WASHINGTON Oct 18 (Reuters) - A senior Republican lawmaker
on Tuesday announced a U.S. congressional hearing next week on
Chinese trade practices he said were hurting American
businesses and workers, but stopped short of promising action
on Senate currency legislation to deal with the concerns.”China’s distorting trade policies are deeply troubling and
cannot be allowed to stand,” House of Representatives Ways and
Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp said in a statement
announcing the Oct. 25 hearing.Camp put forth a list of concerns he said were “costing
U.S. jobs,” but did not include currency among them even though
many lawmakers say China undervalues its currency by as much as
15 percent to 40 percent to give its exporters an unfair trade
advantage.Last week, the Senate approved a bill to pressure China to
raise the value of its yuan against the dollar by allowing U.S.
companies on a case-by-case basis to seek countervailing duties
on goods from countries with an undervalued currency.House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner has called
the legislation “dangerous” because of its potential to start a
trade war.But a majority of House members, including 61 of Boehner’s
fellow Republicans, support a similar bill and Democrats are
pushing for a vote.Camp’s statement referred to both the positive and negative
aspects of U.S.-China trade.”The Chinese market presents enormous potential for growing
U.S. exports, which support American jobs. But China
purposefully makes it harder to sell our goods and services,
unfairly subsidizes its own companies, and blatantly steals the
intellectual property of American businesses,” Camp said.He also suggested the onus was on the White House, rather
than Congress, to devise a response to the problem.”The President and his Administration should continue to
press China to open its markets through every available avenue.
And when China has violated its international obligations, the
United States must aggressively enforce its rights,” Camp
said.”I look forward to hearing the Administration’s plan for
addressing China’s persistent barriers to U.S. exports and
investment and exploring what should be done to ensure American
employers and workers are treated fairly.”
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* Group still exploring every options - sourcePARIS/LONDON, Oct 17 (Reuters) - Commodities trading house
Louis Dreyfus is not in talks with potential bidders and is
still considering all its options to raise capital, a source
familiar with the situation said on Monday.The Financial Times reported on Monday the French company
had hired bankers to look at a listing of its commodities
trading arm, or a partial sale to a sovereign wealth fund.A stock market rebound in the past three weeks has fuelled
expectations some companies may revisit their listing plans,
after keeping them under wraps for months as Europe’s sovereign
debt crisis all but killed appetite for equities.But a source with direct knowledge of the Louis Dreyfus
situation said there was nothing new.”There are no bid discussions at the moment,” the source
said, asking not to be identified. “There is no rush, the
company has been private for 150 years so there is no specific
timing” for changing the shareholding structure.”I wonder why speculation is emerging again as there is
nothing new,” the source said, adding the group was exploring
every option and that the bankers had been hired a year ago.Group chairman Margarita Louis-Dreyfus confirmed
in March she was holding talks with the company’s minority
shareholders about a stock market listing, a merger or bringing
in a private investor to fund future projects.Louis Dreyfus has been in a state of flux since former head
Robert Louis-Dreyfus died in 2009. He left his 59 percent
majority stake to a trust, and made a commitment that his heirs
would buy out minority shareholders from 2012.It is not clear how Louis Dreyfus, which hired Credit Suisse
as financial adviser, will finance such a move.The Louis Dreyfus group, which competes for dominance of
agricultural commodities trading with Archer Daniels Midland Co
, Bunge Ltd , and Cargill Inc , declined
to comment on the FT report.The Louis Dreyfus commodities arm generated some $46 billion
net sales last year and more than $1 billion consolidated net
profit, the company said.Merger talks between Louis Dreyfus and smaller Singaporean
rival Olam International Ltd failed this year. It also
reportedly held merger talks with other rivals, including
Glencore International .
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* GE, Honeywell report on Oct. 21* Caterpillar, Eaton report on Oct. 24* 3M, Illinois Tool Works report on Oct. 25By Scott MaloneBOSTON, Oct 14 (Reuters) - “Forget about where you’ve been.
