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Home sales heated up like never before in the month of June with the number of transactions climbing to 1,379, easily the highest recorded in this decade by the Buffalo Niagara Association of Realtors.

The trade group reported 1,379 closed deals for that period – a 24 percent leap from 1,111 sold June 2009. The previous high sales total for any month since 2000 was 1,188 in August 2007.

For the first half of the year, home sales in the Buffalo area are running 5 percent ahead of 2009 at 4,364 compared to 4,164.

Real estate observers have cited the continuation of a federal tax credit for home buyers as one reason for the spike in home sales in recent months.

Prices also rose to new highs in June with the median tag up 4 percent to $119,000 and the average single-family home price having increased 3 percent to $139,231 from $134,927 year-over-year.

Total dollar volume in the market spiraled 22 percent to $192 million from $157.7 million.

Active listings continued to expand, rising 11 percent to 6,281 from 5,934 while new listings declined 14 percent to 1,650 from 1,912.

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First Citizens BancShares’ net income soared to $28.6 million in the second quarter as loss-share agreements with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. helped the Raleigh-based bank post strong gains in interest revenue while incurring only a slight increase in its provision for loan losses.

In an earnings release issued after the close of trading Monday, First Citizens (Nasdaq: FCNCA) reported a 362 percent gain in second quarter profit – up from $6.2 million in the same quarter last year. On a per-share basis, earnings climbed to $2.54 from 59 cents.

Net interest income jumped 40 percent, to $47.8 million, due for the most part to loans acquired by First Citizens last year when the Raleigh bank acquired failed banks on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts payday loans.

The FDIC brokered those deals and agreed to cover much of the potential loan losses.

First Citizens did raise its provision for loan losses by 53 percent – to $31.8 million – in the quarter ended June 30. But with the FDIC covering nearly 70 percent of the potential loan losses shown on First Citizens’ books, the bank is in solid shape on its bottom line.

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Texas Comptroller Susan Combs said Friday that the state collected $1.61 billion in sales tax revenue for the month of June.

This is a 2.2 percent increase compared to June 2009.

“Total sales tax collections have now slightly exceeded year-ago levels for a third consecutive month,” Combs says. “Net collections in the oil and gas and manufacturing sectors expanded, but collections from the all-important retail sector were down from the year-ago level. While overall economic activity is no longer contracting, a resumption of solid growth in sales tax collections is not yet in evidence.”

Next week, Combs will send $442.8 million in sales tax allocations to cities, counties, transit systems and special-purpose taxing districts no checking account payday advance.

San Antonio will receive $17 million from the state for the month of July. This is a 15.8 percent increase over July 2009.

Bexar County does not collect a sales tax. VIA Metropolitan Transit will receive $7.8 million in sales tax revenue from the Comptroller’s Office for July. This is an 18.8 percent increase over July 2009.

The San Antonio Advanced Transportation District will receive $3.3 million from the state for July, an 8 percent increase over July 2009.

State sales tax revenue in June and local sales tax allocations in July represent sales that occurred in May.

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Patterson Cos. Inc. chose S.M. Wilson & Co. to build its new $15 million technology center in Effingham, Ill., about 100 miles northeast of St. Louis.

St. Paul, Minn.-based Patterson (Nasdaq: PDCO) is a distributor serving the dental, veterinary and rehabilitation supply markets.

S.M. Wilson said Monday it would immediately begin work on the 96,700-square-foot, three-level facility, which is slated for completion in mid-2011.

The St. Louis-based construction company is providing design/build services for the project, which is being designed to qualify for LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification by the U.S. Green Building Council. The architect on the project is Omaha, Neb.-based DLR Group.

The facility’s main level features a showroom, employee training center, offices, conference rooms and support space fast payday loans. The facilities top floor has additional training centers, offices, conference rooms and support space.

The building’s lower level will host a walk-out cafeteria, IT department, equipment testing labs, fitness facility, locker rooms, mechanical rooms, and shipping and receiving departments.

Patterson’s project includes a 450-space parking lot, an outdoor pond and walking trails around the facility. The project is scheduled for completion in mid-2011.

