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The top lawyer for the National Labor Relations Board told a congressional committee Friday that while an NLRB complaint against Boeing Co. may make South Carolina workers feel vulnerable and anxious, the legal action is aimed at protecting the rights of workers everywhere.

The NLRB is suing the aeronautics giant alleging the manufacturer located its new 787 jet assembly line in South Carolina to retaliate against union workers in Washington state who went on strike in 2008.

The congressional hearing is the latest episode in a dispute between the NLRB, which has a majority of Democratic appointees, and GOP lawmakers and Boeing. The NLRB wants that work returned to Washington state, even though the company opened its $750 million South Carolina plant last week.

“Boeing has every right to manufacture planes in South Carolina, or anywhere else, for that matter, as long as those decisions are based on legitimate business considerations,” Lafe Solomon, the agency’s acting general counsel, told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Relations meeting in South Carolina.

South Carolina’s Republican Gov. Nikki Haley, who with 15 other GOP governors asked that the complaint be dismissed, called the complaint “an attack on our employers trying to keep business in America.”

The plant represents the single largest industrial investment in the history of South Carolina, a right-to-work state.

The NLRB complaint went before a judge in Seattle earlier in the week and an attorney for Boeing asked that it be dismissed, adding it had cast a shadow over the company’s employees, supplies and investments. The company said that no one has lost a job in Washington state and that Boeing has added more than 3,000 jobs at its assembly site in Everett, Wash.

South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson called the complaint “the shot heard around the business world” and said it could allow the NLRB to decide where companies invest business capital loan for people with bad credit.

Haley warned that workers across the nation could suffer if companies take business overseas.

“The retaliation is coming from the president. The retaliation is coming from the NLRB. It is not coming from Boeing,” she said.

Solomon told the panel’s Republican chairman, Darrell Issa of California, that the White House played no role in his decision to bring the complaint.

Before the hearing began, a small group of protesters gathered outside holding signs saying Chicago-based Boeing must create jobs legally.

Georgette Carr, who has worked as a union dock worker for 10 years, said South Carolina needs good jobs but “companies that come here need to play by the rules.”

Democrats on the committee strongly questioned why the panel was holding a field hearing the same week the NLRB complaint went to court.

“I am very concerned about the timing. His (Solomon’s) testimony today raises questions about the due process rights of litigants,” said U.S. Rep. Carolyn Malony of New York.

Haley has made no secret she opposes unions.

The International Association of Machinists and AFL-CIO sued earlier this year, asking for a court order telling Haley and state Department of Labor director Catherine Templeton to remain neutral in union matters in South Carolina.

The lawsuit stemmed from several remarks, including those Haley made last December when she nominated Templeton. Haley said her background would be helpful in state fights against unions, particularly at the new Boeing plant.

A federal judge is expected to rule next week on a motion to dismiss that case.

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Maple Group Acquisition Corp. says it has been in discussion with a number of additional potential investors to join its group of nine Canadian banks and pension plans that want to take over TMX Group.

A spokesman would not confirm reports that the investors are Desjardins Financial Group, GMP Capital Inc., and Dundee Capital Markets.

But Peter Block says the consortium has seen a considerable interest from the potential investors, which he says is a vote of confidence in its alternative proposal for the TMX Group (TSX: X), which operates the Toronto Stock Exchange and other Canadian exchanges no credit check payday loans.

New investors could help the group sweeten its $3.6-billion takeover proposal, which has already been rejected by the TMX Group.

Maple plans to mail out its proposal directly to shareholders this week.

The TMX Group is pushing ahead with plans to merge with the London Stock Exchange Group and will hold a special shareholder meeting later this month to vote on the agreement.

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Moody’s Investors Service is reviewing the ratings of Bank of America Corp. Citigroup Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. for possible downgrades.

The three banks’ current ratings get a boost from an assumption the federal government would prevent them from failing in a crisis. Moody’s said Thursday that this assumption may no longer be true.

