NOTE: Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy. (Compiled by Prashant Mehra in MUMBAI)
Tuesday, 1 January 2013
RPT-Sour end to 2012 masks positive trends in America
(Repeats without changes to text)
By Greg McCune
CHICAGO Dec 31 (Reuters) - Many Americans seem to be in a sour mood as 2013 begins, after Hurricane Sandy ravaged parts of the East Coast, a gunman massacred 20 school children in Connecticut and a long, contentious election campaign was followed by failure to resolve the "fiscal cliff" issue by year-end.
Americans have not been very optimistic since the Great Recession of 2008-2009, but the gloom had begun to lift this year until the blast of bad news as 2012 ended, IPSOS pollster Cliff Young said on Monday. IPSOS polling showed that some angst set in as the year ended.
Sixty-eight percent of respondents said the economy was on the wrong track at the end of 2012, IPSOS said, and 64 percent had a negative opinion of national politics.
"I do think these events had some sort of effect on people's short-term prospects," Young said.
But the headlines of 2012 belie a number of positive underlying trends in America, and Young said he expects public opinion to turn more positive in the new year.
Here is a summary of some of the positive trends in health, health, security, the environment, personal finance and education:
COLLEGE EDUCATION: More than 30 percent of Americans 25 years of age or older have finished four years of college, the highest level since 1940. Another 26 percent of adults have completed one to three years of college such as a community college, according to Census Bureau data.
This is important because the lifetime earnings of a person with a college associate's degree working from age 25 to 64 will be $442,000 more than that of a high school graduate. A bachelor's degree could yield $1 million more in lifetime earnings, a Census Bureau study found.
here
CONSUMER DEBT: While Americans are known as big spenders on credit, some surveys show that since the Great Recession of 2008-09, consumers are becoming more frugal. The average consumer with an account had credit card debt of $5,371 in November, 2012, down from $6,503 the same month a year ago, according to consumer organization Credit Karma. Average mortgage and auto debt also was down and even student loan debt, which has been rising, inched lower in November.
The end of the year usually brings increases in credit card debt due to holiday shopping, but consumers seem to be spending more responsibly and paying more with cash. Spending has been more conservative in general over the last four years since the recession, and credit card companies are lowering debt limits, Credit Karma said.
CHARITABLE GIVING: Despite the uncertain economy, Americans continue to be generous to charities. Donations rose to $298.42 billion in 2011, the highest since the Great Recession, although giving has not yet reached pre-recession levels.
Giving by Americans increased 4 percent in 2011 compared with 2010, with individual donations accounting for nearly three-quarters of the total, according to the 57th annual report by the Giving USA Foundation and the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.
Corporate donations remained flat at $14.5 billion last year, foundations made almost $42 billion in grants - an increase of 1.8 percent - while gifts from estates jumped more than 12 percent to $24.4 billion.
The money went to around 1.1 million registered charities and some 222,000 American religious groups.
Religious groups received the most donations - about one- third of the total - but dropped 1.7 percent in 2011 to $95.8 billion. The only other sector to record a drop in donations was giving to foundations, which fell 6.1 percent to $25.8 billion.
here
CANCER: Cancer claims the lives of more than half a million Americans every year and is the second leading cause of death after heart disease. But the numbers of deaths and people afflicted with the disease continue to decline, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While the latest data is for 2008, officials said the trend continued in more recent years.
The federally funded CDC attributes the decline to identifying populations with unhealthy sedentary lifestyles and obesity, and intervening in a targeted way to improve their health and prevent cancer.
The highest rate of cancer deaths in the United States is for lung cancer, followed by prostate, breast cancer among women, colon, pancreatic, ovarian cancer and leukemia.
