*BOE HOLDS ASSET PURCHASE PLAN AT 375 BLN PNDS *BANK OF ENGLAND MAINTAINS BENCHMARK INTEREST RATE AT 0.50%
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Twitter Indicated 69% Above IPO Price on Gray Market 2013-11-07 11:03:40.723 GMT
By Gaurav Panchal Nov. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Twitter shares are indicated 69% higher at $43.84 vs the IPO price of $26, according to gray market prices supplied by IG. * IG’s gray market price, up 12% during most recent trading day, is based on Twitter’s market value with expected ~544.7m shares * IPO range was $23 to $25, priced at $26 * Trading expected to start today, NYSE symbol TWTR * NOTE: According to filing, TWTR common stock offer is for 70m shares, common stock outstanding after offering: 544,696,816 shares; underwriters granted 30-day option to purchase 10.5m additional shares
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--Editors: James Ludden, Brian Lysaght
To contact the reporter on this story: Gaurav Panchal in London at +44-20-7392-0511 or gpanchal2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Ludden at +44-20-7673-2645 or jludden@bloomberg.net
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BN 11/07 10:15 *FIAT'S ALTAVILLA SEES `MILD RECOVERY SIGNS' IN OTHER EU MKTS BN 11/07 10:12 *EUROPE CAR MKT EX ITALY MAY HAVE HIT BOTTOM: FIAT'S ALTAVILLA BN 11/07 10:12 *FIAT'S ALTAVILLA: SOME SIGNS OF RECOVERY OF OTHER EU CAR MKT BN 11/07 10:10 *FIAT'S ALTAVILLA SEES NO SIGN OF RECOVERY OF ITALY CAR SALES
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Fiat’s Altavilla Sees No Sign of Recovery in Italy Car Sales 2013-11-07 10:26:40.834 GMT
By Tommaso Ebhardt Nov. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Alfredo Altavilla, head of Fiat Chrysler EMEA, speaks to reporters in Milan. * Says some “mild” signs of recovery in other EU car mkts, Europe car mkts ex Italy may have hit bottom * NOTE: Italy New Car Sales Decline for 26th Straight Month: BI Chart {NSN MVS5906TTDSA<Go>}
Link to Company News:{CNHI US <Equity> CN <GO>} Link to Company News:{F IM <Equity> CN <GO>}
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To contact the reporter on this story: Tommaso Ebhardt in Milan at +39-02-8064-4231 or tebhardt@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Marco Bertacche at +39-02-8064-4233 or mbertacche@bloomberg.net
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"If the price is right, such combinations could be interesting," says the K + S competitors Mosaic. The German potash producer was injured - and the quarterly report is still pending. A profit slump threatens.
Price erosion, mining disaster , downgrade - for the fertilizer company K + S is coming thick and fast at the moment. In addition, the lost profits of North American rivals Mosaic and Agrium numbers do not bode well for the company expect the Dax is presenting its results for the third quarter of next Thursday. Analysts currently expect on average believe that the adjusted income has halved compared to the previous quarter. K + S shares on Wednesday temporarily lost more than 5 percent and were the biggest loser in the leading index. Ultimately, a decrease of about 3 percent remained.
For the price slide traders blamed primarily the lowest rating. Moody's, the credit rating of K + S by two notches to junk status "Ba1" reduced. The rating agency justified this with the impending price drop of potash fertilizers after the collapse of the Russian-Belarusian export BPC alliance. In addition, K + S has to take more money for the opening of its new potash mine in Canada in the hand. Also, the S & P is currently considering whether to reduce the K + S rating.
Reduce debt quickly
A reduced credit rating by rating agencies usually leads to the fact that companies have to pay higher interest rates when they borrow money on the capital market. For K + S, the decision must be particularly galling: The company is considering, according to London's financial districts to fund its mining project in Canada on corporate bonds with a volume of up to 1.5 billion euros. A decision will learn in the coming weeks, the Reuters IFR daughter learned recently.