In a statement accompanying the announcement, Moody’s senior vice president Sean Jones said the Dodd-Frank Act makes clear the government “does not want to bail out even large, systemically important banking groups.”

Moody’s currently rates Bank of America’s senior debt A2, Citigroup’s A3 and Wells Fargo’s A1. Implied government backing pushes Bank of America’s rating up five spots, Citigroup’s up four spots and Wells Fargo’s three spots.

A downgrade would raise the banks’ borrowing costs.

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Mexico central bank Governor Agustin Carstens will be presented as a candidate for managing director of the International Monetary Fund, the Finance Ministry said in an e-mailed statement today.

The process to choose a new leader at the IMF should be “open, transparent and based on merit,” the ministry said. Finance Minister Ernesto Cordero will present Carstens’ candidacy, the statement said. The government will likely nominate Carstens tomorrow, said Ricardo Ochoa, head of international affairs at the ministry, in a phone interview.

With Carsten’s nomination, Mexico joined Australia, China and other nations in calling for the new managing director of the lender to be chosen because of merit and not the convention that the position should go only to Europeans. Australian Treasurer Wayne Swan said May 22 the position shouldn’t be “limited” to any one nation or continent.

The Washington-based fund plans to complete its search for a managing director by June 30 to replace Dominque Strauss-Kahn who was indicted May 19 in New York on charges including attempted rape. Carstens served as deputy managing director of the fund from 2003 to 2006.

Carstens became central bank governor in January 2010 after Guillermo Ortiz stepped down. Carstens, who has a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago, served as finance minister starting in 2006, where he led the nation’s response to the global financial crisis. Mexico was the first nation to request a flexible credit line from the IMF, a mechanism to help support economies seeking strong macroeconomic policies.

Voting Power

Mexico leads a group of eight countries with 117,045 votes, or 4.66 percent of the total IMF voting power, according to the multilateral lender’s website faxless pay day loans. The group is the seventh largest, measured by voting power, behind the U.S., Japan, Germany, France, the U.K. and 10 nations led by Belgium.

Carstens, a Chicago Cubs baseball fan, led Mexico’s response to the global financial crisis as finance minister since 2006. As chief economist for the central bank from 1994 to 1999, he co-wrote a paper in which he pushed for market participants to have broader access to central bank data. Under Carstens, the central bank published the minutes of policy meetings for the first time this year.

Flexible Credit

The IMF renewed and boosted Mexico’s flexible credit line to $72 billion in January, replacing the one-year $48 billion facility. Mexico first sought the line in 2009 to bolster confidence in the economy, which contracted the most since 1995 that year. Colombia and Poland were the only other two nations to enter similar agreements with the IMF, which the lender said were reserved for nations with strong economic policies.

The economy grew 5.5 percent last year, the fastest growth in 10 years, and may expand as much as 5 percent this year, Carstens said on May 11. Policy makers boosted their forecast for growth this year without changing their forecast for inflation of 3 percent to 4 percent. Annual inflation slowed to 3.36 in April, near the 5-year low set in March and half that of Brazil. The central bank has a target of 3 percent inflation.

Mexico has been buying as much as $600 million dollars monthly through dollar options since March 2010, boosting foreign reserves rose to a record $125.8 billion this year, according to the central bank.

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ST. LOUIS

Yuan forwards traded at the biggest premium to the spot rate in more than five months, reflecting speculation the central bank will allow faster currency gains to help tame inflation.

More rapid appreciation may be a tool for curbing prices, Wang Yong, a professor at the People’s Bank of China’s training center in the city of Zhengzhou, wrote in a commentary published in today’s Securities Times newspaper. The central bank set the yuan’s reference rate 0.11 percent stronger at 6.5156 per dollar, the highest level since July 2005.

“The frequent record highs in the reference rate are pushing up appreciation bets in the offshore market,” said Liu Dongliang, a Shenzhen-based senior analyst at China Merchants Bank Co., the country’s sixth-largest lender by market value. “There won’t be any one-off move in the foreseeable future, especially when the trade surplus is narrowing.”