While lung cancer causes a greater rate of deaths, it is not the most frequent cancer. More Americans contract prostate cancer than any other type of the disease, followed by women with breast cancer. Lung cancer is third, followed by colon cancer, women with cancer of the uterus, and urinary bladder cancer.
here
SMOKING: The number of Americans who smoke continues to gradually decline, to 19 percent of adults over 18 in 2011, the latest year for which statistics are available, from 19.3 percent in 2010. The news is even better for young adults: the rate of smoking among 18- to 24-year-olds dropped to 18.9 percent in 2011 from 24.4 percent in 2005.
The best trend of all is that four out of five teenagers do not smoke, and teen smoking has been on the decline since 2000, although the rate of decline has slowed.
Fewer people addicted to tobacco means lower health costs and fewer deaths, such as from lung cancer, down the road, according to the CDC.
">here
here
TEEN PREGNANCY: The number of births to girls aged 15 to 19 fell 8 percent in 20ll to a record low level. Teens seems to be less sexually active and more of those who are active seem to be using birth control, the CDC said.
www.cdc.gov/teenpregnancy/
CHILD OBESITY: After years of grim news about Americans getting fatter and sedentary, overweight children fixated on video games, the first signs of hope emerged this year. The CDC said new data showed a "modest" decline in child obesity in recent years. Two possible reasons - higher rates of breastfeeding and rising awareness of the importance of physical activity among young kids. A CDC study found 13 percent of preschoolers surveyed were obese in 1998, growing to 15 percent in 2003, but again falling below 15 percent by 2010, the most recent study year.
here
DRINKING AND DRIVING: The incidence of Americans driving after drinking too much has declined by 30 percent over the past 5 years although it remains a serious problem. Four-in-five drunk drivers are men and especially men from ages 21 to 34.
The best news is that drinking and driving among teenagers has fallen 54 percent since 1991. Only about 10 percent of teens ages 16 years or older had driven after drinking in 2011 compared with more than 20 percent two decades ago.
The reasons for this success include a minimum drinking age of 21 in all states, zero tolerance laws, graduated drivers' license systems and better parental monitoring, according to the CDC.
here
here
LAW ENFORCEMENT DEATHS: Deaths of law enforcement officials in the line of duty fell by 23 percent in 2012 after two years of sharp increases. Some 127 federal, state and local officers were killed, with traffic accidents the top cause of death, followed by shootings.
The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund attributed the reduction to better safety for police such as use of bullet-proof vests.
While national headlines have regularly featured terrible shootings such as those at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut and a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, the number of police officers killed in shootings fell 32 percent in 2012.
here
AIR QUALITY: In 2010, about 90 million tons of pollution were emitted into the atmosphere in the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. These emissions form ozone and particles, reduce visibility and deposition of acids, and visibility impairment.
But the good news is that pollution in the air we breath is down substantially in all categories. In the three decades since 1980, emissions of carbon monoxide from cars, ozone, lead, nitrogen, sulfur and particulate matter such as soot all have declined. Carbon monoxide is down 82 percent, lead down 90 percent, nitrogen down 52 percent and sulfur declined 76 percent.
here
TRASH: Americans generated about 250 million tons of trash in 2010, most of which fouls the environment or goes into landfills. We may be starting to reform our wasteful ways, according to data from the EPA. The amount of waste generated per person per day had declined to 4.43 pounds by 2010 from 4.67 pounds five years earlier, according to the EPA.
Another positive trend is that recycling is increasing. Of the 250 million tons of trash produced in 2010, more than 85 million tons or 34.1 percent was recycled or composted.
here (Reporting By Greg McCune; Editing by Eric Walsh)
TABLE-India cbank says repo bids fall to 1.5 trillion rupees
Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.
SNAPSHOT-India stocks, bonds, rupee, swaps, call at 0400 GMT
Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.
ASIA GRAPHICS-Philippines, Thailand lead 2012 market gains; China underperforms
Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.
Best Buy loses two board directors
* Mikan served as interim CEO during time of turmoil
* Paull's resignation expected
By Greg Roumeliotis
Dec 31 (Reuters) - Best Buy Co Inc said on Monday that two of its board directors had resigned, including one of its former chief executives, almost seven months after its founder, who is now mounting a bid for the struggling retailer, left the board.