K + S can not understand the decision by Moody's and is convinced that despite the downgrade continues to collect funds on the capital market. The Group also disponer had cash of around 1.2 billion euros and a credit line of over one billion euros, a company spokesman stressed. A higher debt, which could accumulate K + S because of the costly opening of the mine in Canada, is only temporary and can be removed quickly after the commissioning of the mine, the spokesman added. "The goal was and is to have a rating in the investment-grade long-term."
Threat of a price drop?
The Russian K + S competitor Uralkali end of July, export BPC consortium terminated with Belarusian state concern Belaruskaly, triggering shock waves in the fertilizer industry. So far, BPC and Canpotex's North American counterpart have dominated 70 percent of potash fertilizer market and kept prices at a high level. Now put K + S and its competitors on a falling prices, many farmers hold because of the uncertainty about the further price development is currently back with orders.
As a result of winning the Canadian manufacturer Agrium fell by 70 percent in the third quarter by 41 percent to 76 million dollars, the U.S. provider Mosaic to 124 million dollars. The Americans consider because of falling fertilizer prices now, to curb the promotion in its potash mine in Carlsbad, New Mexico, USA. Basically, the company from Plymouth in Minnesota but was interested in expanding its capacity, underlined Mosaic CEO Jim Prokopanko. When asked whether he had interest in the U.S. rival Intrepid Potash or the new K + S mine in Canada, Prokopanko said: "If the price is right, such combinations could be interesting." K + S was puzzled by this statement, after the group has repeatedly stressed that despite the turmoil in the fertilizer market in the project and hopes to be able to hold it alone. "A sale or a partnership are not for us to discuss," said K + S spokesman.
This is one of the few times that Wall Street could be overly pessimistic about the monthly employment report. It’s not because the report will be so good — it won’t be. But “experts” reading Labor Department tea leaves see signs of minuscule gains when the October jobs report is released on Friday. The Street expects the job-creation number will be a measly 85,000 compared with the pathetically low 148,000 in September. John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics — the best forecaster around — thinks growth could come in as low as 67,000. He says forecasters have been guided down by weaker trend models from the Bureau of Labor Statistics seasonal adjustments. The models are terrible as forecasters and Wall Street’s guess is always too high. So why do I think The Street could be underestimating growth? For one thing, October is one of those months when the Labor Department is pretty optimistic about the number of jobs it thinks (but can’t prove) were created by small, newly formed companies. Last October, the Labor Department added 118,000 of these phantom jobs to the monthly count and there’s no reason it should be less generous this year. Then there is the effect of the government shutdown that happened in mid-October. Because government workers have been paid — or will eventually be paid — their positions are not being counted as lost in the survey that produces the job count. So those “furloughed” workers will not detract from job growth in the so-called establishment (or company) survey, which results in the figure that gives us monthly job growth. If all 800,000 of those furloughed positions had been deducted, Friday’s number would come in at minus hundreds of thousands of jobs. These furloughed workers will, however, be included in the unemployment rate, which is derived from a separate survey taken by calling houses. This could temporarily boost the jobless rate by a couple tenths of a percentage point. That’s not to say the government shutdown won’t have any impact on the total number of jobs, as measured through the establishment survey. When the government shut down, people in the private sector were probably temporarily or even permanently let go from jobs connected to government contracts. But will the effect be enough to reduce Friday’s number to growth of just 85,000, as Wall Street is expecting? This is an unaccustomed position for me but I’m going to have to bet the over — meaning, I think the figure will come in over 85,000. Keep one other thing in mind, though. No matter what, the figure will be the epitome of a mulligan: the forgiven shot that anyone who plays golf knows about. All of this is moot, of course. The Fed will ignore the number when determining whether or not to begin to back off its quantitative easing policy. And economists will have a legitimate excuse to treat the October number will disdain. Our concerns about the economy will get serious again on Dec. 6, when the November jobs figure comes out and we can again fret about the direction of our country. - I’d like to continue the rant I started in my last column about more insider traders needing to go to jail. Steve Cohen, the head of SAC Capital, probably isn’t thrilled that he had to turn over $1.8 billion to settle charges against his firm. But he’d be downright crestfallen if he had to pay and go to jail. There’s no deterrence if the fine — even at $1.8 billion — is less than the profits made from illegal trading. US Attorney Preet Bharara likes to play with words, with his twist on “too big to fail” that no financial institution is “too big to jail.” But that’s as likely as, say, Citibank going bust. We all know that companies can’t be incarcerated. So corporate executives probably have a nice laugh when they hear the “too big to jail” quote. Bharara needs to say “no financial institution is too big to shut down. And no executive makes so much money, has so much political clout or is so charming that he can’t end up behind bars.” Yeah, it’s a little long and not as catchy. But it gets the point across to anyone who thinks cheating is the way to either make themselves rich or make their company’s performance look better. Happy hunting, Preet. But the next time you go after insider trading, bring along your handcuffs. - If you have any involvement in the financial markets, you’ll want to keep your eyes on interest rates. After a brief break, they are rising again despite the fact that the weak economy should keep them down. Friday should be interesting. If the jobs report is weak — and it should be — and rates keep climbing, then there is probably something else going on that we don’t know about.
