Financial Freedom. Best business news.

Rising fees have chased millions of people away from banks and into prepaid debit cards.

In just a handful of years, prepaid cards have become the fastest growing payment method in the U.S. Just this week, American Express became the first mainstream financial company to offer a prepaid card.

But the cards have problems of their own. Complex fee schedules. Few of the protections afforded to bank and credit card customers. No ability to build credit history.

Consumer advocates are raising concerns and demanding more oversight, and at least one state is investigating prepaid card issuers. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is expected to step up oversight of the industry when it launches in July free credit report and score.

“People are using prepaid cards as checking accounts and the government ought to regulate it similarly,” says Suzanne Martindale, staff attorney for Consumers Union, a nonprofit advocacy group that is concerned about unfair prepaid card fees.

Even so, Americans spent $140 billion using prepaid cards in 2009, according to the latest data available from the Federal Reserve. That’s a 21.5 percent increase each year over four years. The amount of money loaded onto the cards is expected to reach $552 billion in 2012 from $330 million three years ago, according to the Mercator Advisory Group, a research firm.

Prepaid cards have gone mainstream by catering to the ranks of the unbanked

There have been a flurry of exchange-traded funds launched this year that employ covered calls, including four that began trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange over the past week. Covered calls are options that are written against all or some of the stock holdings, generating capital gains while changing the funds

A major international mission to investigate Japan’s flooded, radiation-leaking nuclear complex opened Tuesday as new information emerged on just how serious the crisis was in the early days after the March 11 tsunami.

The team of U.N. nuclear experts met with Japanese officials and were to inspect the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant in coming days to investigate the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986 and assess efforts to stabilize the complex by Tokyo’s self-declared deadline of early next year.

The Japanese government, which has pledged to cooperate with the experts from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, also announced its own probe into the crisis, appointing a Tokyo academic to head an investigative panel.

The plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., released new analysis suggesting that fuel rods in the plant’s Units 2 and 3 mostly melted during the early days of the crisis, which had been suspected but could not be confirmed and which suggests the severity of the accident was greater than officials have acknowledged.

TEPCO announced similar findings last week about Unit 1.

Fuel in three of the plant’s six reactors started melting after the March 11 tsunami knocked out cooling systems, prompting huge releases of radiation into the atmosphere. The plant is still leaking, but at much lower levels than immediately after the accident, and Japanese officials hope to bring the entire plant into “cold shutdown” _ halting all radioactive leaks _ by January at the latest.

In the meantime, 80,000 people remain evacuated from homes around the plant. Many are living in school gymnasiums, uncertain of when they will be able to return. A handful of stalwarts have defied government orders and refused to leave.

“TEPCO caused such a horrible disaster. Leaving my home means I have lost to TEPCO,” said Naoto Matsumura, a 51-year-old rice and vegetable farmer who has stayed at his home despite radiation concerns and a lack of electricity and running water.

“Certainly, the life is not comfortable at all,” he said payday loan. “But I will not give up.”

Violators of a 12-mile (20-kilometer) exclusion zone could face fines up to 100,000 yen ($1,200) or detention of 30 days, but no officials have moved to arrest him.

The IAEA team conferred Tuesday with Japan’s trade minister, whose ministry oversees the nuclear industry, and will visit Japan through June 2 before reporting to an international conference in Vienna on June 20.

Michael Weightman, leader of the IAEA team, said he hoped the world soon “can start learning the lessons from the information we gather.”

Goshi Hosono, director of the Japanese government’s nuclear crisis task force, said the IAEA team submitted a “long list” of questions.

“We will do our best to answer their questions,” Hosono said.

The government also said it was appointing University of Tokyo professor Yotaro Hatamura, an expert on industrial and other accidents, to head a panel of outside experts to investigate the Fukushima accident.

The crisis has raised serious questions about the lax oversight of Japan’s nuclear industry and prompted the country to scrap plans to rely on nuclear power for one half its electricity needs _ up from its current one third.

The quake and tsunami, which left 24,000 people dead or missing, also damaged farms, ports and hundreds of suppliers, helping to push Japan’s economy back into recession.

A clearer picture of the extent of damage at the plant emerged Tuesday after an analysis of data from Units 2 and 3 suggested that fuel rods in those two cores had almost certainly mostly melted as well.

