OTTAWA (Reuters) – Bank of Canada Deputy Governor Tim Lane repeated on Wednesday the central bank‘s message that interest rate increases will likely be needed, but only over time.
The “over time” phrase was introduced in the bank’s key guidance in its rate statement on October 23 as a way of signaling that while the next rate move is likely to be up, such a move was less imminent than it had been.
“Over time, some gradual withdrawal of monetary policy stimulus will likely be required, consistent with achieving the inflation-control target,” Lane said, according to a prepared presentation he was giving on Wednesday in Moncton, New Brunswick.
Another part of the presentation, which was posted on the central bank’s website, noted: “The Canadian economy continues to operate with a small amount of excess supply.”
The Bank of Canada is alone in the Group of Seven leading industrialized countries in signaling an intention to raise rates despite expectations of modest and unbalanced global growth.
Lane forecast “very robust growth” in emerging markets, stagnation in Europe and significant dampening of U.S. growth due to fiscal consolidation. He said Canada‘s real gross domestic product was still expected to grow at a moderate pace.
(Reporting by Randall Palmer; Editing by Jeffrey Hodgson; and Peter Galloway)
NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook is proposing to end its practice of letting users vote on changes to its privacy policies. The company says it will continue to let users comment on proposed updates.
The world’s biggest social media company plans to announce Wednesday that its voting mechanism, which is triggered only if enough people comment on proposed changes, has become a system that emphasizes the quantity of responses over the quality of discussion.
Facebook began letting users vote on privacy changes in 2009. Since then, it has gone public and its user base has ballooned from around 200 million to more than 1 billion. As part of the 2009 policy, users’ votes only count if more than 30 percent of all Facebook’s active users partake.
Older patients with positive attitudes on aging may be more likely to fully recover from severe disability compared with those who can’t see the bright side of life, a new study found.
A positive stereotype about aging was associated with a 44 percent greater likelihood of recovery from severe disability versus negative stereotypes, according to study author Becca Levy from the Yale School of Public Health and colleagues.
Holding positive stereotypes in older age was also significantly associated with a slower rate of decline in activities of daily living, the researchers wrote in a letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association online.
“Further research is needed to determine whether interventions to promote positive age stereotypes could extend independent living in later life,” the authors noted.
Read this story on www.medpagetoday.com.
The researchers sampled patients through the Precipitating Events Project study and included 598 mostly female patients with an average age of 79, who belonged to a Connecticut health plan. All participants lived in a community, were nondisabled, and experienced at least 1 month of disability from active daily life during the follow-up period.
Can A Positive Outlook Keep Your Heart Healthy? Watch Video
The participants were interviewed monthly for up to 129 months and filled out home-based assessments every 18 months over 10 years.
The researchers established age stereotypes by asking participants for five terms or phrases they associated with older individuals and coding those descriptors on a five-point scale, with 1 being most negative (such as decrepit) and 5 being most positive (such as spry). The participants scored a mean 2.12 on this scale.
Participants’ severity of disability was based on the number of activities of daily living compromised by disability, including bathing, dressing, transferring, and walking. Three or four compromised activities were considered severely disabled; mild to severe disability required assistance with one to two activities, and mild to no disability required no assistance with activities of daily life.
The researchers grouped patients on whether they held positive or negative age stereotypes and compared rates of recovery from severe or mild injury to no or mild disability. Patients between groups were well-matched for age, sex, nonwhite ethnicity, frailty, education, chronic conditions, mental status, depression, and whether or not they lived alone. The nature of the disabling events was not described.
Patients were significantly more likely to recover from any state of injury to either no or mild disability if they fit positive age stereotypes, including from severe disability to no disability, severe disability to mild disabilit and mild disability to no disability.
The researchers also noted that the positive age-stereotyped patients “showed an advantage in the absolute risk increase percentages” in likelihood of recovery, in addition to “a significantly slower rate of [activities of daily life] decline.”
Study limitations included recruitment from a single community and an undersampling of black patients.
The government borrowed much more than expected in October, reducing the chances that the UK will hit its deficit reduction target in 2012-13.
UK public sector net borrowing, excluding financial interventions, hit £8.6bn in October, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.
That marked a sharp rise from the £5.9bn borrowed in October 2011.
This is the last set of borrowing figures before the chancellor’s Autumn Statement on 5 December.
The headline figure was worse than expected – analysts had forecast borrowing of £6bn.
Corporation tax receipts fell nearly 10% in October, a month when there is usually a heavy inflow to boost the public coffers.
A rise in day-to-day departmental spending also contributed to the higher borrowing.
For the seven months of the financial year so far, borrowing has reached £73.3bn, excluding the one-off effects from the transfer of Royal Mail pension assets.
That is £5bn higher than the same time last year.
A spokesperson for the Treasury said: “The economy is healing, but it still faces many challenges.
“These numbers illustrate that, but also show the government’s plans to bring spending under control are on track for the year.”
But Labour’s shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, Rachel Reeves, said the chancellor was borrowing billions more to pay for the cost of his economic failure.