WASHINGTON — The C.I.A. is paying AT&T more than $10 million a year to assist with overseas counterterrorism investigations by exploiting the company’s vast database of phone records, which includes Americans’ international calls, according to government officials.
The cooperation is conducted under a voluntary contract, not under subpoenas or court orders compelling the company to participate, according to the officials. The C.I.A. supplies phone numbers of overseas terrorism suspects, and AT&T searches its database and provides records of calls that may help identify foreign associates, the officials said. The company has a huge archive of data on phone calls, both foreign and domestic, that were handled by its network equipment, not just those of its own customers. The program adds a new dimension to the debate over government spying and the privacy of communications records, which has been focused on National Security Agency programs in recent months. The disclosure sheds further light on the ties between intelligence officials and communications service providers. And it shows how agencies beyond the N.S.A. use metadata — logs of the date, duration and phone numbers involved in a call, but not the content — to analyze links between people through programs regulated by an inconsistent patchwork of legal standards, procedures and oversight. Because the C.I.A. is prohibited from spying on the domestic activities of Americans, the agency imposes privacy safeguards on the program, said the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because it is classified. Most of the call logs provided by AT&T involve foreign-to-foreign calls, but when the company produces records of international calls with one end in the United States, it does not disclose the identity of the Americans and “masks” several digits of their phone numbers, the officials said. Still, the agency can refer such masked numbers to the F.B.I., which can issue an administrative subpoena requiring AT&T to provide the uncensored data. The bureau handles any domestic investigation, but sometimes shares with the C.I.A. the information about the American participant in those calls, the officials said. Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the C.I.A., declined to confirm the program. But he said the agency’s intelligence collection activities were lawful and “subject to extensive oversight.” “The C.I.A. protects the nation and upholds privacy rights of Americans by ensuring that its intelligence collection activities are focused on acquiring foreign intelligence and counterintelligence in accordance with U.S. laws,” he said. “The C.I.A. is expressly forbidden from undertaking intelligence collection activities inside the United States ‘for the purpose of acquiring information concerning the domestic activities of U.S. persons,’ and the C.I.A. does not do so.” Mark Siegel, an AT&T spokesman, said: “We value our customers’ privacy and work hard to protect it by ensuring compliance with the law in all respects. We do not comment on questions concerning national security.” The C.I.A. program appears to duplicate work performed by the N.S.A. But a senior American intelligence official, while declining to address whether the AT&T alliance exists, suggested that it would be rational for the C.I.A. to have its own program to check calling patterns linked to overseas terrorism suspects. With on-the-ground operatives abroad seeking to disrupt terrorist activities in “time-sensitive threat situations,” the official said, the C.I.A. requires “a certain speed, agility and tactical responsiveness that differs” from that of other agencies. “That need to act without delay is often best met when C.I.A. has developed its own capabilities to lawfully acquire necessary foreign intelligence information,” the official said. Since June, when documents leaked by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden began to surface, an international debate has erupted over the scope of N.S.A. surveillance and the agency’s relationships with American companies that operate networks or provide Internet communications services. Many of the companies have protested that they are legally compelled to cooperate. The AT&T-C.I.A. arrangement illustrates that such activities are not limited to the N.S.A., and that cooperation sometimes is voluntary.