Tell us where you’re going.”That’s the message from investors to big U.S. manufacturers
ahead of a wave of earnings reports over the next few weeks.
They will be far less interested in hearing how the third
quarter went than what companies expect next year to be like
and how they are preparing for it.While early earnings reports from big companies including
Alcoa Inc and JPMorgan Chase & Co disappointed
investors, analysts are still expecting the industrial sector
to chalk up solid third-quarter profit growth of 15.2 percent
across the sector, above the 12.5 percent forecast for the full
Standard & Poor’s 500 index .Chief executives are likely to push back on questions about
their 2012 outlooks — big companies including General Electric
Co , United Technologies Corp and Honeywell
International Inc typically wait until December to
discuss their forecast for the next year. But some investors
say the European debt crisis and signs of slowing demand will
make them eager for an earlier update.The memory of the sharp downturn following the late 2008
credit crunch is still fresh in their minds.”Are managements going to retrench as quickly and as deeply
in the event of a credit moment in Europe or China as they did
last time around?” said Peter Klein, senior portfolio manager
at Fifth Third Asset Management in Cleveland, Ohio. “What we
want to hear is a dose of reality. What are you planning,
what’s your contingency, what are you actually seeing?”This comes as CEOs of many big U.S. companies say orders
are holding up, and one of the main risks they see is that
customers will start holding off on orders out of fear that
something might happen to hurt the economy.”There is just not enough certainty and in some ways the
most important thing we can do right now is social and it has
to do with rebuilding confidence,” GE CEO Jeff Immelt told a
group of executives from mid-sized U.S. companies in Columbus,
Ohio last week.Immelt is due to speak at a Thomson Reuters Newsmaker event
in New York on Monday.GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWSHeading into the reporting season, not every company has
offered a positive view of how the third quarter went.Ingersoll Rand Plc fired a warning shot, saying that
profit could be down for the quarter, as demand for heating and
cooling equipment that it had earlier expected in North America
failed to materialize.But Honeywell confirmed its outlook, saying it expected to
come in at the high end of its forecast on strong demand for
turbochargers and automation and control equipment.Several factors are working in big manufacturers’ favor:
One is that the price of a wide range of metals have fallen,
easing pressure on profit margins. The price of copper,
particularly important as it used for all sorts of wiring, fell
by 25 percent in the third quarter.Another is that many big industrials, including GE, United
Technologies and ITT Corp now generate a significant
portion of their revenue from maintenance of the products they
sell, and that business tends to hold up even when
new-equipment sales fall.But the risks are also clear. With growth at home sagging,
U.S. multinationals have been counting on foreign demand to
drive results. Europe’s economies are being rocked by a
sovereign-debt crisis and China is showing signs of slowing.Analysts, on average, have forecast slower growth for big
manufacturers in the third quarter versus the first half of the
year, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.Among blue-chip names, for GE, they look for earnings to
rise 10.7 percent; for United Technologies they see 11.5
percent; for Caterpillar Inc 27 percent, and for 3M Co 5 percent.In addition, some investors say Wall Street’s worries may
have gotten ahead of reality. The S&P capital goods index has fallen some 14 percent over the past six months, a
steeper slide than the 8 percent decline of the broad S&P 500.”We don’t believe there’s going to be a double dip. We do
believe we’re in a slow recovery, but this market is behaving
like it’s got bipolar disorder,” said Scott Schermerhorn,
portfolio manager with Granite Investment Advisors Inc in
Concord, New Hampshire, which manages about $500 million in
investments and is currently underweight in the industrial
sector.”The reason we scaled back on industrials was they were
ahead of themselves,” Schermerhorn said. “Now we view
industrials as attractive again and we’re actively looking in
that space.”
