether to take that step.
Minutes of the Fed’s Jan. 24-25 meeting show that some Fed officials thought such bond purchases should begin soon because unemployment remains high and inflation low.
Others said such a step should be taken only if the economy weakened further or if inflation stayed below the Fed’s target rate of 2 percent.
The debate took place at a meeting in which the Fed decided to hold its benchmark interest rate at record lows until at least late 2014. One Fed official argued that the central bank might need to consider abandoning that plan to keep inflation low.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said at a news conference after the January meeting that the Fed hadn’t ruled out a third round of bond buying to help boost the economy.
Bernanke also said the Fed would provide more information on the central bank’s balance sheet of bond holdings in the future.
Few economists expect the Fed will announce a bond buying program after its next meeting on March 13. That’s because the outlook for hiring _ and the broader economy _ is looking better since the Fed’s meeting.
The economy added 243,000 net jobs in January, the most in nine months. And the unemployment rate fell for the fifth straight month, to 8.3 percent. The government reported the figures one week after the Fed met cash advance no faxing.
Many analysts believe those reports have pushed a possible round of bond buying further into the future. And some believe that unless there is a shock to the U.S. economy, such as a deeper crisis in Europe, the Fed will not go forward with more bond purchases.
Still, Bernanke told a Senate panel last week that the declining unemployment rate doesn’t capture the plight of millions who have stopped looking for work.
His cautious view suggests the Federal Reserve plans to stick with the three-year time line, even if the unemployment rate continues to gradually decline.
At the January meeting, the central bank for the first time released forecasts for where individual Fed officials expected the key interest rate to be in the future. Those forecasts showed that some members foresee super low rates beyond 2014, while six members saw the increases starting in either 2013 or 2014.
The rate forecasts were an effort to provide more explicit clues about the Fed’s plans to give financial markets greater assurances that rates will stay low for some time to come.
The forecasts support a broader Fed effort to make its communications with the public more open.
The Reserve Bank of Australia lowered its forecasts for growth and inflation this year, enabling policy makers to reduce the benchmark interest rate should the economy weaken significantly.
The European Central Bank is likely to refuse to show its hand on how it will help cut Greece
Prime Minister Mario Monti
For the first time, Indian prosecutors are taking Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other networking sites to court for refusing to remove material considered insulting to Indian leaders and major religious figures.
Government officials are upset about material insulting to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, ruling Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi and major religious figures. Some illustrations have shown Singh and Gandhi in compromising positions and pigs running through Mecca, Islam’s holiest city.
On Friday, the federal government told a New Delhi court that there was sufficient material to proceed against 21 social networking sites for offenses of “promoting enmity between classes and causing prejudice to national integration,” according to the Press Trust of India news agency.
The cases, which PTI said name companies including Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft, represent a new risk of doing business in the nation of more than 1 billion people, which is looking to technology to boost its economy and standard of living. The dispute highlights India’s difficulty in balancing the Internet culture of freewheeling discourse with its homegrown religious and political sensitivities.
Convictions could bring fines and up to five years’ imprisonment, through prosecutors have named only the companies involved rather than any executives. Metropolitan Magistrate Sudesh Kumar on Friday asked India’s External Affairs Ministry to serve summons to officials of foreign-based companies for court appearances March 13 my credit score.
In December, Telecommunications Minister Kapil Sibal said he had spoken repeatedly with officials from major Internet companies over the past three months and asked them to come up with a voluntary framework to keep offensive material off the Internet. He said that the companies told him there was nothing they could do.
There was no immediate comment by the networking sites after Friday’s court proceedings.
However, Facebook said last month that it would remove content that “is hateful, threatening, incites violence or contains nudity.”
Google said in a December statement that it removes content that violates local law and its own standards.
“But when content is legal and doesn’t violate our policies, we won’t remove it just because it’s controversial, as we believe that people’s differing views, so long as they’re legal, should be respected and protected,” Google said in a statement in December.
Sibal had shown reporters Web illustrations showing Singh and Gandhi in compromising positions as well as a site showing pigs running through Islam’s holy city of Mecca, a clear insult to Muslims.
Sibal said the Internet companies had told him that they were applying U.S. standards to their sites, and he objected, saying that they needed to be sensitive to Indian sensibilities.
The editor of a British tabloid has outlined a culture where reporters exaggerate headlines, dramatize stories, and occasionally go too far.