The departures will leave Best Buy with four vacancies on its 11-member board.
The company's fortunes have faltered as consumers increasingly use its big box stores as showrooms for products they end up buying online at Amazon.com Inc and other websites.
Best Buy said that G. Mike Mikan, who served as interim CEO between April and September 2012 after former chief Brian Dunn was found to have had an improper relationship with a female employee, had stepped down from the board effective immediately.
Mikan left to become president of Edward Lampert's hedge fund ESL Investments Inc. Billionaire Lampert is the chairman of another retailer, Sears Holdings Corp, which he controls and is embarked on a turnaround campaign.
"Mike's background fits with our strategy and he will be a great asset to me and to ESL's portfolio companies," Lampert said in a statement on Monday.
Mikan's main corporate stint was at UnitedHealth Group Inc , where he spent 14 years and served as executive vice president and chief financial officer, as well as CEO of its Optum subsidiary. He became a Best Buy director in 2008.
Mikan was at the helm of Best Buy when Richard Schulze, its former chairman and founder, lost his chairmanship after he was held responsible for failing to notify the board about allegations against his protégé Dunn. Schulze resigned as board member in June.
In August, Schulze informed the board that he was interested in teaming up with private equity partners to buy the company but he has yet to table a solid offer and now faces a Feb. 28 bid deadline.
Schulze remains Best Buy's largest shareholder with about one-fifth of the company's outstanding shares but the company is now led by turnaround expert Hubert Joly, who was tapped as CEO to come up with a new restructuring plan.
The second departure announced on Monday was expected. Matthew Paull, who had served on the board since 2008, will retire from the board in April 2013.
Paull stepped down as CFO of McDonald's Corp in 2008. Best Buy's rules dictate that a director must retire five years after he stops pursuing the primary career he or she was engaged in when appointed to the board.
Neither Paull nor Mikan indicated that they were resigning due to any disagreements with Best Buy's management, the company said.
The fourth vacancy on Best Buy's board dates back to June, when Rogelio Rebolledo left to also comply with the company's retirement policy.
INSIGHT-How Colombian drug traffickers used HSBC to launder money
* Drug cartels used complex scheme to launder money
* Smuggled dollars to Mexico, put them in HSBC accounts
* Ring bought U.S. consumer goods and exported to Colombia
* Colombian businessman Chaparro emerged as key player
By Carrick Mollenkamp and Brett Wolf
Dec 31 (Reuters) - When several Colombian men were indicted in January 2010 on money-laundering charges, the case in Brooklyn federal court drew little attention.
It looked like a bust of another nexus of drug traffickers and money launderers, with mainly small-time operatives paying the price for their crimes.
One of the men was Julio Chaparro, a 48-year-old father of four who owned three factories that made children's clothing in Colombia.
But to U.S. authorities the case was anything but ordinary. Chaparro, prosecutors alleged, helped run a money-laundering ring for drug traffickers that took advantage of lax controls at UK-based international banking group HSBC Holdings Plc. It was one of the most important leads for U.S. investigators pursuing a case against the bank that eventually led to a $1.9 billion settlement on Dec. 11.
Chaparro was "basically putting the orchestra together" and investigators saw "him as a major player in terms of cleaning a lot of money," said James Hayes, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New York. Known as ICE, the agency and its task force led the probe.
The Colombian's lawyer, Ephraim Savitt, said Chaparro was a middleman in the operation, but disputed the extent of his client's role, saying he was the "page turner of sheet music for the conductor."
Chaparro, who was arrested in Colombia in 2010 and extradited to the United States in 2011, pleaded guilty to a money-laundering conspiracy count in May and is awaiting sentencing in 2013.
An HSBC spokesman declined comment.
Much about the trail that drug traffickers used to move U.S. dollars - the proceeds from drug sales - through HSBC and other banks remains unclear. By design, the process is layered to evade detection.