S.M. Wilson is one of the largest privately held companies in St. Louis with $439.1 million in 2009 revenue.

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Foreclosure activity in the St. Louis region spiked in April as banks pulled the trigger on more repossessions after several months of delay.

The number of houses either set for a foreclosure sale or actually taken back hit its highest level since September, according to data from RealtyTrac, and jumped 21 percent from the same month last year. In all, 1,090 houses were given an auction date and 789 repossessed in the 17-county metro area.

It’s a troubling sign after several quieter months on the foreclosure front but one that housing advocates have been warning about. Banks have been delaying foreclosures and offering trial modifications, with mixed results. And stubbornly high unemployment means more borrowers are strapped for cash to pay their mortgages, regardless of interest rates.

The rough month for St. Louis comes as national foreclosure rates appear to be plateauing. RealtyTrac reported that foreclosure activity nationwide fell 2 percent from last April, its first year-over-year decline on record.

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Hawaii’s gas prices remain flat from last week at an average of $3.53 a gallon, according to the AAA Hawaii Weekend Gas Watch.

Gas prices for Hawaii metro areas on Thursday were as follows:

• In Honolulu, regular unleaded sold for $3.43 a gallon, one cent higher than last week and $1.06 higher than a year ago.

• In Hilo on the Big Island, regular unleaded sold for $3.56 a gallon, two cents more than last week and $1.07 more than last year.

• In Wailuku, Maui, gas was $3 no faxing pay day loans.90 a gallon, up three cents from a week ago and $1.23 more than last year.

“Last week, oil prices surged to 18-month highs above $87 per barrel,” said AAA Hawaii’s Acting Branch Manager Chris Olvera. “The jump in prices was largely due to investor optimism on the pace of the economic recovery starting to show up in some sectors.”

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German consumer prices posted their highest annual gain in eight months in December after energy costs increased.

The inflation rate, calculated using a harmonized European Union method, rose to 0.8 percent from 0.3 percent in November, the Federal Statistics Office in Wiesbaden said today. That’s the highest level since April. Economists predicted prices would increase an annual 0.7 percent, according to the median of 19 forecasts in a Bloomberg News survey. From the previous month, prices rose 0.9 percent.

Crude oil prices have almost doubled in the past year, undermining confidence just as the economy recovers from the worst recession in more than six decades. While German economic growth accelerated in the third quarter, rising unemployment may prompt consumers to keep a rein on spending. The Bundesbank said this month that inflation will remain benign and predicted that unemployment will increase to 10.1 percent in 2011 from 8.1 percent today.

“Energy prices are still driving the inflation rate,” said Laurent Bilke, a former European Central Bank economist now at Nomura International Plc in London. “Underlying inflation, however, is still weak and is likely to remain so well into 2010.”

Germany’s economy emerged from the recession in the second quarter and growth accelerated to 0.7 percent in the third. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is spending 85 billion euros ($123 billion) to stimulate activity and the ECB has cut its benchmark rate to a record-low 1 percent as inflation risks remain contained.

‘Safely Below’

“Our interest-rate decisions are to be seen in connection with our price-stability goal, and in this context I do not see major threats for price stability in the near future,” ECB Governing Council member Ewald Nowotny said in an interview with Bloomberg News on Dec. 14. “Inflation rates will be on the positive side but it will be safely below the inflation target of the ECB.”

In the 16-nation euro area, consumer prices rose an annual 0.5 percent in November after declining 0.1 percent in the previous month. The ECB aims to keep inflation just below 2 percent. Data for December will be published on Jan. 5.

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Taliban fleeing a Pakistani offensive are regrouping in the country’s northwest, threatening to spread and prolong a conflict that has strained the nation’s economy and may hamper efforts to attract foreign investment.

While Pakistan says its month-old offensive in South Waziristan has destroyed the largest Taliban sanctuary, some militants are falling back to Orakzai, a mountain region less than 16 kilometers (10 miles) south of Peshawar, the capital of North West Frontier Province, said Talat Masood, an independent military analyst in Islamabad.

Rising violence in the region last year prompted London- based Tullow Oil Plc to give up operational control of drilling operations near Orakzai. A wider conflict may make it harder to attract companies like Mol Nyrt., Hungary’s largest oil refiner, which this month started natural gas production in the province.

