European governments moved to bolster their rescue funds, seeking to shield Spain and Italy from the fallout of the debt crisis without alienating bailout- weary voters in wealthy countries.
Finance ministers neared an agreement to run the temporary and permanent funds in parallel until mid-2013, potentially raising the upper limit on emergency lending to 940 billion euros ($1.3 trillion). Amounts immediately available would range between 340 billion euros and 640 billion euros.
The CEO of Bank of America was paid $7.5 million last year _ six times what he got in 2010. That’s according to an Associated Press analysis of a regulatory filing out Wednesday.
The bank says Brian Moynihan’s pay package for 2011 included a salary of $950,000, a $6.1 million stock award and about $420,000 worth of use of company aircraft and tax and financial advice.
It happened in a year when Bank of America stock plunged 58 percent. The bank struggled with lawsuits from investors who had bought securities backed by problematic mortgage loans online cash advance.
The AP uses a calculation that isolates the value a company’s board places on the CEO’s total pay package. The figure includes salary, bonus, incentives, perks and the estimated value of stock options and awards.
President Obama on Friday nominated Dr. Jim Yong Kim, the president of Dartmouth College, to be the next president of the World Bank.
Kim’s background is in medicine, not economics or business as has been the case with most previous World Bank presidents. He has worked with international organizations, serving as a senior official at the World Health Organization.
Kim is particularly known for his efforts addressing health concerns, including AIDS, in developing countries. He was one of the founders and former executive director of Partners In Health, a not-for-profit organization that supports health programs in poor countries.
"Despite its name, the World Bank is more than just a bank. It’s one of the most powerful tools we have to reduce poverty and raise standards of living in some of the poorest countries on the planet," Obama said in introducing Kim in the White House rose garden. "It’s time for a development professional to lead the world’s largest development agency."
The World Bank was created along with the International Monetary Fund in 1944 to help the Allied powers shape the post-World War II economic order. It now includes 187 member states, offering loans and grants as well as technical expertise for development projects around the world.
World Bank to China: Free up your economy or bust
But while the World Bank’s influence is felt most directly in the developing world, it’s the United States that has a stranglehold on its leadership. Under a tacit agreement in place since their inception, an American has always headed the bank while a European has been in charge of the IMF.
The World Bank and the IMF get funding from their members, also known as shareholders, and it is this funding that is the basis for voting power on the organizations’ boards.
The board will vote on the new leader for the bank, but it is widely assumed that the U.S. nominee will be the one confirmed by the full body.
As the largest contributor to the bank and the IMF, the United States has the most voting shares on their boards at roughly 16%. The United States and Europe together have roughly half these shares, and have long been able to impose their will in matters of leadership.
The World Bank announced its short list of nominees late Friday, so Obama was facing a deadline for his pick. The organization expects to pick the new president by its spring meeting the week of April 16.
Earlier Friday, South Africa announced it had nominated Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala for the post. Jose Antonio Ocampo, formerly the finance minister of Colombia, has also been nominated.
World Bank chief nixes return to gold standard
One other American who had been lobbying for the job, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, withdrew his self-nomination Friday, saying he supported Kim 100%.
The World Bank’s projects range from health and education to infrastructure and private sector initiatives. It’s a massive organization, comprising more than 9,000 employees in over 100 locations and offering nearly $250 billion worth of financial assistance over the past five years.
"It’s the premier institution in the development arena," said Colin Bradford, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has also worked at the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Last year, France’s Christine Lagarde took over the top job at the IMF from her countryman Dominique Strauss-Kahn after he resigned in the wake of sexual assault charges that were later dropped.
At that time, however, the so-called BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — issued a joint statement following Strauss-Kahn’s resignation calling Europe’s leadership of the IMF an "obsolete, unwritten convention."
Some in Washington have argued that it’s important for the World Bank head to continue to be an American to ensure continued Congressional funding for the institution. But there is pressure building internationally for a non-American to take over the post.
Kim might be a seen as a compromise between those two competing pressures.
According to Dartmouth’s Web site, Kim was born in South Korea. His family emigrated to the United States when he was five, and he grew up in Muscatine, Iowa. He had an all-American childhood, becoming valedictorian and president of his high school class, and playing quarterback for the high school football team.
Kim got his bachelor’s degree at Brown and his medical and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard, according to the Dartmouth site.
