The Bank of England upgrades its economic growth forecast, but separate figures show a rise in UK unemployment.
See the article here: Bank of England upgrades forecasts
Category : Business
Category : Business
Time magazine publisher will now stand on its own under a new CEO during an already challenging time for print publications
This Time Inc is different.
The venerable publisher of Time magazine will soon stand on its own as a publicly traded magazine company, away from parent company Time Warner, which will focus purely on entertainment and television. Only hours after Time Inc CEO Laura Lang gave rise to media rumors by pulling out of speaking engagements at several prominent events, the parent company announced that within the year it would spin out Time Inc and replace Lang with a successor who has not yet been named. She will stay through the transition, the company said. She has been in the post for just under a year, while her predecessor lasted half that time.
In a memo to staff, Lang, calling the news “something that people are just beginning to digest”, wrote: “After considerable thought, I have decided that taking the company through a transition to the public markets is not where my passion lies.”
The mystique of the Time editorship remains, even as executives cycle through the role. On Twitter, Belinda Luscombe, a Time editor-at-large, observed of the Time Inc CEO job, “a colleague remarked that job is like the Professor of Dark Arts of the publishing world”.
The moves will leave the company’s magazine division – including 21 titles – to fend for itself under a new CEO in challenging times for print publications. Many major Time titles have seen declining ad pages and drops in circulation, reflecting wider industry trends. Rival Newsweek shuttered its print edition in December.
While Time Warner had signaled last month that it wanted to separate Time Inc, the spinoff into a separate, publicly held company was a surprise. Previously, Time was thought to be in merger talks with another magazine company, Meredith, about merging at least some of their magazines into a new publicly traded company. Time Inc’s magazines include Time, Sports Illustrated, People, InStyle, Fortune and Money. Meredith, which publishes Ladies Home Journal and Better Homes & Gardens, has 18 magazines under its umbrella.
Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes explained the spinoff will allow the larger company to “focus entirely on our television networks and film and TV production businesses, and improves our growth profile”. He also said it will allow Time Inc to attract “a more natural stockholder base”, which could mean luring investors who want to invest purely in news and publications rather than the wider world of entertainment. Time Warner has previously separated other divisions, including AOL and Time Warner Cable.
Time Inc CEO Laura Lang pulled out of multiple industry events over recent weeks, which the company attributed to speculation about the future of the magazine division.
The move by Time follows other decisions by media companies to make their publications into standalone companies. News Corp is splitting into two divisions. That will create an entertainment unit, Fox Group, and a publishing division that is the “new” News Corp, headed by CEO Robert Thomson, and which will include the Wall Street Journal and other publications. The shares of both companies will be controlled by Rupert Murdoch. The publishing division posted a $2bn net loss in the last fiscal year.
Category : Business, World News
Samsung has failed in its latest patent challenge against Apple, but is being aided by a former UK judge in a separate battle.
More here: Samsung loses Japan iPhone battle
Kitbag infographic gets stuck into the facts that separate Red Devils from Los Merengues
Read more here: Match Preview: Bagful of Real Madrid v Man United Stats
Category : Business, World News
News Corporation said its publishing wing, which is set to be split off as a separate business, incurred losses of $2.1bn in the last financial year.
Read more from the original source: News Corp publishing loses $2.1bn
Category : Business, World News
Government plans to separate banks’ retail businesses from their investment arms “fall well short of what is required”, a group of MPs warns.
Go here to see the original: MPs critical of banking reforms
Category : Business, World News
The European Commission sets out a timetable for eurozone integration, including plans for a separate eurozone budget and joint issuance of debt.
Read the original here: EU unveils plan for euro’s future
Charles Dunstone’s version of events around the mis-selling of payment protection insurance is not persuasive
Sir Charles Dunstone, the Carphone Warehouse co-founder who did nine years as a non-executive director of HBOS, thinks the great PPI swindle was not a swindle at all. He thinks the mis-selling of payment protection insurance was not as widespread as the Financial Services Authority thought and he suggests the banks surrendered on compensation because they are unpopular.
