NEWS,23.05.2013

Eurozone slump eases in May

The downturn across eurozone businesses eased slightly this month, although a dearth of new orders means the bloc's economy is likely to contract again in the second quarter, business surveys showed on Thursday.

Markit's flash eurozone Services PMI, which surveys around 2 000 companies ranging from major banks to caterers, rose in May to 47.5, a three-month high, from 47.0 in April.

While that was a little better than economists polled expected, the PMI has now spent 16 straight months below the 50 mark that divides growth and contraction.

French companies continued to fare poorly this month, while activity in German firms effectively stagnated.

Overall, survey compiler Markit said the surveys pointed to a similar economic performance in the second quarter as the 0.3% contraction the eurozone logged in the January-March period.

"There are signs the rate of decline is easing, which does suggest we may be moving into a period of stabilisation, but it's taking a lot longer than most people anticipated," said Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit.

"It's looking more like the end of the year (until) we're going to see the numbers start to show signs of stabilising."

The new orders services index fell to 45.3 from 46.2, meaning a big upturn in the PMI next month looks unlikely. 

Williamson said there were signs that the rate of decline eased this month in the "peripheral" eurozone countries outside Germany and France.

"But against that we've seen a worrying steep deterioration in service sector expectations for the year ahead."

Although business expectations for the year ahead hit an 11-month high in April, it plummeted in May to its lowest point since December.

The PMI for the manufacturing sector rose to 47.8 this month from 46.7 in April, while showing new orders and output declined at a slower pace, comfortably beating expectations of 47.0 predicted by economists.

Combining both the services and manufacturing reports, the composite PMI hit a three-month high of 47.7 in May, compared with April's 46.9, while showing continuing job losses.

Both the input and output prices index stayed below the 50 mark this month, indicating deflationary pressures.

"The European Central Bank doesn't have anything to worry about in relation to inflation," said Williamson. 

"More likely, it's going to find it difficult to get inflation up to the level it wants," he added, referring to the central bank's target of close to 2%.