While officials in Washington are discussing whether to rein in the N.S.A. on American soil, governments in Europe are demanding more transparency from the companies and threatening greater restraints. AT&T is exploring a purchase of Vodafone, a European cellphone service provider, and European regulators and politicians have vowed to intensely scrutinize such a deal.
AT&T has a history of working with the government. It helped facilitatethe Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program by allowing the N.S.A. to install secret equipment in its phone and Internet switching facilities, according to an account by a former AT&T technician made public in a lawsuit. It was also one of three phone companies that embedded employees from 2003 to around 2007 in an F.B.I. facility, where they used company databases to provide quick analysis of call records. The embedding was shut down amid criticism by the Justice Department’s inspector general that officers were obtaining Americans’ call data without issuing subpoenas. And, for at least the past six years, AT&T has embedded its employees in federally funded drug investigation offices to analyze call records, in response to subpoenas, to track drug dealers who switch phones. A briefing document for that program said AT&T had records of calls handled by its switches — including “a tremendous amount of international numbers that place calls through or roam on the AT&T network” — dating back to 1987, and described efforts to keep its existence “under the radar.” The history of the C.I.A. program remains murky. It began sometime before 2010, and was stopped at some point but then was resumed, according to the officials. They said the House and Senate Intelligence Committees had been briefed about it. While the N.S.A. is separately vacuuming up call metadata abroad, most scrutiny in the United States has focused on its once-secret program that uses court orders to domestic phone companies under the Patriot Act to assemble a comprehensive database of Americans’ calls. Some lawmakers have proposed modifying it to have the phone companies, not the N.S.A., control the data, similar to how the C.I.A. has been operating. Still, there may be limits to comparisons. The N.S.A. is subject to court-imposed rules about the standard that must be met before its analysts may gain access to its database, which contains records from multiple providers. The C.I.A. appears to have a freer hand, and officials said it had submitted significantly more queries to AT&T for data. In addition, while both programs analyze cross-border calls of Americans, the N.S.A.’s Patriot Act database does not include purely foreign calls, while AT&T does not use purely domestic calls in analyzing links for the C.I.A., officials said. Absent an emergency, phone companies are usually legally forbidden to provide customers’ calling records to the government except in response to a subpoena or a court order, and the C.I.A. has a mandate to focus overseas. Lawyers who reviewed the program, officials said, concluded that AT&T’s partial masking of American phone numbers satisfied those restrictions, citing a statutory exception to data privacy lawscovering “the acquisition by the United States government of foreign intelligence information from international or foreign communications.” That same exception has come to public attention before. It was apparently invoked by a still-secret Jan. 8, 2010, memo written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. A 2010 inspector general’s report described the memo as allowing the F.B.I. to obtain call records “on a voluntary basis from providers, without any legal process or a qualifying emergency.” While the bureau said it would not use that memo, the report warned that the existence of the government’s still-classified legal theory created a “significant gap” in “accountability and oversight” and urged Congress to modify the statute. Lawmakers have not acted on that recommendation.
Link to article in English :{http://bit.ly/1b8EXkx} Link to article in French : {http://bit.ly/HIfNPn}
According to a survey commissioned by Deloitte, the budget they spend on gifts and Christmas Eve dinner is expected to decline by 17%. Unheard of. The French are on a diet before meals holiday season. For Christmas, they plan to spend 531 euros against 639 euros last year, or 17% less than in 2012! Never decade, these projections were too low. This is what emerges from the sixteenth edition of the study Christmas audit and consulting firm Deloitte in 18 countries in Europe published on Thursday, November 7. In France, 1,595 people were polled second and third weeks of September.
When asked what they actually spent last year for gifts, meals and entertainment, the decline was only 0.9%," tempers Stéphane Rimbeuf, Consumer responsible business partner at Deloitte.