While many of the previous World Bank presidents have a background in business and finance, it is not always the case. Paul Wolfowitz — a nominee of President George W. Bush — served as the 10th president from 2005 to 2007, coming from a career in academia and government service. His post immediately before joining the bank was Deputy Secretary of Defense.
The position became vacant when current president Robert Zoellick, a former deputy secretary of state who also served as international vice chairman at Goldman Sachs (, Fortune 500), announced in February that he would depart when his term concludes at the end of June.
Pakistan is better known for bombs than bombshells, militant compounds than opulent estates. A few enterprising Pakistanis hope to alter that perception with the launch of a local version of the well-known celebrity magazine Hello!
They plan to profile Pakistan’s rich and famous: the dashing cricket players, voluptuous Bollywood stars and powerful politicians who dominate conversation in the country’s ritziest private clubs and lowliest tea stalls. They also hope to discover musicians, fashion designers and other new talents who have yet to become household names.
“The side of Pakistan that is projected time and time again is negative,” said Zahraa Saifullah, CEO of Hello! Pakistan. “There is a glamorous side of Pakistan, and we want to tap into that.”
But celebrating the lives of Pakistan’s most prosperous citizens is not without its critics in a country where much of the population lives in poverty. Advertising one’s prosperity could be risky as well since kidnappings for ransom are on the rise and attracting attention from Islamist militants can mean death.
Wajahat Khan, a consulting editor at Hello! Pakistan, said they were cognizant of the sensitivity of publishing a glamour magazine in a conservative Muslim country where many people are struggling and planned to be “socially responsible and culturally aware.”
“We are trying to be happy in a war zone,” Khan said Saturday at a news conference with Saifullah and other members of the magazine’s editorial staff. “We are trying to celebrate what is still alive in a difficult country.”
Khan said they would do everything they could to protect the security of the people they profile, but he wasn’t overly concerned.
“I don’t think terrorist networks are going to be reading Hello! anytime soon,” he said.
Pakistan already has a series of local publications that chronicle the lives of the wellheeled in major cities like Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi, especially as they hop between lavish parties guaranteed payday loans. But the producers of Hello! Pakistan hope the magazine’s international brand and greater depth will attract followers.
Hello! was launched in 1988 by the publisher of Spain’s Hola! magazine and is now published in 150 countries. It’s well-known for its extensive coverage of Britain’s royal family and once paid $14 million in a joint deal with People magazine for exclusive pictures of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s newborn twins.
The market for English-language publications in Pakistan is fairly small. Most monthly and weekly magazines sell no more than 3,000 copies, said Khan, the consulting editor. But they hope to tap into the large Pakistani expatriate markets in the United Kingdom and the Middle East as well.
Hello! Pakistan will be published once a month and will cost about $5.50, twice as much as what many poor Pakistanis earn in a day. The first issue will be published in mid-April and will focus on the Pakistani fashion scene.
Saifullah, who grew up watching her mother and grandmother read Hello! as she hopped between London and Karachi, said it took her two years to convince the magazine to publish a local version in Pakistan.
“They were concerned about whether Pakistan was ready for a magazine like this,” she said.
But Saifullah thinks the timing is perfect to showcase Pakistan’s too often hidden treasures, citing Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who recently became the first Pakistani filmmaker to win an Oscar for a documentary about the plight of female victims of acid attacks in the country.
“We want to tap into the aesthetically beautiful, the athletic, the fashionable,” said Saifullah. “There is so much going on on a daily basis that nobody ever covers. It’s totally unexplored.”
Prime Minister Mario Monti’s government has approved new labor rules hotly contested by Italy’s major trade union confederation.
Monti refused to weaken measures making it easier to fire workers despite political opposition and threats of a nationwide general strike.
The prime minister instead pledged to monitor for abuses of the new rules. But he added that a court could no longer force companies to rehire workers laid off for economic reasons, even if the employer’s case is not proven in court. A judge can instead order damages no faxing payday loan.
The reform is much broader _ including a new unemployment compensation system and limits on temporary workers to encourage permanent employment.
The measures approved Friday by the Cabinet must still pass Parliament, where some politicians say they will seek changes.
Sales of previously owned U.S. houses held in February near an almost two-year high, adding to evidence the market that triggered the recession is firming.