Bernanke: No Fed stimulus pullback yet

The Federal Reserve's monetary stimulus is helping the US economy recover but the central bank needs to see further signs of traction before taking its foot off the gas pedal, Fed Chairperson Ben Bernanke said on Wednesday.
A decision to scale back the $85bn in bonds the Fed is buying each month could come at one of the central bank's "next few meetings" if the economy looked set to maintain momentum, Bernanke told Congress.
But minutes from the Fed's most recent meeting released on Wednesday showed the bar was still relatively high.
"Many participants indicated that continued (job market) progress, more confidence in the outlook, or diminished downside risks would be required before slowing the pace of purchases," according to minutes from the April 30-May 1 meeting.
In testimony that showed little immediate desire to retreat from the Fed's third and latest round of bond buying, Bernanke emphasized the high costs of both unemployment and inflation, which respectively continue to run above and below the Fed's targets.
"Monetary policy is providing significant benefits," he told the congressional Joint Economic Committee, citing strong consumer spending on autos and housing, as well as increases in household wealth.
"Monetary policy has also helped offset incipient deflationary pressures and kept inflation from falling even further below the (Fed's) 2% longer-run objective."
Still, financial markets focused on the possibility that Fed purchases will be scaled back later this year. The S&P 500 closed 0.8% lower, the dollar hit a near three-year peak against a broad basket of currencies, and the bond market sold off sharply. Yields on 10-year Treasury notes jumped back above 2% to their highest levels since mid-March.
The central bank is currently buying $45bn in Treasury bonds and $40bn in mortgage-backed debt each month to keep borrowing costs low and encourage investment, hiring and economic growth. It is the third round of asset purchases, or quantitative easing, since the Fed drove interest rates to near zero in late 2008.
"I believe the Fed, while feeling more confident in the economy bottoming, is not yet comfortable with ending QE and the US economic crutch it offers," said Douglas Borthwick, managing director of Chapdelaine Foreign Exchange in New York.
Missing the target
Bernanke noted that the main inflation gauge the Fed monitors rose just 1% in the 12 months through March, just half the central bank's 2% target.
Part of the reason, he said, was a decline in energy prices. But there were also indications of more broad-based disinflation, Bernanke said.
He said the Fed was prepared either to increase or reduce the pace of its bond buys depending on economic conditions, as the central bank stated on May 1 after its last policy meeting.
"If we see continued improvement and we have confidence that that's going to be sustained then we could in the next few meetings ... take a step down in our pace of purchases," he said.
"If we do that it would not mean that we are automatically aiming toward a complete wind down. Rather, we would be looking beyond that to see how the economy evolves and we could either raise or lower our pace of purchases going forward."
US economic growth rose to a 2.5% annual rate in the first quarter following an anemic end to 2012. The unemployment rate has fallen to 7.5% from a peak of 10%, but remains, as Bernanke put it, "well above its longer-run normal level."
Recent economic data have been mixed. Job growth, retail sales and housing have all shown some vigor, but factory output has been contracting.
Bernanke said some headwinds facing the economy, including the debt crisis in Europe, have been dissipating. But he said a sharp tightening of the US government's budget had become too big of a drag on growth for the central bank to offset fully.
Bernanke told the committee the Fed was aware of the risk that keeping monetary policy too easy for too long could fuel asset price bubbles. However, he said the central bank believed major asset prices were justified by the economy's fundamentals.
Further, he warned of the risks to pulling back on stimulus too early.
"A premature tightening of monetary policy could lead interest rates to rise temporarily but would also carry a substantial risk of slowing or ending the economic recovery and causing inflation to fall further," Bernanke said.
He also suggested the Fed could refrain from selling off some of the mortgage-backed securities it has acquired when the time finally came to tighten monetary policy. "I personally believe that we could exit without selling any MBS," he said.
Too soon to taper
In separate remarks, New York Fed President William Dudley stressed that uncertain economic conditions meant it was too early to determine whether to taper the Fed's bond purchases.
"I think three or four months from now you'll have a much better sense of 'Is the economy healthy enough to overcome the fiscal drag or not?'" Dudley said in a Bloomberg TV interview that took place on Tuesday but aired on Wednesday.
Dudley added that it would be possible to dial down the program by the fall "if the economy does better and if the labor market continues to improve."
The minutes of the last Fed meeting said a number of officials expressed a willingness to taper bond purchases as early as the upcoming meeting on June 18-19 if there were signs of "sufficiently strong and sustained growth." But views differed both on how to gauge progress and on how likely it was that that threshold would be met.
Asked whether the Fed would curtail the pace of its bond purchases by the September 2 Labour Day holiday, Bernanke said simply: "I don't know."

US shares recover, but dollar extends losses

US stocks and bonds were little changed on Thursday, with equities rebounding from what traders considered an excessive drop on Wednesday, though concerns remained over the pace of global economic growth.
The midday strength in US equities bucked a worldwide trend of weakness. European shares ended down 2 percent while Japan plummeted 7.2 percent on weak data from China and Europe.
US shares opened sharply lower, extending a sharp decline on Wednesday that came after Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke broached the possibility of reducing stimulus if economic conditions improve.
While Fed officials stressed that no action was likely for months, investors are anxious about the timing to any change in monetary policy, which is widely credited with fueling massive gains in stocks and high-yield corporate bonds this year.
"The commentary was very benign and wasn't anything unexpected, the sell-off came because we were looking for an excuse to correct after the big moves this year," said Eric Green, senior portfolio manager at Penn Capital Management in Philadelphia.
The Dow Jones industrial average was up 2.64 points, or 0.02 percent, at 15,309.81. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index was down 4.45 points, or 0.27 percent, at 1,650.90. The Nasdaq Composite Index was down 4.24 points, or 0.12 percent, at 3,459.06.
Thursday's equity rebound continued a recent trend of investors using any market decline as a buying opportunity. A rally in Hewlett-Packard Co, which jumped 14 percent to $24.18 a day after raising its profit outlook, helped limit losses and keep the Dow in mildly positive territory.

