The International Monetary Fund said Britain requires further monetary easing to boost the economy and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne should consider budget stimulus including temporary tax cuts.
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Greek party leaders are to resume power-sharing talks Monday as negotiations to create a government drag into a second week, raising the specter of fresh elections that could threaten the crisis-stricken country’s international bailout and its membership of the euro.
President Karolos Papoulias has summoned party leaders back to negotiations at 7:30 p.m. (1630GMT), after talks on Sunday failed to lead to the creation of a coalition government.
The conservatives New Democracy party won May 6 general elections, but the poll failed to produce an outright winner. The second-placed left wing party, Syriza, has refused to join a coalition, demanding that the terms of an international bailout be scrapped or radically renegotiated.
Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras will not attend Monday’s meeting, party officials said.
“They are looking for an accomplice to continue their catastrophic work _ we will not help them,” Panos Skourletis, a spokesman for the party, told Mega television.
The political turmoil has taken a toll on markets across Europe, with shares on the Athens Stock Exchange 3.5 percent lower at 590.38 in midday trading.
“Voices of support (in Europe) to Greece … are becoming fewer and fewer, while there is a frenetic increase of those that are predicting the country’s exit from the euro,” an editorial in Greece’s top-selling Ta Nea said. “The dramatic drop in state revenues during the election campaign and the serious souring of the atmosphere in Europe toward Greece mean that after almost certain repeat elections there will be a need for even tougher austerity measures.”
Greece’s two traditionally dominant parties, New Democracy and the Socialist PASOK were hammered on May 6, as the bailed-out country suffers through a fifth year of recession, with more than one in five Greeks out of work.
Since the election, Syriza has gained support, and in a survey published Monday led with a projected 20.5 percent of public support, pushing New Democracy to second place with 19.4 percent, while PASOK was third with 11.8 percent. No margin of error was given in the Rass poll of 1,002 people, conducted May 10-11 for the Eleftheros Typos newspaper.
New Democracy and PASOK could form a government without Syriza, but the small Democratic Left party that would provide the required support is insisting that such a coalition would be unworkable.
“The president has invited us to a new meeting and I will attend,” Democratic Left leader Fotis Kouvelis told Antenna television. “I will repeat my position, that without the participation of the second largest party, the government would not have sufficient popular and parliamentary support.
Shut out of main debt markets, Greece is surviving on rescue loans from other euro countries and the International Monetary Fund, who have repeatedly warned that payments will only continue if the country continues its draconian cost-cutting program.
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Macy’s is reporting a 38 percent increase in its first-quarter profit as the department store chain continues to reap benefits from its move to tailor its fashions to local markets.
The results beat analysts’ expectations but the company failed to boost its guidance for the year.
Macy’s Inc. shares fell 4 percent in early premarket trading.
The retailer said Wednesday that its net income rose to $181 million, or 43 cents per share, for the three-month period ended April 28. That’s up from $131 million, or 30 cents per share, a year ago.
Revenue rose 4.3 percent to $6.14 billion.
Analysts surveyed by FactSet had expected 40 cents per share on revenue of $6.14 billion.
Revenue at stores opened at least a year climbed up 4.4 percent for the quarter.
South Korean producer-price inflation cooled to the slowest pace in 26 months on a decline in meat and fish costs, according to a report released two days before a monetary-policy meeting.
Prices climbed 2.4 percent in April from a year earlier, the smallest gain since February 2010, after a 2.8 percent increase in March, the Bank of Korea said in a statement in Seoul today. Prices fell 0.1 percent from March.
Defying expectations, Congress has reached the homestretch on a major overhaul of federal transportation programs that is critical if the nation is to avoid steep cutbacks in highway and transit aid.
The bill is driven partly by election-year politics. Both Congress and President Barack Obama have made transportation infrastructure investment the centerpiece of their jobs agendas. But the political imperative for passing a bill has been complicated by House Republicans’ insistence on including a mandate for federal approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. The White House has threatened to veto the measure if it retains the Keystone provision.