Dunstone’s version of events is not persuasive. The key point about PPI was that it should have been a niche product, of interest only to those with a specific risk to be covered. In the hands of banks, it became a mass-market product that made very large contributions to retail profits. Some 32m policies were sold after 2001.
The reason the banks “surrendered” had little to do with the industry’s unpopularity. In April last year, long after bankers became unpopular, the British Bankers Association was still trying to stop the retrospective application of FSA rules on how PPI should be sold. The trade body lost the case in the high court. The dam then burst when Lloyds, before the BBA had decided whether to appeal, decided to pay out on legitimate PPI claims.
At a push, one might argue that the new management at Lloyds was motivated by a desire to improve the bank’s image. But the plainer explanation sounds more plausible – that the banks’ legal defence looked increasingly hopeless. As Lloyds chief executive António Horta-Osório put it, the PPI scandal was allowed to develop because banks “lost sight of their core values, had become complacent, non-customer focused and inefficient”.
There’s a separate debate to be had about the flood of bogus claims for PPI compensation drummed up by ambulance-chasing claims firms. Those firms’ behaviour in many cases is indeed outrageous. But it is a separate debate.
Category : Stocks
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'The Walking Dead' recap Season 3 episode 6: 'Hounded' brings Woodbury and …
Zap2it.com (blog) michael-rooker-merle-dixon-walking-dead-season-3- So far on Season 3 of “The Walking Dead,” the prison and Woodbury have remained separate but creatively equal storylines. Tonight is the beginning of those worlds colliding, and raises anticipation even …
Fines and compensation are related to mortgage bond losses regarded as the ‘ground zero’ of the global financial crisis JP Morgan Chase and Credit Suisse will pay a combined $416.9m (£262.4m) to settle US civil charges that they misled investors in the sale of risky mortgage bonds prior to the 2008 financial crisis, regulators have said. JP Morgan would pay $296.9m, while Credit Suisse will pay $120m in a separate case, with the money going to harmed investors, the US Securities and Exchange Commission said. Both settlements addressed alleged negligence or other wrongdoing in the packaging and sale of risky residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS), including at the former Bear Stearns Co, which JP Morgan bought in 2008. The banks settled without admitting wrongdoing and in separate statements said they were pleased to settle. “In many ways, mortgage products such as RMBS were ground zero in the financial crisis,” SEC enforcement chief Robert Khuzami said in a statement. “Misrepresentations in connection with the creation and sale of mortgage securities contributed greatly to the tremendous losses suffered by investors once the US housing market collapsed.” Goldman Sachs in 2010 agreed to pay $550m, also without admitting wrongdoing, to settle SEC charges that it misled investors in a complex mortgage bond transaction. The enforcement actions are the second and third from a “working group” of federal and state agencies created this year by President Barack Obama to investigate misconduct related to RMBS that contributed to the financial crisis. Khuzami said the working group was investigating other RMBS transactions. The SEC accused JP Morgan of materially overstating in a prospectus the quality of home loans that backed a $1.8bn RMBS offering it underwrote in December 2006. According to the SEC, the largest US bank represented that just four loans were delinquent by 30 to 59 days, when in fact there were more than 620, or about 7% of the total. Investors lost at least $37m as a result, the SEC said. The regulator also faulted Bear’s failure to disclose its having arranged discounted cash settlements with originators that left investors stuck owning many problem loans, rather than forcing the originators to buy the loans back. It said Bear reaped at least $137.8m from the practice. Credit Suisse failed to disclose similar settlements, which netted $55.7m, the SEC said. The Swiss bank also misled investors by falsely claiming when it would buy back mortgage loans in two offerings in which borrowers had defaulted on their initial payments, and that “all first payment default risk” had been removed, the SEC added. About $84m of JP Morgan’s payout and $39m of Credit Suisse’s represented fines. The JP Morgan accord requires approval by a federal judge in Washington DC, while Credit Suisse’s case was resolved in an SEC administrative proceeding. JP Morgan had in June 2011 agreed to pay $153.6m to settle a separate SEC fraud case over its sale of mortgage securities to investors, also without admitting wrongdoing.
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