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Still, overseas markets were sharply lower, driving investors to safe-haven currencies. At the session peak, the yen rose more than 2 percent against the dollar and the euro, which both lost 1 percent against the Swiss franc , also seen as a safe haven.
Chinese factory activity shrank for the first time in seven months, adding to concerns that the world's second-biggest economy had stalled. European factory sentiment dropped, suggested that the euro zone's economy was likely to contract again in the second quarter.
Japanese shares were hit hardest in overnight action, with the Nikkei losing 7.3 percent, its biggest one-day fall in two years. European shares ended 2.1 percent lower and MSCI's world equity index lost 1.3 percent.
"Even though we were overdue for a correction, the Chinese data certainly didn't help things. If it proves to be part of a trend, that's very concerning for the global economy," said Green, who helps oversee $7 billion in funds.
US light crude oil, which is closely tied to the pace of economic growth, fell 0.5 percent. The U.S. dollar index fell 0.8 percent.
The Euro STOXX 50 Volatility Index, Europe's widely used measure of investor risk aversion, surged nearly 15 percent to a three-week high. The CBOE Volatility Index rose 3 percent.
Concern the Fed will wind down its stimulus initially took its toll on bonds, but investors' sales of equities caused money to flow into safer government debt, leaving yields on US Treasuries and German Bunds down from their highs. The benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note was down 2/32 in price, the yield at 2.0281 percent.
Investors expect the bond market will adjust to changing Fed policy, and that suggests higher yields in the coming months.
Demand for riskier euro zone debt softened, although bonds remained underpinned by expectations the European Central Bank may yet ease monetary policy further. That would contrast with any tightening by the Fed but follow a massive stimulus package launched by the Bank of Japan.

Apple has enjoyed Irish tax holiday since 80s

Apple has operated almost tax-free in Ireland since 1980, welcomed by a government keen to bring jobs to what was then one of Europe's poorest countries, former company executives and Irish officials have said.
Chief Executive Tim Cook faced criticism from a Senate subcommittee in Washington over the iPad and iPhone maker's tax practices, which had been shrouded from full view behind secretive tax-exempt Irish-based corporate entities.
Apple, one of Ireland's top multinational employers, denied avoiding billions of dollars in US taxes and said its arrangements helped fund research jobs in the United States.
The committee revealed that Apple's Irish companies, some of which are not tax resident in any jurisdiction, allowed the group to pay no tax on much of its overseas earnings in recent years.
Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the subcommittee, said Apple had sought "the Holy Grail of tax avoidance".
A former company executive and Irish officials the almost tax-free status dates all the way back to Apple's arrival in County Cork 32 years ago.
Apple must have seemed attractive to Ireland and to Cork. Amid a generally moribund Irish economy, Cork had been hard hit by the closure of its shipyards and a Ford car plant, and in 1986 nearly one in four were out of work in the city.
In the early days, Apple's staff sat down to meals together. Now the company employs 4,000 in Ireland and is the country's biggest multinational employer.
"There were tax concessions for us to go there," said Del Yocam, who was Vice President of manufacturing at Apple in the early 1980s.

