Pirate attacks off West Africa’s coast have increased to levels that rival those seen in Somalia, insurers say, prompting maritime agencies to focus on setting aside their rivalries and cooperate to fight the rising threat.
The International Maritime Bureau says Nigeria and Benin reported 18 pirate attacks in the first half of 2011. While smaller than figures attributed to Somali pirates, analysts say the number of attacks off Nigerian waters is underreported because some ships carry illegal oil cargo and others fear their insurance rates will rise.
“I believe we are nearly at a crisis here and if it’s a crisis, there has to be action,” said Rear Adm. Kenneth J. Norton, deputy chief of staff for strategy, resources and plans for U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa, headquartered in Naples, Italy.
Officials from Nigeria’s Navy, its maritime industry and other groups met this week with U.S. officials aboard the HSV 2 Swift off Nigeria’s coast to discuss maritime issues, including formulating anti-piracy strategies.
The U.S. and other Western nations have an anti-piracy armada patrolling the waters off East Africa, but there is no West African counterpart, leaving Nigeria and its neighbors to stop the growing swell of attacks on their own.
A big problem, those involved say, has been a lack of cooperation among the many Nigerian institutions that deal with maritime issues.
“Somebody must take charge and whenever the functions overlap, somebody has to cede” said Capt. D.O. Labinjo, who represents a Nigerian ship owners’ association. “Instead of interagency cooperation, what we have been getting is interagency rivalry.”
London-based Lloyd’s Market Association, an umbrella group of insurers, earlier this month listed Nigeria, neighboring Benin and nearby waters in the same risk category as Somalia, where two decades of war and anarchy have allowed piracy to flourish.
As a result, shippers may be subjected to more checks and higher premiums, said Neil Smith, head of underwriting at Lloyd’s Market Association. That could mean additional costs for oil-rich Nigeria’s shipping industry, which exports crude crucial to the U.S. market.
It also can affect commercial shipping coming into Lagos’ busy Apapa Port and the thriving used-car market based in Cotonou, the commercial capital of Benin.
Even as Nigerian agencies attempt to cooperate, the fast-changing patterns of pirates are testing their capabilities.
Piracy in the Gulf of Guinea has over the last eight months escalated from low-level armed robberies to hijackings, cargo thefts and large-scale robberies, according to the Denmark-based security firm Risk Intelligence.
West African pirates also have been more willing to use violence, beating crewmembers and shooting and stabbing those who get in the way. Analysts believe many of the pirates come from Nigeria, where corrupt law enforcement allows criminality to thrive.
Robbers appear to be targeting chemical and oil tankers sailing through the region.
Sometimes, a company makes big news by staying put.
That’s what happened Tuesday, when Stifel Financial Corp. said it plans to buy its downtown office building and stay there, adding about 225 jobs over the next three years.
That’s something, in and of itself
A day after Standard & Poor’s took the unprecedented step of downgrading the creditworthiness of the United States government, the ratings agency offered a full-throated defence of its decision, calling the bitter standoff between President Barack Obama and Congress over raising the debt ceiling a
Asian stock markets tumbled Friday amid fears the U.S. may be heading back into recession and Europe’s debt crisis is worsening.
The sell-off in Asia on Friday follows the biggest one-day points decline on Wall Street since the 2008 financial crisis.
Oil prices extended sharp losses to near $86 a barrel in Asia amid expectations a slowing global economy will undermine demand for crude.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 stock average slid 3.4 percent to 9,328.74 points and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng dived 4.4 percent to 20,912.60. China’s Shanghai Composite Index lost 2.1 percent to 2,626.80.
Asian investors were rattled by the lack of agreement in Europe about debt and how to stabilize the euro, said Tom Kaan of Louis Capital Markets in Hong Kong. He said they also were watching to see whether the U.S. Federal Reserve launches a new stimulus effort.
“A lot of people will be trying to stay on the sidelines,” Kaan said. “It’s a general fear that is clouding the markets at the moment.”
Elsewhere in Asia, South Korea’s Kospi index shed 3.6 percent to 1,945 and Taiwan’s benchmark skidded 4.4 percent to 7,952.98. Australia’s benchmark dropped 4 percent to 4,103.10.
Investors fretted over the U.S. economic recovery ahead of Friday’s release of crucial non-farm payrolls for July, which often set the tone in markets for a week or two.
Investors, already fidgety after protracted U.S. debt deliberations, and worries that Italy and Spain are getting deeply embroiled in Europe’s debt crisis, searched for assets considered safer, such as gold.