“We have analyzed data, which showed that it was highly likely that most of the fuel rods have melted. But it is unlikely that melting fuel rods could worsen the crisis because the melted fuels are covered in water,” said Takeo Iwamoto, a company spokesman.

Source

Lowe’s Cos.’ first-quarter net income fell 6 percent, pressured in part by bad weather and difficult economic conditions.

The Mooresville, N.C., home improvement retailer also cut its full-year outlook on Monday.

Lowe’s earned $461 million, or 34 cents per share, for the three months ended April 29. That’s down from $489 million, or 34 cents per share, a year earlier.

Revenue dipped 2 percent to $12.19 billion.

Analysts expected earnings of 36 cents per share on revenue of $12.54 billion.

For the full year, Lowe’s now expects earnings of $1.56 to $1.64 per share and an approximately 4 percent revenue increase. It previously forecast earnings of $1.60 to $1.72 per share on a 5 percent revenue rise.

Analysts predict full-year earnings of $1.70 per share on revenue of $50.9 billion.

Source

A gain in U.S. sales of existing homes during March probably failed to make up for a drop the previous month, a sign that the housing market is struggling to rebound, economists said before a report today.

Purchases rose 2.5 percent to a 5 million annual rate after dropping 9.6 percent in February, according to the median forecast of 74 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News. Sales in January of existing homes, which make up 90 percent of the market, climbed to the highest level in eight months as buyers used all-cash transactions to obtain distressed properties.

Housing may remain a weak link in the economic recovery that began in June 2009 as unemployment, falling property values and stricter loan rules push foreclosures to record levels. At the same time, a drop in prices has made houses more affordable, a sign demand may not fall much more.

“We’re on a recovery track, it’s just going to be slower than we would all like,” said Robert Dye, a senior economist at PNC Financial Services Group Inc. in Pittsburgh. “Credit constraints are working against home sales right now. By the end of this year, we’ll start to feel like we’ve turned a corner.”

The National Association of Realtors’ data are due at 10 a.m. in Washington. Economists’ estimates ranged from 4.59 million to 5.4 million.

The figures would underscore the Federal Reserve’s view that the housing market “continues to be depressed” even as the rest of the economy improves.

Median Price

The drop in purchases in February sent the median price of existing homes to the lowest level since 2002. Distressed properties accounted for 39 percent of sales, and the share of all cash transactions was 33 percent, the highest since at least August 2008, when the agents’ group began tracking the monthly figure.

CoreLogic Inc. last month estimated that about 1.8 million homes were delinquent or in foreclosure, a so-called “shadow inventory” set to add to the 3.5 million existing homes already on the market.

A glut of unsold properties may push prices down further, a disincentive for homebuilders to break ground on new homes.

A report from the Commerce Department yesterday showed builders began work on 549,000 houses at an annual rate in March, up from 512,000 the previous month. The increase followed a 19 percent plunge in February that was the biggest drop since 1984.

Homebuilders have underperformed the broader stock market. The Standard & Poor’s Supercomposite Homebuilder Index has gained 3.6 percent so far this year, compared with a 4.4 percent increase for the broader S&P 500 Index. (SPX)

KB Home (KBH), the Los Angeles-based homebuilder that targets first-time buyers, this month reported a bigger-than-expected loss for the quarter ended Feb. 28 as orders plunged.

“We do not anticipate a net profit for 2011,” Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Mezger said during a conference call with analysts on April 5 pay day loans. “The economy is continuing to improve. Even so, this recovery has yet to include significant job growth and has not spilled over into housing.”

Builders overall are not optimistic. The National Association of Home Builders’ confidence fell to 16 this month, according to the group’s gauge released this week. A reading under 50 means a majority of builders view conditions as poor.