Daily Star Editor Dawn Neesom was speaking at the judge-led inquiry into British media ethics set up in the wake of the phone hacking scandal centered on the now-defunct News of the World tabloid
She shied away from claims that her paper played fast and loose with the truth, but acknowledged that the paper’s mission was “to put a smile on people’s faces payday loans.”
Neesom said Thursday: “Occasionally, I admit, we do cross lines. But we do have standards.”
The Star is owned by media magnate Richard Desmond, who is also to give evidence at the inquiry.
Desmond also publishes the Daily Express and celebrity magazines OK! and New!
Imagine this: You open your eyes, and find yourself standing in front of a tall, lean fellow. He has a long white beard, and wears a long white robe.
Big Pearly Gates loom up behind him. It’s St. Peter, and he looks ticked off.
He’s sitting at a desk with a big book open to a page with your name on it. It’s time for your final performance appraisal.
Pete is a sourpuss. “Well,” he says, fingering a page. “I see you cheated on your eighth-grade English test. And that was a very nasty thing you did to Mary Murphy’s pigtail.”
“Uh, I was just a kid and …”
“Ahem! That’s enough out of you,” gruffs Pete. “Now moving on to your adulthood. I see you were in church all of twice last year. Couldn’t drag your sorry carcass out of bed, huh? And you were chintzy on the United Way contribution.”
You’re sweating. It’s getting warm.
“Now, let us review your investment portfolio,” says old Pete. “What’s this? Altria? Isn’t that a tobacco stock? And here’s a whiskey stock. And Playboy Enterprises! Great balls of fire!”
St. Peter raises his eyebrows and pins you with a stare.
“Well, just how much money did you make from sin?” asks the saint.
At this point, you’re doing a little dance. The ground under your toes is getting very, very hot.
OK, wake up now.
A dream like that might get you thinking about socially responsible investing. There are about 250 mutual funds that promise to ally you with the angels. They screen out companies engaged in vices, war, pollution and workplace meanness while investing in companies that are green, peaceful, socially sensitive and sweet to employees. If you need some quick salve for your guilty conscience, there you go.
The nice thing is that you can feel all smug and socially superior without losing investment return. There have been lots of studies on socially sensitive fund performance, and they’ve generally concluded that social screens have little effect on investment return over the long haul, says David Kathman, analyst for Morningstar, the investment analysis firm.
Over shorter periods, the screens can both help and hurt. For instance, take the Amana Income fund. It invests according to Islamic principles, which means avoiding banks that charge interest. That helped the fund a lot in 2008, when the banking system nearly collapsed. It hurt in 2009 and 2010 when banks bounced back somewhat.
The Domini Social Equity fund screens for environmental behavior and good treatment of workers overnight pay day loans. During the 1990s, that moved its investments away from dirty industries toward technology companies where workers brought dogs to work and played foosball in the office.
That helped Domini shine in the late 1990s, while the tech bubble was inflating, and pulled down returns when the bubble popped.
“It tends to even out,” says Kathman.
That gets us to another thing about such funds. They vary in what they consider responsible. Some lean toward religious principles, others favor the environment. Some ban alcohol stocks. Others will tipple away. Defense stocks? Nuclear power? OK with one fund, not another.
You can find a handy guide to such funds, with performance returns and social screens, at ussif.org/resources/mfpc.
It’s harder to determine whether social investing does anything to change society. In theory, the movement would switch capital away from disfavored companies and toward favored ones. As the shunned companies’ stock price falls, management would change its behavior. Rewarded companies would get even nicer.
But are there enough bleeding hearts to swing a stock price? The U.S. Social Investment Forum, the movement’s trade group, claims heavy clout: $3.07 trillion out of $25.2 trillion in the U.S. investment marketplace is run in a socially conscious way, the group says.
Of course, its definition is pretty broad. It includes mutual funds that are perfectly happy to own a sin stock or a polluter, as long as they can hector management through shareholder proposals and the like. Investors qualify if they deposit money in banks with good community lending records.
With so many different social agendas, influence gets diluted. In fact, there’s some academic evidence that socially shunned stocks do a little better than others. Socially blessed stocks do a little better, too.
Perhaps the answer lies in observing St. Louis. The movement has been around for a couple of decades now, and you can still buy a pack of Camels. Boeing keeps churning out fighter jets. Ameren keeps burning coal, and we’re still a town that loves beer.
Socially conscious investing may get you points with St. Peter. But the CEOs of the world don’t seem to care much.