“Stocks will continue to dive, especially in Euroland, where profits are disappointing analysts’ estimates,” said Carl B. Weinberg of High Frequency Economics in a report payday advance online.
In Europe, most markets shed more than 3 percent Thursday. France’s CAC-40 tumbled 3.9 percent, Germany’s DAX lost 3.4 percent and Britain’s FTSE 100 also shed 3.4 percent.
For the day, the Dow closed down 512.76 points, at 11,383.68. It was the steepest point decline since Dec. 1, 2008.
Thursday’s decline was the ninth-worst by points for the Dow. In percentage terms, the decline of 4.3 percent does not rank among the worst. On Black Monday in 1987, for example, the Dow fell 22 percent.
In currency markets, the dollar edged down to 78.64 yen from late Thursday’s 79.02 and the euro weakened slightly to $1.4100 from Thursday’s $1.413.
On Thursday, Japan’s government intervened in markets to weaken the yen against the dollar to support exporters. Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda said authorities acted to protect the economic recovery following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
The dollar had fallen as low as 76.29 yen on Monday. It hit a record post-World War II low of 76.25 yen in the days following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
The intervention was coupled with monetary policy easing by the central bank’s board.
Japan’s moves came only a day after the Swiss National Bank intervened to slow a rise in the Swiss franc, another currency perceived as a save-haven at a time investors are fleeing risky assets such as shaky European government bonds.
Benchmark oil for September delivery was down 39 cents to $86.20 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Crude fell $5.30 to settle at $86.63 on Thursday.
The cell phone company controlled by Carlos Slim says it plans to buy the 40 percent of Telefonos de Mexico SAB, or Telmex, it doesn’t already own as part of a consolidation plan it began last year.
An America Movil statement says the company will offer 10.40 pesos (US$.90) in cash per Telmex share.
It said Monday that if the company gets sufficient shares it will delist Telmex from the markets where it trades.
America Movil said Monday that if the consolidation is completed it will be able to provide “more advanced telecommunication services to its customers in Mexico.”
America Movil is Latin America’s largest cell phone service provider with 236 million subscribers. Telmex controls more than 80 percent of Mexico’s land lines.
An edge-to-edge four-inch display, sleek curved edges, a touch-sensitive home button and gesture area, and a faster processor.
Are these among the snazzy new features of Apple
A dozen Senate Republicans say they have cleared the way for legislation to help workers displaced by foreign competition, possibly removing the main obstacle to approval of free trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia.
The Obama administration supports the trade deals, but says they must be linked to extension of expired sections of the Trade Adjustment Assistance program. The GOP senators, in a letter to President Barack Obama, said they can assure passage of the worker aid bill by joining Democrats in moving it past any filibuster hurdles.
Their support, while welcomed by the administration, may be too late for Congress to act on the aid and trade bills this summer. Congress is scheduled to leave for its summer recess on Aug. 6, and is likely to be preoccupied until then in resolving the crisis over raising the government’s debt limit to avoid a first-ever U.S. default.
Administration officials said earlier this week that the Obama administration might delay sending final legislation on the three trade deals until September.
Sens. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., and Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said Friday that their Republican group would provide more than enough votes to ensure Senate passage of a stand-alone, compromise version of the worker assistance bill. Blunt said he had been working with his House and Senate colleagues for five years to find a way to advance the three trade agreements. “Today we have that path forward,” he said.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which like other business groups has been pressing Congress and the White House to act on the trade deals, praised the 12 Republicans for working to end the impasse. “With our economic recovery stalling, we need to move now on these job-creating trade agreements,” said the Chamber’s president and CEO, Thomas J. Donohue.
The Obama administration is behind the trade deals, which have been pending since the George W. Bush administration, but has said that Congress must at the same time act to extend expired sections of the four-decade-old program to assist workers hurt by foreign competition with financial and retraining aid.
House and Senate Republicans critical of the expense of the assistance program have said that legislation to extend it must be separate from votes on the trade bills.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Thursday he was committed to working with Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., “to ensure a fair floor process for my members so they have an opportunity to try to amend a stand-alone Trade Adjustment Assistance bill separate from the three free trade agreements. That way, if the administration can generate the votes it needs, the TAA bill will pass on its merits.”
McConnell acknowledged that he didn’t expect this to happen before the August recess.
In the House, Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., who chairs the Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over trade, said in a statement that he applauded the Senate Republicans for their approach to the worker aid bill and the trade deals. He repeated his promise to have his committee vote on both on the same day if the administration submits the trade agreements separately from the TAA bill.