And there are other points of disagreement between the GOP-controlled House and Democratic-controlled Senate, including how to pay for transportation programs and how much leverage the federal government should have over how states spend their aid money. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has said it’s unlikely Congress will pass a final bill until after the November elections.
Despite LaHood’s pessimism, lawmakers and transportation lobbyists said they believe prospects are improving for passage of a final bill by June 30, when the government’s authority to spend highway trust fund money expires. The fund, which pays for roads and transit, is forecast to go broke sometime next year.
A House-Senate conference committee is scheduled to begin formal negotiations May 8.
It has taken Congress years to get this far. Work on a transportation overhaul began before the last long-term transportation bill expired in 2009. The Senate finally passed a $109 billion bill with broad bipartisan support in March. The bill would give states more flexibility in how they spend federal money, step up the pace of road construction by shortening environmental reviews and impose a wide array of new safety regulations.
House Republicans, after failing to corral enough votes to pass their own plan, recently passed a placeholder bill that allows them to begin negotiations with the Senate. That bill included the Keystone provision, as well as provisions limiting the public’s ability to challenge transportation projects on environmental grounds and taking away the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate toxic coal ash.
“I feel like people are worn out on this issue and would like to get something done,” said Jeff Shoaf, a lobbyist with the Associated General Contractors of America, a trade association for the construction industry. “I think the prospects are good.”
Winning approval of the Keystone provision, which would give federal regulators no choice but to approve a pipeline to transport oil from Canada’s tar sands, appears to be House Speaker John Boehner’s top priority, lawmakers and transportation lobbyists said instant payday loan.
Republicans portray Obama’s delay in the pipeline as a contributor to high gasoline prices. “Boehner wants to push Keystone as hard as he can because he sees it as a political winner,” said Joshua Schank, president and CEO of the Eno Center for Transportation, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to improving transportation.
Senate Democratic conferees on the bill appear to have enough votes to block inclusion of the Keystone provision in the final product. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., one of four Senate committee chairmen responsible for a portion of the bill, has announced he’ll oppose Keystone and other House environmental provisions.
An open question is whether House Republicans will balk on an overall transportation bill if they can’t get Keystone. Similarly, despite their public statements, it’s unclear whether Senate Democrats would be willing to sacrifice the bill in order to block a Keystone provision, and whether Obama would follow through on his veto threat, especially if the Keystone language were softened in negotiations.
The president painted a bleak picture of America’s infrastructure in a speech Monday to union workers in the construction industry, saying U.S. highways are clogged, railroads are no longer the fastest in the world and airports are congested. A transportation construction bill would boost employment and the economy, but “the House Republicans are refusing to pass a bipartisan bill that could guarantee work for millions of construction workers,” Obama said, referring to the Senate bill.
“Instead of making the investments we need to get ahead, they’re willing to let us all fall further behind,” he said.
The transportation bill “is incredibly important to the president,” said Ed Wytkind, president of the transportation trades department of the AFL-CIO.
Both sides ultimately must decide whether they want an issue to be used as a campaign weapon or an accomplishment they can tout to voters.
Dave Bauer, a lobbyist for the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, cautioned against reading too much into what congressional conferees say at this point.
“Before they even get to a conference table, some seem to be trying to make this all about Keystone, and it’s not,” he said.
For most of its 63 years, Cutco Cutlery has sold its knives and kitchen tools through a network of sales representatives doing in-home visits where they demonstrate, among other things, how the company’s shears can cut through a penny.
But earlier this month, the largest kitchen cutlery manufacturer in North America took a step toward a gradual paradigm shift for the company: It opened a retail store in a shopping strip in Creve Coeur. It is the New York-based company’s fourth physical store — and could be followed by dozens more nationwide.