Bloomberg Survey ================================================================ Exist Exist Homes Homes Mlns MOM% ================================================================ Date of Release 04/20 04/20 Observation Period March March —————————————————————- Median 5.00 2.5% Average 5.01 2.6% High Forecast 5.40 10.7% Low Forecast 4.59 -5.9% Number of Participants 74 74 Previous 4.88 -9.6% —————————————————————- 4CAST Ltd. 5.05 3.5% ABN Amro Inc. 5.03 3.0% Action Economics 5.05 3.5% Aletti Gestielle SGR 5.00 2.5% Ameriprise Financial Inc 4.95 1.4% Banesto 5.40 10.7% Bank of Tokyo- Mitsubishi 4.95 1.4% Barclays Capital 5.05 3.5% BBVA 4.95 1.4% BMO Capital Markets 4.98 2.1% BNP Paribas 5.00 2.5% BofA Merrill Lynch Resear 5.00 2.5% Briefing.com 5.15 5.5% Capital Economics 5.00 2.5% CIBC World Markets 5.00 2.5% Citi 5.00 2.5% ClearView Economics 5.00 2.5% Commerzbank AG 5.00 2.5% Credit Agricole CIB 5.10 4.5% Credit Suisse 4.86 -0.4% Daiwa Securities America 4.75 -2.7% Danske Bank 5.00 2.5% DekaBank 5.00 2.5% Desjardins Group 5.05 3.5% Deutsche Bank Securities 5.00 2.5% Fact & Opinion Economics 5.00 2.5% First Trust Advisors 5.01 2.7% FTN Financial 5.00 2.5% Goldman, Sachs & Co. 4.59 -5.9% Helaba 5.00 2.5% HSBC Markets 5.10 4.5% Hugh Johnson Advisors 5.20 6.6% IDEAglobal 5.10 4.5% IHS Global Insight 4.93 1.0% Informa Global Markets 5.05 3.5% ING Financial Markets 5.00 2.5% Insight Economics 5.10 4.5% Intesa-SanPaulo 5.10 4.5% J.P. Morgan Chase 4.95 1.4% Janney Montgomery Scott L 4.96 1.6% Jefferies & Co. 5.15 5.5% Landesbank Berlin 5.00 2.5% Landesbank BW 5.03 3.1% Manulife Asset Management 4.95 1.4% Maria Fiorini Ramirez Inc 5.00 2.5% MET Capital Advisors 5.00 2.5% MF Global 4.93 1.0% Moody’s Analytics 5.08 4.1% Morgan Stanley & Co. 5.20 6.6% National Bank Financial 4.99 2.3% Natixis 4.98 2.1% Nomura Securities Intl. 5.00 2.5% OSK Group/DMG 4.95 1.4% Parthenon Group 4.88 0.0% Pierpont Securities LLC 5.00 2.5% PineBridge Investments 5.10 4.5% PNC Bank 5.00 2.5% Raiffeisenbank Internatio 5.00 2.5% Raymond James 5.00 2.5% RBC Capital Markets 4.80 -1.6% RBS Securities Inc. 5.15 5.5% Scotia Capital 5.10 4.5% Societe Generale 5.07 3.9% Standard Chartered 4.64 -5.0% State Street Global Marke 5.07 3.9% Stone & McCarthy Research 5.10 4.5% TD Securities 4.95 1.4% UBS 5.00 2.4% UniCredit Research 5.00 2.5% University of Maryland 5.00 2.5% Wells Fargo & Co. 4.98 2.1% WestLB AG 5.00 2.5% Westpac Banking Co. 5.08 4.0% Wrightson ICAP 5.05 3.5% ================================================================

To contact the reporter on this story: Timothy R. Homan in Washington at thoman1@bloomberg.net

Source

Nissan says it will fix a software glitch on 5,300 Leaf electric cars worldwide.

The company says owners of a small number of Leafs have reported that the car won’t start after they’ve turned it off.

About 500 Leafs sold in the U.S. are affected.

Nissan says dealers will reprogram the engine control computer. Owners will get a message on their car’s dashboard telling them to contact their dealer and they’ll also get letters. Spokesman Brian Brockman says dealers may even send someone to the owners’ homes or workplaces to fix the problem cash advance in one hour.

The company says there is no safety issue with the cars because they will not stop when they are running.

The battery-powered Leaf can go up to 100 miles on a single charge.

Source

The main Libyan opposition spokesman says 13 rebels have accidentally been killed and seven injured in a NATO airstrike targeting Moammar Gadhafi’s forces.

Abdel-Hafidh Ghoga said Saturday that the attack occurred as the rebels prepared to take over the oil city of Brega.

His comments are the first confirmation that the rebels were killed in an airstrike payday lenders. NATO says it’s looking into the report.