“Having failed on jobs and growth, the government is now failing on the deficit too,” she said.
‘Wrong direction’ Continue reading the main story
AAA-rating
The best credit rating that can be given to a borrower’s debts, indicating that the risk of borrowing defaulting is minuscule.
Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit, said the low tax receipts reflected the disappointing performance of the economy, which is experiencing weak growth and weak consumer spending.
He told the BBC that he could see no chance of the government now hitting its deficit target of £120bn for 2012-13. Current projections suggest this year’s deficit would come in closer to £130bn.
“So it’s moving totally in the wrong direction,” he said.
“The longer-term prospects are looking much more disappointing than the Office for Budget Responsibility and the government were hoping when they first set these targets out back in March.”
He added that Chancellor George Osborne was likely to announce increases in taxes, further cuts in spending, or a combination of the two, when he delivers his Autumn Statement.
Chris Williamson, Chief Economist at Markit
However, analysts at Credit Suisse said the figures were disappointing but not disastrous.
“To some extent, this poor reading was mitigated by improvements in last month’s figure, which was around £0.8bn lower (less borrowing) than previously thought.
“In addition, the good news is that the poor figure appears to have been driven by expenditure rather than receipts data. This suggests that the weakness in the numbers may not be due to weaker GDP performance feeding into weaker tax receipts.”
They also pointed out that, overall, central government receipts were up 1.8% on the year to October, while expenditure was up 7.4%.
ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greece has reacted with dismay to the European Union‘s failure to agree to release vital rescue loan funds for the debt-ridden country, with the prime minister warning it was not just Greece’s future that hangs in the balance.
The delay prolongs uncertainty over the future of Greece, which faces a messy default that would threaten the entire euro currency used by 17 EU nations.
Prime Minister Antonis Samaras stressed that Greece has done what its creditors from the EU and International Monetary Fund required. “Our partners, along with the IMF, also must do what they have committed to doing,” he said.
He said that “it is not just the future of our country, but the stability of the entire eurozone” that depend on the success of negotiations in coming days.
(Reuters) – Interpublic Group of Cos said it sold its remaining investment in Facebook Inc for $ 95 million in cash.
Interpublic said it expects to record a pre-tax gain of $ 94 million. It had recorded a pre-tax gain of $ 132.2 million for the third quarter of last year from the sale of half of its 0.4 percent stake in Facebook.
Interpublic paid less than $ 5 million for the stake in 2006.
Shares of Facebook, which debuted with a market value of more than $ 100 billion in May, have lost nearly half their value since then on concerns about money-making prospects.
“We decided to sell our remaining shares in Facebook as our investment was no longer strategic in nature,” Chief Executive Michael Roth said in a statement.
Interpublic also authorized an increase in its existing share repurchase program to $ 400 million from $ 300 million. The company repurchased shares worth $ 151 million, as of September 30.
Shares of the company were up 1 percent at $ 10 on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday.
Facebook shares were marginally up at $ 23.00 on the Nasdaq.
(Reporting by Sruthi Ramakrishnan in Bangalore; Editing by Joyjeet Das)
FIRST PERSON | New research shows that Medicare patients with breast cancer wait as long as 32 days before surgery. This wait is typical in the United States. It is not only older women that have a long wait. I first found a lump in my breast in September 2011. My first surgery was not until November 2011. The wait was not on my end — in northwest Arkansas, it takes at least three weeks to get an appointment with anyone.
The study
MedicalXpress reports that the Fox Chase Cancer Center published its findings in the Nov. 19, 2012 edition of The Journal of Clinical Oncology. The study evaluated data from over 72,000 Medicare patients with non-metastatic breast cancer and found that in 2005, at least half of the breast cancer patients waited a minimum of 32 days before having surgery. This data shows a marked increase from 21 days back in 1992.
Breast cancer diagnosis
It is interesting that they looked only at non-metastatic breast cancer. When you first go to see your doctor about a breast problem, like a lump, you have no idea if it is even cancer, much less if it has spread to other parts of the body. Diagnostic mammography, breast MRIs, and ultrasound cannot tell you if the area of concern is cancer. Only surgery can determine breast cancer — that means either a needle biopsy or other invasive procedures.
The waiting can kill you
Medicare had nothing to do with my time delays, as I have private insurance. I have non-metastatic breast cancer. It took 3 weeks to see my OBGYN, then it was another week before I had the imaging done. From there, it took three weeks to schedule a wire-guided surgical biopsy. I had the biopsy in mid-November 2011. It was then I received a cancer diagnosis and was told that it was a high-grade tumor — meaning it was very aggressive. At the same time of my diagnosis, my surgeon ordered more tests. We waited until late December 2011 to discuss a mastectomy. The wait was due to him wanting to see the results of genetic testing. Personally, I was uncomfortable with the long wait time.
Long waits are not just for Medicare recipients and for people in large metropolitan areas. Here in rural Arkansas, wait times are long because there is a shortage of physicians. The area is growing but the medical community is not keeping up with the growth. Patients like me who have serious medical conditions are traveling to other areas in order to get better care.