Purchases dropped 0.9 percent to a 4.59 million annual rate from a revised 4.63 million pace in January that was faster than previously estimated and the highest since May 2010, a report from National Association of Realtors showed today in Washington. The median price increased over the past year for the first time since November 2010.
Treasury just scored a big win — it got rid of one of its financial-crisis era portfolios of mortgage-backed securities and made a $25 billion profit, the department announced Monday.
Treasury bought $225 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities during the height of the financial crisis starting from October 2008 through December 2009.
Some of those securities were backing up loans thought to be worthless, financial analysts reported at the time. But Treasury’s portfolio was made up mostly of 30-year fixed rate mortgage backed securities were guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, making them more valuable.
Last March, Treasury started the process of selling those securities. The agency reported that the total of cash from the sales, the principal and interest paid taxpayers back $250 billion.
However, if the mortgages behind those securities fail, taxpayers will still be on the hook, since federal housing giants guarantee the loans and taxpayers have been propping up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Treasury heralded the profit, calling it a successful winddown of a useful program that helped the nation navigate the financial crisis.
"The successful sale of these securities marks another important milestone in the wind down of the government’s emergency financial crisis response efforts," said Assistant Secretary for Financial Markets Mary Miller in a statement online payday loans.
Fights brewing over House Republicans’ budget
The profit from the sale of the mortgage-backed securities appears to be the largest Treasury has made on any of its crisis-related programs.
Treasury’s Mortgage Backed Securities program was tied to saving Fannie and Freddie. That program was separate from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, when Congress gave Treasury some $700 billion to bail out banks and save the economy. Of that, Treasury only paid out $411 billion.
Several parts of TARP have also turned a profit, like its bank bailout program. Treasury still owns a big chunk of American International Group (, Fortune 500) and a smaller chunk part of General Motors (, Fortune 500), among other firms.
Congress authorized $700 billion for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, but Treasury only paid out $414 billion. Of that amount, $331 billion has been paid back, including profits, interest and dividends made from investments.
The repayments from the mortgage-backed security program will go to pay down debt, unless Congress decides otherwise.
Italy
Bo Xilai
Cisco Systems Inc. is buying digital video technology company NDS Group Ltd. for about $4 billion to enhance its video offerings to pay-TV providers and expand in emerging markets.
The purchase would be Cisco’s biggest since the company bought Norwegian teleconferencing company Tandberg in April 2010 for $3.4 billion.
In the meantime, the networking gear maker has been working on turning its business around. It missed the early stages of the economic recovery and lost out to competitors on rebounding orders.
Cisco said Thursday that buying NDS will speed up the delivery of its Videoscape entertainment platform and help it grow in emerging markets such as China and India, where NDS already does business. Videoscape lets customers watch video on mobile gadgets and laptops along with their TVs.
In addition to the $4 billion it is paying for NDS Group, Cisco will assume $1 billion of NDS debt.
San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco has been narrowing its focus by culling divisions and cutting costs through layoffs. It shuttered its consumer-oriented Flip video camera business last year but video offerings for businesses have remained a big part of its focus. It acquired Scientific-Atlanta, a maker of TV set-top boxes, in 2006 for $7.1 billion and online conference provider WebEx a year later for $3 billion.
Brian Marshall, an analyst with ISI Group, said the deal makes sense for Cisco as it focuses on video offerings for service providers. NDS, which competes with Cisco, counts pay-TV operators such as DirecTV, Vodafone, Cox and BSkyB among its customers.
NDS, based in the United Kingdom, is jointly owned by News Corp. and private equity firm Permira. Its software helps cable and satellite TV companies deliver content to subscribers’ digital video recorders, tablets, smart phones and other devices. It had filed documents as part of a planned initial public offering before agreeing to the deal with Cisco.
Cisco is acquiring NDS’ sites in Britain, Israel, France, India and China and is absorbing its 5,000 employees. The boards of both companies have approved the deal, and it’s expected to close in the second half of this year.
Marshall said that while the acquisition is a “good use of offshore cash” for Cisco, the company is paying a lot. He estimates that Cisco is paying about 25 times NDS’s earnings, while Cisco’s stock trades at about 10 times its earnings.
Cisco stock fell 29 cents, or 1.4 percent, to $19.91 in midday trading Thursday after trading as high as $20.20 earlier in the session. That was near its 52-week high of $20.49 reach about a month ago.
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