Calling it an “unfortunate accident,” Ghoga says the rebels were killed as they moved forward while the NATO strike was in progress late Friday.

Source

Treasuries rose, with two-year notes climbing the most since September, as concern of spreading unrest in the Middle East boosted demand for the relative safety of U.S. government debt.

Ten-year note yields fell as Egypt approved a request from Iran to send two naval ships through the Suez Canal on their way to Syria, which ratcheted up regional tensions and drove oil prices higher as Israel called it a “provocation.” The Federal Reserve purchased $24 billion of Treasuries and TIPS during the week, as part of its efforts to sustain the economic expansion. The Treasury will sell $99 billion of notes next week.

“Geopolitical risk remains and there is a lot of uncertainty about the possibility of it spreading, which has given Treasuries a bid,” said Suvrat Prakash, an interest-rate strategist in New York at BNP Paribas, one of the 20 primary dealers required to bid at Treasury auctions. “With Fed purchases continuing and global unrest, Treasuries have support.”

Two-year note yields fell nine basis points to 0.75 percent in New York, according to BGCantor Data, the most since the week ending on Sept. 17, from 0.84 percent on Feb. 11. The price of the 0.625 percent securities maturing in January 2013 was 99 24/32. Ten-year note yields dropped five basis points to 3.58 percent from 3.63 percent.

Flight to Bills

Three-month bill rates traded as low as 0.0821 percent yesterday, the least since June 17. One-month bill rates were little changed at 0.0659 percent.

“Anytime there is civil unrest anywhere people will flock to Treasury bills,” said Michael Franzese, head of Treasury trading at Wunderlich Securities Inc. in New York. “Investors feel they can wait out in bills the uncertainty with regard to what is going on with Federal Reserve monetary policy and the direction of long-term Treasury yields.”

Treasuries pared a weekly gain yesterday after a European Central Bank official said it may need to raise interest rates as global inflation pressures mount while the Fed maintains its target of almost-zero short-term rates. ECB Executive Board member Lorenzo Bini Smaghi said the “degree of accommodation of monetary policy has to be monitored and, if needed, corrected,” in an interview with the daily newsletter Bloomberg Brief: Economics.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s speech text in Paris yesterday didn’t address the U.S. monetary policy that central bank policy makers maintained last month along with plans to buy $600 billion of Treasuries through June. Paris is hosting the Group of 20 meetings of central bankers and finance ministers this weekend.

Fed Views

Minutes of the Fed’s meeting last month showed policy makers regarded the U.S. recovery as being on a “firmer footing.” The central bank raised projections for economic growth this year and made little change to forecasts after 2011 or for unemployment and inflation payday loan. They were divided about whether further evidence of a strengthening recovery would warrant slowing or reducing the Treasuries buying.

“People were expecting the minutes to mention some sort of exit plan, but the Fed signaled that they are more concerned about growth, which lets the market know that they are inclined to stay accommodative,” BNP Paribas’s Prakash said.

The difference between yields on two-year notes and Treasury Inflation Protected Securities, which tracks the outlook for consumer prices during the life of the debt, expanded to 2.04 percentage points, the widest gap since July 2008.

Economic Reading

Government economic reports showed housing starts climbed 15 percent in January to a 596,000 annual rate and the consumer price index increased 0.4 percent in January, exceeding the 0.3 percent median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News, figures from the Labor Department showed. Year-on-year inflation accelerated to 1.6 percent, the highest since May.

“The fundamentals look good, and are bearish for Treasuries, but the market can’t ignore geopolitical risk like this,” said James Caron, head of U.S. interest-rate strategy at Morgan Stanley in New York, a primary dealer.

President Barack Obama sent Congress a $3.7 trillion budget that projects the federal deficit will exceed $1 trillion for the fourth consecutive year in 2012 before falling to more “sustainable” levels by the middle of the decade.

Deficit Politics

The deficit for the current fiscal year is forecast to hit a record $1.6 trillion — 10.9 percent of gross domestic product — up from the $1.4 trillion the administration estimated previously. It would be $1.1 trillion in 2012, 7 percent of GDP. By 2015 it would decline to $607 billion, or 3.2 percent of GDP.

The U.S. plans to sell $35 billion in two-year notes on Feb. 22, the same amount of five-year debt the following day and $29 billion in seven-year securities on Feb. 24.