House Speaker John Boehner said Thursday that Republicans controlling the chamber are willing to compromise on legislation increasing the government’s borrowing authority.
“Frankly, I think it would be irresponsible on behalf of the Congress and the president not to be looking at back-up strategies for how to solve this problem,” Boehner said. “At the end of the day, we have a responsibility to act.”
Asked whether GOP lawmakers supporting the House “cut, cap and balance” debt limit measure would be unwilling to ultimately compromise, Boehner said, “I’m sure we’ve got some members who believe that, but I do not believe that would be anywhere close to the majority.
His talk of possible accommodation in the protracted political stalemate over federal budget policy came as the Senate took up the tea party-backed House legislation Thursday. It ties an increase in the government’s borrowing authority to a series of conservative demands, including immediate spending cuts and a constitutional balanced budget amendment.
Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called up the measure to placate Republicans demanding a vote. But he said it “doesn’t have one chance in a million of passing the Senate.”
Democrats argue that the so-called “cut, cap and balance” measure would impose untenable spending restraints and set spending levels, as a percentage of the overall economy, on par with the mid-1960s _ before the advent of Medicare and automatic Social Security cost-of-living adjustments.
The development Thursday reflected the reality that there’s more talk than progress as official Washington wrangles daily over finding a way out of a debt dilemma that has the government sliding inexorably toward a first-ever default on its financial obligations.
President Barack Obama met with House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, at the White House for 90 minutes on Wednesday, but neither side would comment afterward.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Thursday the legislation now before his chamber would be an opportunity for lawmakers to “go on record in support of balancing our books or against it.” He urged Democrats to join GOP senators in backing it.
Democrats are expected to kill the measure _ which they say would demand debilitating cuts to Medicare _ in a vote on Saturday if not before.
Meanwhile, momentum on a separate bipartisan budget plan by the Senate’s “Gang of Six” seemed to ebb as critics warned the measure contains larger tax increases than advertised and it became plain that the measure comes too late and is too controversial to advance quickly _ particularly as a part of a debt limit package that already would be teetering on a knife’s edge.
Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., a member of the Gang of Six, said Thursday that some 40 senators of both parties back the plan his group has brought forward. It generally takes 60 votes to pass legislation in the 100-member Senate because the rules permit unlimited debate unless a supermajority votes to limit it.
But Conrad also said he feels there’s too little time between now and Aug. 2 to complete a comprehensive package of spending cuts, benefit program changes and an overhaul of the tax code.
Conrad said doing nothing is not an option, saying that “we’re all going to have to do things we’d prefer in a perfect world not to have to do.”
Absent a breakthrough between Obama and Republicans, there is a hotly contested backup plan by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky direct payday lenders., that would give Obama broad new powers to obtain increases in the government’s borrowing unless blocked by veto-proof two-thirds margins in both the House and Senate.
Many conservative Republicans are in an uproar over the McConnell plan, and more than 70 House members signed a letter circulated by members of the conservative Republican Study Committee calling on Boehner to come out in public opposition to the McConnell-Reid plan..
In a shift, White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday that Obama would back a short-term deal to prevent a disastrous financial default on Aug. 2 but only if a larger and still elusive deficit-cutting agreement was essentially in place.
Officially, the president continued to push for a big compromise that would cut the nation’s budget deficit and extend the government’s tapped-out borrowing power above the current $14.3 trillion cap. Obama had threatened to veto any stopgap expansion of the nation’s debt limit, at one point last week even challenging House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., not to call his bluff about it.
Carney said if a divided Congress and the White House can agree on a significant deal, Obama would accept a “very short-term extension” of the debt limit to let bigger legislation work its way through Congress.
Obama also is open to the McConnell plan, but it seems barely aloft due to fervent tea party opposition in the House. The hope appears to be that such an option will look a lot better to the House in a week or so, given the lack of other ideas.
The Gang of Six plan has come under assault from critics like House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who say the plan would increase taxes by $2 trillion over the next 10 years instead of the $1 trillion-plus claimed by proponents like Conrad _ a development likely to stunt momentum among Republicans.
The revenue increase is larger than advertised because the $1.2 trillion in new taxes comes on top of an underlying assumption used by Obama’s deficit commission _ and incorporated by the Senate group in its plan _ that the Bush-era income tax brackets for family income exceeding $250,000 would revert to the higher, Clinton administration levels. The deficit panel’s assumption was made before Obama buckled in December and signed a full extension of the Bush tax cuts.