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"It was a big concession."
In fact, the deal was about as good as a company can get.
"We had a tax holiday for the first 10 years in Ireland. We paid no taxes to the Irish government," one former finance executive, who asked not to be named, said.
Apple wasn't an exception, although it was among the last to enjoy such favourable treatment.
From 1956 to 1980, Ireland attracted foreign companies by offering a zero rate of tax, according to the Irish government's website. Eligible companies arriving in 1980 were given holidays until 1990.
"Any multinational attracted into Ireland that was focusing on the export market paid zero percent corporation tax," said Barry O'Leary, CEO of IDA Ireland, which is charged with attracting investment into Ireland.
Apple said it pays all the tax due in every country where it operates. It declined to comment on the tax treatment it received in the 1980s.
As part of Ireland's accession to the European Economic Community, precursor to the European Union, in 1973, it was forced to stop offering tax holidays to exporters.
From 1981, companies arriving in Ireland had to pay tax, albeit at a low 10 percent rate, providing they qualified for manufacturing status.
Economic coup
Apple's investment was a major coup for Ireland. At the time, the country was struggling with high and rising unemployment, double-digit inflation and a brain drain of the young and educated through emigration.
"We were the first technology company to establish a manufacturing operation in Ireland," recalled John Sculley, Apple's CEO from 1983 to 1993.
He said government subsidies had also played a role in deciding to set up a base in Ireland.
Ireland also offered low wage rates - a big attraction when it came to hiring hundreds of people for the relatively low-skilled work of assembling electronic equipment.
Apple told the subcommittee it could not answer questions about why it chose Ireland as a base since it had lost the paperwork from the period.
The operation in Cork built the company's Apple II computer and would later build disc drives, 'Mac' computers and others. These would be sold in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
But having a tax holiday in Ireland would not, in itself, have allowed Apple to operate tax free in these markets.
Equipment assembly is not the kind of activity that economists or tax authorities usually credit with generating a large share of a technology company's profits.
More value has been associated with generating the intellectual property behind the technology - which Apple did in the United States - and with the selling of goods, which was to be done on the ground in France, Britain and India.
But none of these countries offered the tax advantages Ireland did. The key to minimising Apple's tax bill was maximising the amount of profit that could be ascribed to Apple's Irish operations.
Holiday over
In 1990, Apple's tax holiday came to an end, and in that year, the Irish operation's tax rate hit 4 percent, accounts from the period show.
At the same time, Apple's Irish manufacturing activities came under question as the company looked to cut costs by outsourcing.
In 1992, the company announced plans to cut hundreds of jobs after deciding to shift some work to Singapore, which at this time was attracting increasing investment by offering tax holidays.
"They nearly left Ireland altogether," O'Leary said.
By this stage, the European Community had banned tax holidays of the kind given to Apple, so the company and Dublin negotiated an arrangement which had a similar outcome but fell within European rules.

Cautious calm returns to Wall Street

Wall Street has been had mixed trading today, paring sharp early losses after disappointing data from China and a slump in Japanese stocks outweighed better-than-expected reports on US jobs and housing.
In China, the preliminary reading for a Purchasing Managers' Index of manufacturing was 49.6 in May, according to HSBC and Markit Economics data. In Japan, the Topix plunged 6.9%.
Yesterday's comments by US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke suggested the central bank might ease back its bond-buying programme as soon as at its next meeting, while also stressing the risk of withdrawing stimulus measures too soon.
Fed officials today sought to soothe investors' concerns. James Bullard, president of the St Louis Fed, said he did not think the bank's policy committee was "that close" to tapering bond purchases and when it did start to pull back it would be slowly.
"The market is struggling with conflicting language from Fed officials as to the timing of potential tapering of asset purchases, slowing growth in China and after Japan's decline in equities," Ryan Larson, the Chicago-based head of US equity trading at RBC Global Asset Management, told Bloomberg News.
In late afternoon trading in New York, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 0.18%, while the Standard & Poor's 500 Index fell 0.22% and the Nasdaq Composite Index edged up 0.04%.
US economic data released today were better than anticipated, though failed to brighten the mood. Initial claims for state unemployment benefits fell 23,000 to a seasonally adjusted 340,000 last week, according to Labor Department data.

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New single family home sales increased 2.3% in April to a 454,000-unit pace, while the median sales price for a new home rose 14.9% from a year ago to a record US$271,600.
"All the eggs are in housing and the consumers' baskets this quarter. Outside that, there is going to be little support to growth," Ryan Sweet, a senior economist at Moody's Analytics in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
Bucking the trend today, shares of Hewlett-Packard jumped, last up 14.7%, after the computer maker lifted its 2013 earnings outlook.
"She [Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman] clearly has the company focused on profit and cash flow and that's coming through in the earnings," Shannon Cross, an analyst at Cross Research in Millburn, New Jersey, who rates the stock a hold, told Bloomberg. "It shows they're able to drive margin at businesses that are under significant revenue pressure."
Europe's benchmark Stoxx 600 Index shed 2.1%. Yesterday European shares had closed higher, ending the session before Bernanke suggested the US central bank could taper its bond-buying as soon as next month.
The UK's FTSE 100, France's CAC 40 and Germany's DAX each also closed with declines of 2.1%.