LONDON – EIGHT European banks are not strong enough to withstand a prolonged recession and need to raise 2.5 billion euros (S$4.3 billion) in capital, an industry health check aimed at reviving investor confidence showed on Friday.
The ‘stress test’ of 90 banks in 21 countries showed five banks in Spain, two in Greece and one in Austria failed the test.
The European Banking Authority (EBA), the regulator running the test, said full details on the banks that failed will be released later.
Between five and 15 smaller lenders had been expected to fail the test. All big banks passed, as expected.
The International Monetary Fund has warned Europe it is taking too long to rebuild its banking system and the threat of the Greek debt crisis spreading to bigger countries such as Spain and Italy has further rattled investors.
PUBS group JD Wetherspoon is confident of securing “a reasonable outcome in the current financial year” it said in a trading update today.
The group, which has about 30 pubs around Merseyside, issued a pre-close statement ahead of the end of its current financial year on July 24.
In the 11 weeks to July 10 like-for-like sales were 1.6% up and total sales were 7.1% ahead.
During the 50 weeks of the financial year to July 10 it reported a 2.2% rise in like-for-like sales and a 7.5% improvement in total sales.
So far the chain has opened 38 new pubs and disposed of two, and before the end of its financial year later this month it expects to add a further 12 new pubs to its portfolio.
However, it acknowledged that trading will remain tough, saying: “As previously stated, the company, in common with many businesses, continues to be faced with rising costs for a wide range of goods and services, combined with a reduction in disposable income for many of its customers.”
But it added: “Sales and cashflow continue to be resilient and the performance of our recently opened pubs remains encouraging, which should enable the company to produce a reasonable outcome in the current financial year.”
Liverpool stockbroker Panmure Gordon recommended investors to hold onto their Wetherspoon shares after today’s update.
But some Manhattan neighborhoods are assuming that vacant feeling year-round because the people who own or rent apartments there actually live somewhere else most of the time. This explains why, in a city of bright lights, so many windows dotting the imposing facades of Fifth, Madison and Park Avenue apartment buildings are pitch dark every evening.
Wealthy out-of-towners have always had pieds-a-terre and unused investment properties in the city. What is new is how many.
In a large swath of the East Side bounded by Fifth and Park avenues and East 49th and 70th streets, about 30 percent of the more than 5,000 apartments are routinely vacant more than 10 months a year because their owners or renters have permanent homes elsewhere, according to the Census Bureau’s latest American Community Survey.
In one part of that stretch, between East 53rd and 59th streets, more than half of the 500 apartments are occupied for two months or less.
ATHENS – GREECE on Tuesday raised 1.625 billion euros, or S$2.78 billion, in an auction of six-month treasury bills as Europe struggled to contain debt contagion and stocks and the euro took a second day of pain.
‘Total bids reached 3.6 billion euros and the amount finally accepted was EUR 1.625 billion,’ the Greek debt management agency said.
The cost of borrowing the money inched lower to 4.9 per cent from 4.96 per cent offered to investors in an equivalent sale in June.
The Tuesday auction had originally aimed to raise 1.25 billion euros.
The latest sale came as European finance ministers went into new crisis talks with the debt storm that started in Greece and subsequently spread to Ireland and Portugal now threatening to engulf Italy and Spain, the EU’s third and fourth largest economies.
Ratings agency Moody’s threatened Wednesday to downgrade U.S. government bonds, citing the risk the government could fail to pay its debt on time if budget negotiators cannot meet an Aug. 2 deadline.
Government reports throughout the day on unemployment claims, retail sales and wholesale prices will paint a clearer picture of the economy.
JPMorgan Chase is up 2 percent in premarket trading after the bank reported higher investment banking fees boosted its quarterly earnings.
Dow Jones industrial average futures are up 19, or 0.2 percent, at 12,444 in premarket trading. Standard & Poor’s 500 index futures are up 4, or 0.3 percent, at 1,315. Nasdaq 100 futures are up 12, or 0.5 percent, at 2,356.
In a ruling on Monday, Rakoff said that Rajat K. Gupta, the former Goldman Sachs and Procter & Gamble director, could proceed with a lawsuit that accuses the agency of violating his constitutional rights.
The decision is the latest in a series of rulings in which Rakoff has not minced words in his criticism of the SEC. In March, Rakoff chafed at the agency’s practice of allowing defendants to settle cases “without admitting or denying wrongdoing,” describing the practice as treating the court as a “rubber stamp.” And last year, in approving a deal between the SEC and Bank of America over its acquisition of Merrill Lynch, he called the settlement “half-baked justice.”
The latest decision was related to an unusual civil administrative proceeding that the SEC filed in March against Gupta that accused him of leaking secret board discussions to Raj Rajaratnam, the head of the Galleon Group hedge fund, who was convicted of insider trading crimes in May.
Gupta’s lawyers fired back at the SEC, filing a lawsuit asking to move the case to federal court.
Since the start of 2011, the three-county area of Charlotte, Manatee and Sarasota counties has added on average almost 1,000 jobs each month.
By contrast, Labor Department figures released Friday showed the U.S. as a whole created only a paltry 18,000 net jobs in June, starkly undercutting analyst estimates and sparking doubt about the nation’s nascent economic rebound.
That 18,000 figure marked the lowest job-creation level in nine months and the fourth consecutive month that the unemployment rate has risen.
U.S. unemployment inched upward to 9.2 percent in June, the highest level so far this year. Nationwide, unemployment has now been above 8 percent for 29 consecutive months, the longest stretch since the Great Depression.
“This is not your father’s recession, this is more like your grandfather’s depression,” said Scott Brown, chief economist at St. Petersburg-based Raymond James & Associates Inc.
THE force of social media showed just how powerful it can be as it drove public outrage over the News of the World phone hacking scandal.
People felt so strongly about the accusations that they immediately took to social media sites and targeted the paper’s advertisers directly. C