Why French tighten the purse strings This sudden braking on expenses is explained by the very strong feeling in France a decline in purchasing power. "If 40% of French respondents feel this is the perception that it goes even lower in 2014 is striking," says Stéphane Rimbeuf. France is thus the only one in this case on all European countries surveyed by Deloitte.
Raising taxes and VAT are already in the mind. Thus, France is in the group of countries with Christmas expenses were down 0-3%, alongside Ireland, Portugal and Italy. Only Greece is worse with forecasts drop of 12.8% compared to last year. At the other end of the spectrum, Germany is optimistic with an expected increase of 6.7%, for a total of ... 399 euros, well below so that the French plan.
For purchases, internet has increasingly rating To fill the hood Christmas, despite their reduced budget, the French will rely heavily on the Internet when doing their Christmas shopping: 38% of expenditure, against 33% last year, will be conducted online. They look for the best prices and the gifts they will engage in the coming weeks.
Indeed, nearly half of respondents expect to have completed their purchases until December. This means that distributors must be well organized to deal with these peaks. Last year, according to the Deloitte survey, 8% of online orders were not delivered on time!
The only escape from this diet will children According to the audit and consulting firm, the French are looking for new strategies to cope with the austerity they inflict. They want more than ever that their loyalty is rewarded by immediate reductions. Moreover, these are gifts that should suffer the most with restrictions announced spending down 2.7% compared to last year's purchases.
However, it is not pleasant on meals and entertainment even up respectively 2% and 0.2%. But not to do too much pain to those they love, the French arbitrate their spending for children. Theirs in particular where they plan to spend 9% more.
What Fed economists are telling the FOMC
While the markets have become obsessively focused on the date at which the Fed will start to taper its asset purchases, the Fed itself, in the shape of its senior economics staff, has been thinking deeply about what the stance of monetary policy should be after tapering has ended. This is reflected in two papers to be presented to the annual IMF research conference this week by William English and David Wilcox, who have been described as two of the most important macro-economists working for the FOMC at present. At the very least, these papers warn us what the FOMC will be hearing from their staff economists in forthcoming meetings.
Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs goes further, arguing that the papers would only have been published if their content had been broadly approved by both Chairman Ben Bernanke and by Janet Yellen. The new works take the Fed’s mainstream thinking into controversial areas which have certainly not been formally approved by the majority of the FOMC.
The English paper extends the conclusions of Janet Yellen’s “optimal control speeches” in 2012, which argued for pre-committing to keep short rates “lower-for-longer” than standard monetary rules would imply. The Wilcox paper dives into the murky waters of “endogenous supply”, whereby the Fed needs to act aggressively to prevent temporary damage to US supply potential from becoming permanent. The overall message implicitly seems to accept that tapering will happen broadly on schedule, but this is offset by super-dovishness on the forward path for short rates.
The papers are long and complex, and deserve to be read in full by anyone seriously interested in the Fed’s thought processes. They are, of course, full of caveats and they acknowledge that huge uncertainties are involved. But they seem to point to three main conclusions that are very important for investors.
1. They have moved on from the tapering decision
Both papers give a few nods in the direction of the tapering debate, but they are written with the unspoken assumption that the expansion of the balance sheet is no longer the main issue. I think we can conclude from this that they believe with a fairly high degree of certainty that the start and end dates for tapering will not be altered by more than a few months either way, and that the end point for the total size of the balance sheet is therefore also known fairly accurately. From now on, the key decision from their point of view is how long to delay the initial hike in short rates, and exactly how the central bank should pre-commit on this question. By omission, the details of tapering are revealed to be secondary.
2. They think that “optimal” monetary policy is very dovish indeed on the path for rates
Both papers conduct optimal control exercises of the Yellen-type. These involve using macro-economic models to derive the path for forward short rates that optimise the behaviour of inflation and unemployment in coming years. The message is familiar: the Fed should pre-commit today to keep short rates at zero for a much longer period than would be implied by normal Taylor Rules, even though inflation would temporarily exceed 2 per cent, and unemployment would drop below the structural rate. This induces the economy to recover more quickly now, since real expected short rates are reduced.