Lynda Altman was diagnosed with breast cancer in November 2011. She writes a series for Yahoo! Shine called “My Battle With Breast Cancer.”
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Stocks inched higher on Tuesday, reversing earlier declines after bargain hunters stepped in to buy beaten-down shares and offset the impact of Hewlett-Packard‘s accounting charge and France losing its triple-A credit rating.
The S&P 500 briefly dipped below its 200-day moving average at 1,382, but recovered to trade slightly above the key technical level, which is seen as a support mark.
Stocks rallied for the last two days on optimism that Washington politicians could agree on a deal to avoid the U.S. “fiscal cliff.” But the gains followed two weeks of sharp losses.
“We got into a very oversold condition on just about any indicator and then you had intraday reversals in just about all the indexes,” said Jeffrey Saut, Raymond James Financial‘s chief investment strategist in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Shares of McDonald’s shot up 1.3 percent to $ 86.11, leading the Dow industrials’ slim advance.
Moody’s Investors Service cut France’s sovereign rating by one notch to Aa1 after the market’s close on Monday, citing an uncertain fiscal outlook as a result of the weakening economy.
While the move was expected after Standard & Poor’s made a similar downgrade in January, it was a reminder of the headwinds buffeting the global economy and the danger of contagion by the euro zone’s debt crisis.
Hewlett-Packard Co shares tumbled 10.5 percent to a 10-year low at $ 11.91 as the computer and printer maker swung to a fourth-quarter loss. The company said it took an $ 8.8 billion charge related to its acquisition of software firm Autonomy, citing “serious accounting improprieties.
A bright spot for the economy came in data showing U.S. housing starts rose to their highest rate in more than four years in October, suggesting the housing market’s recovery was gathering momentum. The PHLX housing sector index <.HGX> jumped 2.4 percent, led by PulteGroup Inc , up 4.8 percent at $ 16.67.
The Dow Jones industrial average <.DJI> was up 10.34 points, or 0.08 percent, at 12,806.30. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index <.SPX> was up 2.17 points, or 0.16 percent, at 1,389.06. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.IXIC> was up 3.41 points, or 0.12 percent, at 2,913.48.
The S&P 500 index had fallen 5.3 percent between election day two weeks ago and the start of the rebound as angst over a possible U.S. budget deal drove investors to sell stocks and limit the impact of expected tax increases on capital gains and dividends.
President Barack Obama and congressional leaders hope to start serious negotiations after the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday to avoid the “fiscal cliff,” a series of mandatory tax hikes and spending cuts that would go into effect early next year – if a deal is not reached – and could push the U.S. economy back into recession.
(Additional reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak Editing by W Simon, Kenneth Barry and Jan Paschal)
TORONTO (Reuters) – Any fiscal problems that would significantly slow the U.S. economy would be of great concern to Canada, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on Monday.
The United States needed a credible medium-term fiscal plan, Harper said at a business forum in Ottawa, adding that he was following the U.S. fiscal debate with “great interest.”
Dallas Mavericks owner and billionaire Mark Cuban has confirmed reports from last week, in a post on his personal blog today, that he has a serious beef with Facebook. But before getting into all the reasons he no longer loves the social network, he clarifies one small point: “First, I’m not recommending to any of my companies that we leave facebook,” he writes. Last week ReadWriteWeb’s Dan Lyons kind of made it seem like Cuban planned to pull out altogether because of the way Facebook’s algorithm has affected the way people see his brands’s posts. The algorithm, Edgerank, controls brand posts so that not all fans are forced to see each one in their news feeds. Because of this, he quoted Cuban saying “We are moving far more aggressively into Twitter and reducing any and all emphasis on Facebook.” And later he had him talking about all the reasons he finds it horrible for businesses. Like, mainly, that it’s too expensive, a point that GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram called naive. “Really? That surprises you? What else did you think Facebook was going to do when it gave you a giant social platform for nothing?” Cuban now explains that he isn’t bailing on Facebook, just de-emphasizing it in favor of other Internet places, like Tumblr and Twitter. But, that does not mean that he does not hate Facebook as much as everyone has been saying he hates Facebook. He does.
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You can read the laundry list of reasons over at his personal blog, but some highlights include:
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Its a time waster … FB doesn’t seem to want to accept that it’s best purpose in life is as a huge time suck.
IMHO, FB really risks screwing up something that is special in our lives as a time waster by thinking they have to make it more engaging and efficient.
So by default you are not going to use your newsfeed as a primary source of information. It’s more like the township newspaper
I also think that FB is making a big mistake by trying to play games with their original mission of connecting the world. FB is a fascinating destination that is an amazing alternative to boredom which excels in its SIMPLICITY. One of the threats in any business is that you outsmart yourself. FB has to be careful of just that.
Basically Mark Cuban thinks Facebook should stop trying to make money and stop trying to get too smart, which might work in the favor of Cuban who doesn’t want to spend too much money on something silly like social media. But,this doesn’t sound too appealing to Facebook, which as a public company needs to make money. Unless more join his cause, which could maybe happen. At least the Miami blog the 305 agrees with him. Anyone else?