But a review of confidential investigative records that originate from two U.S. Attorney office probes and federal court filings in New York and California, as well as interviews with senior law-enforcement officials, shows how investigators tracing the activities of people who allegedly worked with Chaparro were able to expose large-scale money laundering at one of the world's biggest banks.
The federal law-enforcement task force - named after El Dorado, the mythical city of gold in South America - used wire taps, email and computer searches, information from at least one inside source, and old-fashioned surveillance, to piece together the ring's operations.
SMUGGLED ACROSS BORDER
Drug cartels sold narcotics in the United States and routed the cash to Mexico, often using couriers to smuggle it across the border. That cash would then be put into bank accounts at HSBC's Mexico unit, where large deposits could be made without arousing suspicion, according to U.S. Department of Justice documents.
In one filing, U.S. prosecutors said, Chaparro and others allegedly utilized accounts at HSBC Mexico to deposit "drug dollars and then wire those funds to ... businesses located in the United States and elsewhere. The funds were then used to purchase consumer goods, which were exported to South America and resold to generate 'clean' cash."
In a typical transaction, a middleman in a drug cartel would offer to deliver consumer goods, such as computers or washing machines, to Colombian businesses on favorable terms. Another person in the United States would buy the goods from firms using funds from drug trafficking, and fulfill those orders.
Money launderers exploited the laxness of HSBC in policing shadowy money flows, the Department of Justice said earlier this month. Failures included not conducting due diligence on customers, not adequately monitoring wire transfers or cash shipments and not having enough employees to run anti-money laundering systems. U.S. Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer called the lapses "stunning failures of oversight."
The situation was so bad, according to the Department of Justice, that in 2008, the head of HSBC's Mexican operations was told by Mexican regulators that a local drug lord described the bank as "the place to launder money."
The Chaparro probe, led by ICE and the Justice Department, converged over the past two years with two other investigations - led by federal prosecutors and investigators in West Virginia and by the Manhattan district attorney - resulting in this month's settlement with HSBC.
HSBC and its employees avoided criminal indictments, as the bank agreed instead to a deferred-prosecution deal that forces it to strengthen controls and accept a compliance monitor.
Today, Chaparro sits in a federal detention center in Brooklyn, reading the Bible and awaiting sentencing, said Savitt, a former U.S. prosecutor in Brooklyn, who submitted a list of questions to Chaparro for Reuters.
"He is contrite, regretful and ashamed about his crimes," Savitt said. "He wants to serve his time and rejoin his family. He understands that a prison term could prevent that from happening for many years."
Under federal guidelines, he could face 15 to 18 years in prison.
ON CHAPARRO'S TRAIL
The El Dorado federal task force, based in a building on the west side of Manhattan near Chelsea Piers, serves as an umbrella organization for some 250 law-enforcement officials from state, local and federal agencies.
One of the task-force supervisors is Lieutenant Frank DiGregorio, a former New York detective who spent years tracking the so-called Black Market Peso Exchange, which is used to convert dollars to Colombian pesos through trading in goods. DiGregorio along with two younger investigators - Graham Klein and Carmelo Lana - led the HSBC case.
The overall probe began in 2007 when investigators analyzed how courier companies ferried cash through airports in Miami and Houston, a person familiar with the case said. They ultimately tracked that to HSBC's operations in Mexico and then connected it to funds moving through New York.
A tipping point in the investigation came in 2009 when El Dorado agents arrested a man named Fernando Sanclemente. Two sources familiar with the case say Sanclemente was an operative in Chaparro's network.
Sanclemente, who was charged with allegedly conducting financial transactions tied to narcotics trafficking, is free on bail with a $200,000 bond, according to the latest court docket entry, which dates to January 2012. His lawyer, James Neville, declined to discuss the status of the case.