“Naturally, this violence is not good for the investment climate, but the government’s decision this year to tackle the Taliban is a good one for the long term,” said Habib-ur-Rehman, who manages $48 million of stocks and bonds at Karachi-based Atlas Asset Management Ltd.

Peshawar, Pakistan’s eighth-largest city, suffered 11 major terrorist attacks this year, including a Nov. 19 suicide bombing at the main courthouse that killed 18 people. The city has a U.S. consulate and straddles the truck route for supplies from the port of Karachi to U.S. troops in landlocked Afghanistan.

Mountainous Trails

South of Peshawar, guerrillas are escaping over trails that snake through the mountains, military spokesman Major General Athar Abbas said in a Nov. 13 interview. While “sealing off the footpaths is not realistic,” the army is “preventing the militants from moving vehicles or heavy weapons,” he said.

Some escaped militants will abandon the Taliban movement and others will continue, making Orakzai the army’s possible next target, Abbas said. Pakistani air force jets have bombed Taliban positions there this month, killing as many as 20.

The fighting is hurting what the International Monetary Fund has called an “anemic” economy. Foreign aid and loans financed 40 percent of Pakistan’s $10 billion current account deficit in the year ended June 30, said Asad Farid, an economist at AKD Securities in Karachi. This year such assistance will entirely cover a deficit of $6 billion, he said.

Rising Cost

The war against the Taliban has been costing the government $8.5 billion a year, Finance Minister Shaukat Tarin said July 15. This year’s figure is higher, Tarin told reporters Nov. 16, declining to give details.

Successes in South Waziristan, where the army has captured militant strongholds and main roads, may revive an argument with the Obama administration over which Taliban factions Pakistan’s forces should strike next payday loans guaranteed no fax. U.S. National Security Adviser James Jones has renewed pressure for Pakistan to hit the groups that attack U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, the New York Times reported Nov. 15, citing unnamed U.S. officials.

“The Pakistani response to any new U.S. demand will be the same as before: that they have no resources to open a new front,” said Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center of the Atlantic Council in Washington.

The army’s current offensive targets a Taliban faction in South Waziristan that opposes Pakistan’s government, which blames it for 80 percent of Islamic attacks in the country. While Taliban groups that fight in Afghanistan are based nearby in North Waziristan, Abbas said the army has no plans to expand its assault there.

Shifting Focus

“Cost and security reasons” led oil developer Tullow to hand over control of a drilling project at Kohat, near Orakzai, to its local partner, spokesman George Cazenove said in an e- mail. “Because they are no longer the operator, the number of Tullow employees in Pakistan has been reduced significantly,” although Tullow retains a 40 percent stake in the project, Cazenove said.

Budapest-based Mol, Hungary’s largest oil refiner, began production at its Manzalai field last week after an initial investment of $500 million. Initial output of 250 million cubic feet of gas a day will be increased 40 percent to 350 million cubic feet by 2013, Mol Chief Executive Officer Gyorgy Mosonyi told a press conference in Islamabad on Nov 11.

“We are reducing risk to the possible minimum,” the company said in a statement in response to questions about security. “Operations at both the office in Islamabad and at the countryside facilities are continuous and uninterrupted.”

The Karachi Stock Exchange 100 Index fell 2.1 percent last month, the most since January, as bombings and assaults in major cities eroded confidence.

Sanctuary Disrupted

The South Waziristan campaign will improve Pakistan’s security because it has disrupted the country’s largest Taliban sanctuary, said Mahmood Shah, an analyst who once served as security chief for the border zone.

“We should see a reduction in the attacks within as little as two weeks,” Shah said.

On Oct. 17, the army sent 28,000 troops into the lands of the ethnic Pashtun Mehsud tribe, which has about 5,000 to 8,000 Taliban fighters, Abbas said. The battlefield is a forested, mountainous zone of 2,200 square kilometers, about half the size of the U.S. state of Rhode Island.

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India’s central bank must tighten its monetary policy “fairly soon” to stem inflation, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said.

“Given the magnitude of easing and the speed at which inflation has bounced back, monetary policy will need to be tightened fairly soon,” the Paris-based OECD said about India in a report released yesterday.