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* Switzerland is world ‘leader’ in restoring assets, foreign
ministry official saysBy Stephanie NebehayGENEVA, Oct 12 (Reuters) - Switzerland is trying to help the
new authorities of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya recover 770 million
Swiss francs ($850 million) in frozen assets linked to their
ousted leaders, but the process could take years, a senior Swiss
official said on Wednesday.Separately, the neutral Alpine country, aligning itself with
European Union sanctions on Syria, has blocked 45 million francs
tied to President Bashar al-Assad and his regime, said Valentin
Zellweger, head of international law at the foreign ministry.The Swiss federal cabinet moved swiftly at the start of the
Arab spring in January and February, blocking suspicious funds
stashed in Swiss coffers to ensure they were not moved or used
to fund Muammar Gaddafi’s armed attacks on his people, he said.Seized assets currently include 300 million francs linked to
the deposed Libyan leader, 410 million Swiss francs tied to
former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and 60 million francs
to former Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, he said.Switzerland has already unfrozen 385 million francs and made
them available to the new Libyan authorities for the Libyan
National Oil Company and Libya Investment Authority, he added.”The main objective remains quick restitution of funds to
Tunisia and Egypt. We are putting all of our efforts into
contributing all we can,” Zellweger told a news conference.But 25 years of experience tracing illicit Swiss funds of
dictators, including Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and
Sani Abacha of Nigeria, has shown that lawyers can lodge appeals
all the way up to the highest Swiss court, he said.One-third of the $1.5 billion in assets held offshore by
Middle Eastern and African rulers is in Switzerland, some of it
illegally obtained, according to the Swiss-based research firm
MyPrivateBanking.Switzerland has tightened money-laundering laws in recent
years and requires the country’s 7,000 financial institutions to
enforce “know your customer” rules, Zellweger said. These also
cover so-called “politically-exposed persons” or PEPs, the Swiss
term encompassing leaders, ministers and military brass.”In terms of money restituted globally by all financial
centres, of the total 4-5 billion francs estimated by the World
Bank, one-third comes from Swiss banks. It’s an objective fact,
Switzerland is the country that has restituted the most money
and this is recognised by a growing number of experts,”
Zellweger said. “Switzerland is a leader in this domain.”“Swiss banks can of course have relations with ‘politically
exposed persons’. If Madame (German Chancellor Angela) Merkel
came to a bank and asked to open an account, she would be
considered a PEP but the bank would have an obligation of due
diligence, to review the profile of Madame Merkel regularly.”“ENDEMIC CORRUPTION”Swiss authorities last week formally accepted a request from
Tunisia for judicial assistance in recovering 60 million francs
after rejecting the initial request as insufficient.”Several days ago the Swiss federal justice office accepted
the request for assistance from Tunisia. We hope it will bear
fruit as quickly as possible. It is an important step that we
haven’t crossed yet with Egypt, where there is cooperation but
for the bulk of its case we’re not there yet,” Zellweger said.”Endemic corruption, the Tunisian system that is being
discovered now, clearly resembles a certain form of criminal
organisation, to line the pockets of people in power,” he said.Switzerland has sent financial and legal experts to
fledging democracies in North Africa and the Middle East to
establish a “relationship of confidence” and help their
authorities unlock the web of financial transactions, he said.”In Tunisia, there have not been many criminal
investigations for corruption in the last 30 years. These crimes
are enormously complex. Some countries don’t have such
savoir-faire and it is extremely expensive. It has to be built
up,” said Zellweger.