Treasuries have handed investors a 1 percent loss in 2011, while inflation-linked Treasuries decreased 0.8 percent, according to indexes compiled by Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

“No one wants to be short going into a long weekend that could expose the market to a lot of event risk,” said Thomas Tucci, managing director and head of rates trading at Royal Bank of Canada in New York. “Any selloff will be limited given the potential for more geopolitical headlines.”

Source

Women nationwide are searching high and low for a special kind of tampon that has been missing from shelves since the fall.

In January, Johnson & Johnson (JNJ, Fortune 500) said its mysteriously absent o.b. tampons had started being shipped to retailers, but that there could be a delay of weeks or days before they reached the stores.

The company also gave no explanation as to why the tampons — which have a cult-like following thanks to their small profile and lack of an applicator — were off the shelves in the first place.

And it’s now February, and the tampons still haven’t shown up.

"I’ve spent about 3 hours driving between 6 different stores today and yesterday, in heavy traffic, looking for OB tampons," one discouraged o.b. fan wrote in an online forum. "I couldn’t find any at all, in any size!"

They are out of stock online at Walmart (WMT, Fortune 500) and CVS (CVS, Fortune 500) and don’t show up in search results at Walgreens (WAG, Fortune 500) — which now owns Duane Reade — or Target (TGT, Fortune 500).

A Johnson & Johnson spokeswoman said that while this may be the case online, brick-and-mortar retailers should have received the shipments by now.

"We’ve been shipping as of our statement in early January," she said, adding that "different retailers reset their shelves at different times, or it may be that they are selling through them."

But the tampons still haven’t made it to southeastern grocery store chain Publix (PUSH). A spokeswoman said its stores "have been out of stock at the store level for the product due to the manufacturer," giving no indication of when the tampons would return to shelves.

And an employee at a Duane Reade in New York City said the store hadn’t had the tampons "for a while" and that she didn’t know when new shipments would be arriving.

The one place o.b. tampons were spotted was Rite Aid’s website. While it doesn’t have the Super Plus absorbency in stock, the Super absorbency and Regular absorbency o.b. tampons are somehow available. But Rite Aid (RAD, Fortune 500) did not return calls for comment, so don’t get your hopes up.

Because the product is so unique, the shortage has led to a black market. While a box of o.b. tampons costs $7.49 at Rite Aid, eBay users have posted starting bids of as much as $130 for four boxes, taking advantage of the limited supply.

And apparently that isn’t too much to ask of some loyal fans, with one customer saying in an online forum that she recently bought a box on Amazon.com for $39. 

Source

Polish policy makers shouldn’t rush another interest rate increase after lifting borrowing costs last month for the first time since June 2008 because it may damp economic growth, central banker Andrzej Kazmierczak said.

The Narodowy Bank Polski in Warsaw raised its seven-day reference rate to 3.75 percent on Jan. 19 from a record-low 3.5 percent. Policy makers previously kept borrowing costs unchanged for 18 months, helping Poland avoid a recession in 2009 and expand 3.8 percent last year.

Kazmierczak’s view is at odds with other policy makers, including central bank Governor Marek Belka, who signaled policy may be tightened further. Higher rates may fail to curb price increases, which are driven by external forces including growing oil costs, while potentially harming growth, Kazmierczak said.

“Drawing a vision of rate increases in the longer term is ungrounded,” he said in an interview in Warsaw yesterday. “We should avoid any nervous moves that could turn out to be more harmful to economic growth than helpful in fighting inflation.”

The zloty weakened to 3.914 per euro at 3:30 p.m. in Warsaw from 3.8992 per at noon, ending two days of gains after a 1.6 percent decline last week, the biggest weekly decline in two months. The yield on the government’s five-year bond dropped to 5.56 percent from 5.65 percent yesterday.

Forward-rate agreements used to lock in interest costs in a year’s time indicate Polish rates will increase by 1.17 percentage points by year-end, while two weeks ago they predicted 1.33 percent.

Growth Concern

Central banks in east Europe, the region hardest hit by the global financial crisis, will raise interest rates less than other emerging markets as policy makers signal greater concern about growth, according to Commerzbank AG, Capital Economics Ltd. and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Source