The Gang of Six plan also earned poor reviews from liberals like Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who said it would “balance the budget on the backs of the vulnerable.”
And Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, blasted the plan in a missive to his panel members, saying it would cut the Pentagon much too deeply and would unfairly curb military health and retirement benefits.
The Gang of Six plan promises almost $4 trillion in deficit cuts, including an immediate 10-year, $500 billion down payment that would come as Congress sets caps on the agency budgets it passes each year. It also requires an additional $500 billion in cost curbs on federal health care programs, cuts to federal employee pensions, curbs in the growth of military health care and retirement costs, and modest cuts to farm subsidies.
Conrad made his remarks in an interview Thursday on MSNBC.
Shares of Research In Motion (TSX: RIM) are down slightly as the company denies reports it planned to halt production on the Wi-Fi version of its PlayBook tablet device.
The BlackBerry-maker
Inma Rodriguez lost her job, and now that she’s defaulted on her mortgage, she’s about to lose her home. But the nightmare doesn’t end there: Once creditors kick her out, she’ll still need to pay back the money she borrowed to buy her house.
It’s a mortgage anomaly seen in much of Europe, but especially acute these days in Spain, a nation grappling with an economic crisis triggered by the collapse of a real estate bubble. Since the 2008 property crash, more than 300,000 have been hit by the potential double-whammy of eviction and mounds of mortgage debt.
“It hurts so, so much,” says Rodriguez, choking up as she looks up at the ceiling of the home where she’s lived for 30 years and raised two children.
Under the terms of her contract, Rodriguez will probably have to pay almost half of her euro200,000-plus ($290,000) bank debt, plus court costs and penalties after she leaves _ in stark contrast to the U.S., where defaulters can return the keys to the bank and walk away from their debt.
Defaulters are a small minority in Spain _ nearly 98 percent of mortgage holders are up to date on payments. But their plight is generating a wave of solidarity as unemployment soars to record highs: When an eviction appears imminent, demonstrators often gather by the hundreds outside the property to try to block it.
In the rallies, protesters form a human cushion and physically prevent court clerks and bank officials with a locksmith in tow from ejecting residents. The association behind the demonstrations has succeeded about 50 times since 2009, although ultimately it just delays the inevitable.
Last week, the government passed a decree that seeks to address the plight of evicted debtors. It protects more of their wages from being claimed by banks, and changes the way such people’s post-foreclosure debt is calculated, to try to trim it.
If the bank manages to sell a foreclosed home, that amount is struck off the remaining debt. But the norm these days is that the property is put up for auction and nobody bids. That has meant the bank then takes over the house for just half its originally assessed value, and wipes the amount off the remaining debt _ leaving the borrower still owing a bundle. The legislation passed last week raises the proportion the bank has to effectively pay in the event of non-sale to 60 percent.
The Platform for Mortgage Victims _ the association staging the doorstep rallies _ wants Spain to usher in U.S.-style mortgage legislation. But the Spanish Banking Association says that would wreck Spain’s low interest rate mortgage system: Even now, as loan-shy banks raise rates, they can be below 3 percent, with repayment periods of as much as 40 years and no mandatory mortgage default insurance.
The result, it says, would be banks granting fewer, smaller and more costly loans that are repayable in a shorter time, meaning the nearly 98 percent of mortgage-holders who do make their payments on time would suffer.
“The good payers would be the ones to be hurt,” it said.
But Rodriguez, a 56-year-old unemployed cleaning lady, said she fell victim to a rapacious system eager to lend money. She says she can barely read or write and gets confused in the thick gumbo of her financial woes, shared with her estranged husband.
Rodriguez and her husband Manuel, who worked as a painter and carpenter, took out a big second mortgage in 2006 to pay off debts, remodel their 3-bedroom apartment in this town outside Madrid and buy furniture and a new car.
“I did not even know what I was signing,” Rodriguez says in a living room with empty shelves and a broken cuckoo clock, as three small Yorkshire terrier yapped at her heels.
Six months after taking out the mortgage, Rodriguez and her husband separated. Since then, she complains, he hasn’t chipped in a dime toward the euro1,000-plus a month mortgage payment. She hasn’t worked in nearly two-and-a-half years, and even when she did she earned just euro500 a month.
“They made it so easy. So easy,” Rodriguez said of the credit. “If we had not bought anything or done all this, we would not owe anything now.”
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