($1 = 0.904 Swiss Francs)
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In its annual report on countries lining up to join the EU, the EU executive said Serbia’s new status was conditional on it resuming talks on practical cooperation with its former breakaway province Kosovo. The talks broke down in September.”I recommend granting Serbia candidate status on the understanding that Serbia re-engages in the dialogue with Kosovo and is moving swiftly to the implementation in good faith of agreements reached to date,” EU Enlargement Commissioner Stefan Fuele said in a speech in Brussels.The EU executive also recommended on Wednesday that the bloc starts accession talks with tiny ex-Yugoslav state Montenegro.Serbia has satisfied one of the main demands of the European Union for membership by catching fugitives wanted for crimes during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, including Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb military commander who was on the run for 16 years until he was caught in May this year.But its relations with Kosovo remain a sticking point. Belgrade lost control over Kosovo in 1999, when a NATO bombing campaign halted a Serb counter-insurgency war against ethnic Albanian rebels. With Western backing, Pristina declared independence in 2008, a move Serbia refuses to recognize.Tensions have worsened in recent weeks over border and trade disputes that led to clashes in which one policeman died and dozens of NATO peacekeepers and Serb protesters were injured.JUGGLING TURKEYIn the same report, the Commission criticized Turkey, the largest of EU candidates, for not doing enough to normalize relations with EU member Cyprus. In a reference to a recent spat over gas drilling rights in the eastern Mediterranean, it told Ankara to avoid threats that could further damage ties.Fuele said both Brussels and Ankara were frustrated by the lack of progress in Turkey’s EU accession, which is caused in part by opposition from Cyprus as well as by French and German reluctance to admit the largely Muslim state.”Regrettably, accession negotiations have not moved forward for more than one year. There are frustrations about this on both sides,” he said, adding that the EU should work out ways to keep Ankara engaged.”These (frustrations) should not blind us from the importance of our relationship, or the underlying fundamentals, which remain good. I believe it is time to work for a renewed positive agenda in EU-Turkey relations.”European policymakers are concerned about losing influence with Turkey at a time when Ankara’s clout is rising in the Middle East and North Africa, where popular revolts this year have created uncertainty over future alliances.Turkey also oversees important energy corridors from Asia to Europe, and wields significant influence over whether illegal migrants from Africa can reach Europe.
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63 notes
In its annual report on countries lining up to join the EU, the EU executive said Serbia’s new status was conditional on it resuming talks on practical cooperation with its former breakaway province Kosovo. The talks broke down in September.”I recommend granting Serbia candidate status on the understanding that Serbia re-engages in the dialogue with Kosovo and is moving swiftly to the implementation in good faith of agreements reached to date,” EU Enlargement Commissioner Stefan Fuele said in a speech in Brussels.The EU executive also recommended on Wednesday that the bloc starts accession talks with tiny ex-Yugoslav state Montenegro.Serbia has satisfied one of the main demands of the European Union for membership by catching fugitives wanted for crimes during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, including Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb military commander who was on the run for 16 years until he was caught in May this year.But its relations with Kosovo remain a sticking point. Belgrade lost control over Kosovo in 1999, when a NATO bombing campaign halted a Serb counter-insurgency war against ethnic Albanian rebels. With Western backing, Pristina declared independence in 2008, a move Serbia refuses to recognize.Tensions have worsened in recent weeks over border and trade disputes that led to clashes in which one policeman died and dozens of NATO peacekeepers and Serb protesters were injured.JUGGLING TURKEYIn the same report, the Commission criticized Turkey, the largest of EU candidates, for not doing enough to normalize relations with EU member Cyprus. In a reference to a recent spat over gas drilling rights in the eastern Mediterranean, it told Ankara to avoid threats that could further damage ties.Fuele said both Brussels and Ankara were frustrated by the lack of progress in Turkey’s EU accession, which is caused in part by opposition from Cyprus as well as by French and German reluctance to admit the largely Muslim state.”Regrettably, accession negotiations have not moved forward for more than one year. There are frustrations about this on both sides,” he said, adding that the EU should work out ways to keep Ankara engaged.”These (frustrations) should not blind us from the importance of our relationship, or the underlying fundamentals, which remain good. I believe it is time to work for a renewed positive agenda in EU-Turkey relations.”European policymakers are concerned about losing influence with Turkey at a time when Ankara’s clout is rising in the Middle East and North Africa, where popular revolts this year have created uncertainty over future alliances.Turkey also oversees important energy corridors from Asia to Europe, and wields significant influence over whether illegal migrants from Africa can reach Europe.
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