Expectations of higher interest rates have sent Indian bond prices down by 5.9 percent in 2009, the worst performance among 10 Asian local-currency debt markets tracked by HSBC Holdings Plc. The central bank took the first steps to raise borrowing costs last month by ordering lenders to set aside a bigger proportion of their deposits in government bonds.

India’s consumer price index for industrial workers may average 5.4 percent in the 12 months starting April 1, more than double the rate in the current year, the OECD said. During the same period, India’s economic growth may accelerate to 7.3 percent from 6.1 percent, it estimates.

Central bank Governor Duvvuri Subbarao has injected 5.85 trillion rupees ($126 billion) of cash into the economy since September 2008 to protect India from the worst financial crisis since the 1930s.

In the last monetary policy announcement on Oct. 27, Subbarao raised the statutory liquidity ratio to 25 percent from 24 percent and kept the benchmark policy rates unchanged . He maintained the central bank’s economic growth forecast for the year ending March 31 at 6 percent “with an upward bias.”

Inflation Pressures

“Given that activity is expected to strengthen relatively quickly and that the recovery is likely to have begun with only a modest level of slack in the economy, delayed fiscal consolidation will also contribute to higher inflationary pressures,” the OECD said.

India also loosened the fiscal policy to stimulate the economy amid the global recession, cutting excise and customs tax rates, raising government salaries and stepping up spending on roads and power.

As a result, India’s national budget deficit, including federal and state government finances, may reach 10.1 percent of gross domestic product in the year ending March 31 from 4.2 percent of GDP two years ago, the OECD said.

The OECD said it projects only a “modest narrowing” in the budget shortfall because much of the increase in expenditure in the past year, such as the rise in salaries of government workers, is permanent in nature.

The deficit is forecast by the OECD to narrow to 9 percent of GDP in the next financial year starting April 1.

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Hitachi Ltd, Japan’s biggest electronics firm by sales, will raise up to $4.6 billion to shore up its capital, joining a scrum of Japanese firms tapping equity markets before a possible economic slowdown.

Hitachi, which is headed for its fourth straight annual loss, said it will raise up to 416 billion yen after fees, issuing 318 billion yen worth of shares and convertible bonds worth 100 billion yen.

The Monday announcement came as its shares headed for their biggest single-day slide in six months after sources told Reuters about the public stock issue, Hitachi’s first in 27 years.

Hitachi, which has a joint venture with General Electric in nuclear power, will invest in its nuclear power, software services and lithium-ion batteries operations, while trimming losses.

But Hitachi has been forced to seek money before it could form a realistic plan for recovery, some analysts said.

“This amount is the absolute limit that Hitachi can seek from markets, but this may not be enough even to cover restructuring costs at such a mammoth firm, let alone invest in growth,” said Mitsushige Akino, chief fund manager at Ichiyoshi Investment Management Co.

“I don’t think investors will want to put their money in. There are so many more deserving companies that need funds.”

The share issue would boost Hitachi’s shares outstanding by more than 30 percent.

Hitachi, like many of its once high-flying peers, has lost market share in flat TVs and digital devices to rivals from South Korea and Taiwan, and is eager to focus its sprawling operations in growth such as in lithium-ion batteries and smart grids.

A sprawling conglomerate with more than 900 group firms, Hitachi has repeatedly said it will trim losses and focus on growth areas.

It said it will use the funds it raises to boost production capacity of nuclear reactors and lithium-ion batteries, to expand its software services operations and to spend more on research on its train systems.

But Hitachi, which supplies lithium-ion batteries to General Motors, remains weighed down by losses on its flat TVs and microchips.

It must shoulder an investment of about 80 billion yen to pave the way for a merger of Renesas Technology — its chip venture with Mitsubishi Electric — and chipmaker NEC Electronics next year.

Battered by deep losses, Hitachi’s shareholders’ equity ratio has slipped to just below 11 percent, roughly half that of rival NEC Corp, which earlier this month announced it would raise up to $1.5 billion.

The ratio is calculated by dividing shareholders’ equity by total assets and is a measure of financial strength. 

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