Twelve-month non-deliverable forwards rose 0.3 percent to 6.3285 per dollar as of 10:43 a.m. in Hong Kong, 2.9 percent stronger than the onshore exchange rate of 6.5133, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That’s the largest gain projected since Nov. 10. The currency appreciated 0.1 percent today in Shanghai and earlier touched a 17-year high of 6.5131, according to the China Foreign Exchange Trade System.

Relatively large pressure for yuan gains has affected companies’ export orders, the Ministry of Commerce said on its website today. The country’s import growth may be faster than export growth this year, the ministry said. The world’s second- biggest economy had a $1.02 billion trade deficit in the first three months of this year, the first quarterly shortfall in seven years.

Consumer prices rose 5.4 percent in March from a year earlier, exceeding the government’s 2011 target of 4 percent, according to data released last week.

–Judy Chen. Editors: Sandy Hendry, James Regan

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With rising oil prices and the possibility of a Tory majority, the future is looking brighter for northern Alberta

European Central Bank Executive Board member Juergen Stark said the bank will raise interest rates and withdraw other emergency measures at an appropriate pace.

“The ECB will adjust its policy interest rates and its provision of liquidity at a pace and to a degree commensurate with the evolution of risks to price stability and as appropriate to maintain an orderly and functional monetary policy transmission,” Stark said in a speech in Hong Kong today. “As with the phasing-in of non-standard measures, there are no pre-defined steps between phasing them out and exiting from very low policy interest rates.”

Stark’s comments indicate the Frankfurt-based ECB has embarked on a gradual tightening cycle even though President Jean-Claude Trichet said last week’s rate increase, the first in almost three years, wasn’t necessarily the start of a series. Officials are balancing the need for higher borrowing costs in countries like Germany, whose economy is booming, against the risk that they could exacerbate the sovereign debt crisis afflicting peripheral euro-area nations.

The ECB on April 7 lifted its key rate to 1.25 percent from a record low of 1 percent to stem faster inflation. At the same time, it maintained programs to provide unlimited liquidity to banks and purchase the bonds of debt-strapped governments.

‘More Normal’

These “non-standard monetary policy measures are an extraordinary response to exceptional circumstances” and are “temporary in nature,” Stark said. “A return to a more normal liquidity management and to a more moderate scale of central bank intermediation is warranted to avoid distortions in financial incentives with longer-term adverse consequences for the economy.”

Stark suggested the ECB can keep raising rates while leaving some non-standard measures in place, saying they can “coexist with any interest rate level.”

“The maintenance of price stability over the medium term guides all monetary policy decisions,” he said.

Inflation breached the ECB’s 2 percent limit in December and accelerated to 2.6 percent last month, the fastest pace in more than two years. The ECB aims to keep inflation just below 2 percent.

Policy makers will follow last week’s rate increase with 25 basis-point steps every three months, taking the benchmark to 1.5 percent in July and 1.75 percent in October, according to the median of 20 estimates in the Bloomberg News survey. The pattern will continue in 2012 with increases every quarter, so that the key rate reaches 2.75 percent before the end of next year, the survey shows.

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What had been a little-known home weatherization program has become the latest target for Republican state senators trying to make a point about runaway federal spending.

The senators have proposed slashing $250 million of already approved federal stimulus projects as a trade-off for their agreement to drop their controversial bid to turn down federal money for unemployment assistance.

The leader of the conservative group, Sen. Jim Lembke, R-Lemay, called the stimulus spending “a plethora of different pork barrel projects and pet projects cash till payday advance.” Chief among them: the weatherization program that pays to upgrade homes for low-income Missourians. That millions of dollars in federal funds has been ’sitting there” for two years proved his point that it was unneeded, Lembke said.

But one of the biggest recipients of weatherization money awarded to any local agency in the state