“It could be 50 — it could be 150,” said Tim McCreadie, a Cutco executive spearheading the store expansion. “We just don’t know at this point. We’re still in the learning stage. We’re new to retail.”
Company officials say they chose the St. Louis region for one of the first stores because it’s the company’s fifth most productive sales unit and has an estimated 130,000 customers in the area who have bought Cutco knives over the years.
The local office, by the way, also has some of the company’s top salespeople, including one man who holds the all-time record of more than $3 million in sales.
So why after so many years doing business the same way has Cutco finally decided to branch out into retail stores?
Well, most of the company’s sales force is made up of college students who sell the products during their summer breaks, McCreadie said. When those students graduate, customers can lose touch with the company.
“We have over 15 million Cutco customers in the U.S.,” he said recently while giving a tour of the store at 11641 Olive Boulevard. “So we had all of these Cutco customers that wanted their products serviced and even wanted to buy more products, but didn’t have a gateway to be able to do that.”
Still, the company has been testing the retail waters slowly, careful to make sure the stores don’t cannibalize sales of its representatives. But so far, McCreadie said, so good.
Sales have been up. And about 95 percent of people who visit the stores are already Cutco customers, he said. They either come in to get their knives sharpened or replaced as part of the company’s “forever” guarantee or stop by to find out about new products.
An added benefit is that the stores are a good way to build more excitement about the brand among sales representatives, some of whom may not be familiar with the company when they first start, he said.
Next on the horizon for Cutco is online sales. Other companies with similar business models such as Avon and Pampered Chef have made the leap. There’s no timetable for Cutco to do so, but McCreadie said the company is gearing up for the transition while also trying to ensure that the company doesn’t lose its reputation for great service.
W. Scott Downey, a Purdue University professor who has incorporated Cutco’s model into his sales classes for years, said the company has stayed true to its mission of making a direct connection with its customers payday loans in one hour. So it has been slow to go online where that personal touch can be lost, he said.
But he added that online is a natural progression for Cutco. After all, customers have been able to buy products over the phone through Cutco for some time now.
“They’ve been very careful, which I think is a tribute to them,” Downey said. “They’re a pretty conservative company. That personal connection is really important to them.”
Amy Robinson, spokeswoman for the trade group Direct Selling Association, said a number of direct selling companies have some sort of online component. But online sales haven’t replaced those companies’ reliance on sales representatives, she said.
“When the Internet was first becoming popular, a lot of people said, ‘Gosh, who needs direct sellers now?’” she said. “But that’s a wholly different sales model. The sales force is the backbone of these companies.”
And a lot of these products do better by demonstration — such as the Tupperware’s famous burping technique — which doesn’t resonate the same way when someone just sees it on a shelf, she said.
Over the years, Cutco and its sales division, Vector Marketing, have occasionally come under fire from college students who have complained about everything from recruiting tactics on college campuses to the $150 deposit sales reps had to put down to get a starter kit to use for demonstrations. (Cutco sets sell for between $399 and $1,999 with individual knives starting at $50.)
But a couple years ago, Cutco did away with the deposit fee. McCreadie said the company did so to remove a possible barrier of entry for college students.
As a result, the company has also stepped up its screening process to make sure recruits are serious about selling the products since they’re now giving the kits on loan for free, said Justin Donald, a Cutco division manager.
With jobs hard to come by these days, Donald said he is getting more inquiries than ever. The local office has between 30 and 50 active sales reps throughout the year. But that sales force swells to more than 100 during the summer when college students join the ranks, Donald said.
Of course, selling is not everyone, which some students quickly find out. That’s one of the reasons Purdue’s Downey has students sell Cutco products as part of his class to show them what it’s really like to work in sales.
“In many ways, it’s an emotional business,” he said. “It’s difficult for customers to tell you no, so we want students to have that experience.”