Compared to previously published simulations, the new ones in the English paper are even more dovish. They imply that the first hike in short rates should be in 2017, a year later than before. More interestingly, they experiment with various thresholds that could be used to persuade the markets that the Fed really, really will keep short rates at zero, even if the economy recovers and inflation exceeds target. They conclude that the best way of doing this may be to set an unemployment threshold at 5.5 per cent, which is 1 per cent lower than the threshold currently in place, since this would produce the best mix of inflation and unemployment in the next few years. Such a low unemployment threshold has not been contemplated in the market up to now.
3. They think aggressively easy monetary policy is needed to prevent permanent supply side deterioration
This theme has been mentioned briefly in previous Bernanke speeches, but the Wilcox paper elevates it to centre stage. The paper concludes that the level of potential output has been reduced by about 7 per cent in recent years, largely because the rate of productivity growth has fallen sharply. In normal circumstances, this would carry a hawkish message for monetary policy, because it significantly reduces the amount of spare capacity available in the economy in the near term.
However, the key is that Wilcox thinks that much of the loss in productive potential has been caused by (or is “endogenous to”) the weakness in demand. For example, the paper says that the low levels of capital investment would be reversed if demand were to recover more rapidly, as would part of the decline in the labour participation rate. In a reversal of Say’s Law, and also a reversal of most US macro-economic thinking since Friedman, demand creates its own supply.
This new belief in endogenous supply clearly reinforces the “lower for longer” case on short rates, since aggressively easy monetary policy would be more likely to lead to permanent gains in real output, with only temporary costs in higher inflation. Whether or not any of this analysis turns out to be justified in the long run, it is surely important that it is now being argued so strongly in an important piece of Fed research.
Conclusion
The implication of these papers is that these Fed economists have largely accepted in their own minds that tapering will take place sometime fairly soon, but that they simultaneously believe that rates should be held at zero until (say) 2017. They will clearly have a problem in convincing markets of this. After the events of the summer, bond traders have drawn the conclusion that tapering is a robust signal that higher interest rates are on the way.
The FOMC will need to work very hard indeed to convince the markets, through its new thresholds and public pronouncements, that tapering and forward short rates really do need to be divorced this time. It could be a long struggle.
Sotheby’s, the auction house under attack from investor activist Dan Loeb, received a welcome boost on Wednesday when its sale of Impressionist and Modern paintings trumped forecasts and eclipsed rival Christie’s dismal start to New York’s autumn auction season. Sales for the evening hit $290.2m, with 94.2 per cent of the artworks selling for their highest estimates or above.
The star piece, a bronze sculpted bust by Giacometti entitled “Grande tête mince”, sold for $50m to Acquavella Galleries, the New York dealer, after frenzied bidding. Another standout work, Picasso’s “Mousquetaire à la pipe”, sold for $30.96m, smashing its $18m estimate and breaking auction records for a late Picasso. The buyer was billionaire art dealer David Nahmad. “Tête de femme”, the second of four Picassos to go under the hammer at the sale, was the third and final lot of the night to top $30m with an eventual price tag from an anonymous telephone bidder of $39.9m. Several of the bids breaking records for artists such as Picabia, Balla, Arp and Man Ray. By contrast, a three-day series of impressionist and modern art sales at Christie’s disappointed, ending on Tuesday afternoon with a total of $293.7m – just a fraction over the figure reached by Sotheby’s on its opening night alone. Industry observers said that Sotheby’s had outperformed its rival by offering a clutch of artworks rarely seen on the auction house circuit. Pieces from 13 countries found buyers of 36 nationalities, both from the mature and developing markets. Sotheby’s added that the evening had included record levels of participation from both Asia and Latin America. The results would have bolstered spirits at the New York-based auction house, which withstood a withering attack on its management and business practices in a letter penned last month by Dan Loeb, the hedge fund manager. Third Point, the fund owned by Mr Loeb, has built up a 9.3 per cent stake in Sotheby’s. In response to Mr Loeb’s aspersions about its ability to keep up with shifting art market trends, Sotheby’s adopted a defensive poison pill shareholder rights plan. The seasonal sales continue in New York.