According to a criminal complaint filed against him by Lana, the El Dorado agent, on June 30, 2009, task force agents followed Sanclemente for more than two hours as he drove around Queens in New York to ferry cash from drug sales.
Sanclemente first met with a person for about "30 seconds" on one street corner, and left with a yellow plastic bag. Later that night, he drove to a Dunkin' Donuts near LaGuardia Airport, where a black livery cab pulled up and the driver handed him a black bag.
The El Dorado team followed Sanclemente to Laurel Hollow, New York, some 40 minutes away, where the investigators stopped and searched him, finding about $153,000 in the two bags. At Sanclemente's apartment, investigators said they found ledgers and documents consistent with money laundering.
With the arrest, investigators gained insight into Chaparro's alleged transactions. At one point, investigators set up undercover bank accounts where they were able to get Chaparro's network to wire proceeds that could be traced back to HSBC's Mexico operations, according to people familiar with the situation and a Department of Justice filing in the HSBC case.
Federal agents would ultimately home in on $500 million that had moved from HSBC Mexico to HSBC's operations in the United States, according to the confidential investigative records.
Between October 6, 2008 and April 13, 2009, Chaparro and others conducted money laundering transactions totaling $1.1 million tied to narcotics trafficking, the indictment against Chaparro alleged.
RPT-GRAPHIC-2012 markets-Asia, Germany, Turkey, Portugal star
LONDON Dec 31 (Reuters) - As 2012 draws to a close, global asset market tallies for the year show it would have been hard to lose money on the major indices during a bumpy year dominated by massive monetary support from the world's biggest central banks.
Thanks to a late surge in Chinese and Japanese stock markets, up 16 and 9 percent respectively in December, Asian equity at large was one of the best bets of 2012.
MSCI's index of Asian equities excluding Japan, for example, gained more than 20 percent this year and outperformed many strategists' favoured trades of investment grade and high-yield corporate bonds as well as the broader emerging markets benchmarks.
Those December gains in Shanghai and Tokyo may well be a frontloading of many investors' top picks for 2013, where Chinese and Japanese stocks feature highly.
However, apart from the retreat in major commodity indices and yen-sapped Japanese government bonds, most other major asset classes also ended the year in the black.
Despite a continued tendency for the market to lurch from "risk on" to "risk off" modes during the year, both the most-favoured 'safety' trades and some of the bumpier, white-knuckle rides gained in tandem.
German 10-year bunds returned almost 10 percent and gold was up 6 percent and yet Spanish 10-year debt gained more than 8 percent and emerging market equities jumped almost 20 percent.
Of the MSCI country equity indices, Germany's more than 30 percent rise in U.S. dollar terms was the standout performance among major bourses, followed closely by gains of more than 25 percent in Hong Kong and India.
In the MSCI stable of emerging markets, Turkey surged 65 percent in dollar terms - almost double Germany's gains - while Egypt ended the year up 50 percent despite persistent local political tension. It is though still well below levels seen at the end of 2010, before the revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak. Poland rose 41 percent, helped by zloty gains on the dollar of 11 percent.
Morocco's 10 percent loss for 2012 was one of the few markets left in the red for the year.
You have to get into the more exotic world of frontier markets to see some big losses emerge, with the likes of Ukraine and Argentina losing between 40 and 50 percent. That's balanced out by gains of more than 50 percent in Nigeria and Kenya.
And yet you would have had to return to the battered euro zone to put all that in the shade. Portuguese 10-year government bonds returned 80 percent over the course of 2012.
Top equity sectors worldwide were financials and healthcare. Top commodities were wheat and soybeans whereas coffee, cotton and sugar were best avoided.
BROAD ASSET SHIFTS 2012:
COUNTRY EQUITY PERFORMANCE:
GOVERNMENT BOND MARKETS:
CURRENCIES:
EQUITY SECTORS:
EMERGING MARKET EQUITIES:
FRONTIER MARKET EQUITIES:
COMMODITIES:
HEDGE FUND STRATEGIES:
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)