The United Nations hopes to have 30 cease-fire monitors in Syria next week and plans are already being made for the deployment of up to 300, a spokesman for international envoy Kofi Annan said Friday, as France called on the international community to prepare for the possible failure of the increasingly fragile peace deal.
Seven observers are on the ground and another two will arrive on Monday, said Annan’s spokesman.
“During the course of next week we hope that those that we are seconding from missions in the area who can move quickly will be there and we will make the numbers up to 30,” Ahmad Fawzi told reporters in Geneva.
The preliminary agreement between Syria and the United Nations on the deployment of U.N. observers says they will have freedom to go anywhere in the country by foot or by car, take pictures, and use technical equipment to monitor compliance with the cease-fire engineered by Annan.
But the issue of using helicopters and aircraft will likely dominate discussions in the coming days, Fawzi told The Associated Press.
The larger contingent of up to 300 also still needs to be approved by the U.N. Security Council.
“As soon as the Security Council adopts a resolution authorizing up to 300 monitors on the ground, we will be ready to deploy very, very rapidly,” Fawzi said.
“We are preparing for the deployment because we feel that it is going to happen sooner or later because it must happen,” he added
In France, Foreign Minister Alain Juppe called on the international community to live up to its responsibilities and warned that if Annan’s peace plan “doesn’t function, we have to envisage other methods.”
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon accused Syrian President Bashar Assad on Thursday of failing to honor the peace plan that went into effect a week ago payday loan.
Juppe said on France’s BFM television that his country would support a U.S.-backed proposal for a U.N. arms embargo and other tough measures against Syria.
The peace plan is “the last chance before civil war. … We don’t have the right to wait,” he said.
Juppe hosted U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other diplomats in Paris on Thursday to try to work out options for Syria.
Annan’s diplomacy succeeded in getting Russia to back the monitoring mission, but Syria’s ally continues to resist more forceful measures.
“The Russian position is in the process of evolving,” Juppe said without elaborating.
U.N. chief Ban told the Security Council on Thursday that the situation remains “highly precarious,” citing an escalation of violence including “shelling of civilian areas, grave abuses by government forces and attacks by armed groups.”
That view was echoed by Annan’s spokesman.
“The situation on the ground is not good, as we all know,” Fawzi said. “There are casualties every day. There are incidents every day. And we have to do everything we can to stop what’s going on. The killing, the violence in all its forms.”
The observers, who report to Annan daily, will have freedom to install temporary observation posts in cities and towns, to monitor military convoys approaching population centers, to investigate any potential violation, and to access detention centers and medical centers in coordination with the International Committee of the Red Cross and Syrian authorities, the agreement says.
______
Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this report.
Consumer products maker Procter & Gamble Co. is raising its quarterly dividend by 7 percent to 56.2 cents.
The Cincinnati company had been paying a quarterly dividend of 52.5 cents. It pays dividends on common shares certain preferred shares. Its next dividend is payable May 15 to shareholders of record as of April 27.
Procter & Gamble makes Tide laundry detergent, Crest toothpaste, Pampers diapers, and other products.
Japan’s quarterly central bank survey shows no improvement in business confidence from the previous quarter. The worse-than-expected result reflects a deteriorating outlook among medium and smaller manufacturers despite easing worries over the crisis in Europe.
The Bank of Japan’s quarterly “tankan,” released Monday, showed the main index for big manufacturers was at minus 4 for the January-March quarter, unchanged from the last quarter of 2011. Many analysts had forecast an improvement to minus 1 faxless pay day loans.
A negative reading indicates greater pessimism than optimism among those surveyed.
Data released last week showed weaker than expected factory production in February, underscoring the fragility of the economic recovery as growth in Asia slows.
Government data show Japan’s factory production fell in February in its first decline in three months, as demand for exports weakened.
The 1.2 percent decline in industrial output reported Friday was worse than expected.
The data show production was weaker in the transport equipment, electronics components and machinery industries. Output of cell phones, large passenger cars and liquid crystal devices fell.
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