Financial News

President Barack Obama said Monday that a $2 billion trading loss suffered by JPMorgan Chase is "why Wall Street reform is so important."

"We don’t know all the details," Obama said, but "it’s going to be investigated."

The bank’s loss, which resulted from a massive bet on derivatives, has sent shockwaves through financial markets and caused JPMorgan shares to drop 12% over the past two trading sessions.

Earlier on Monday, the bank announced the retirement of Ina Drew, the firm’s chief investment officer and the supervisor of the bank’s chief investment office.

That office, which makes trades designed to hedge against risk, had amassed a large position in credit-default swaps that began to sour in recent weeks.

Net losses, after factoring in other securities gains, are expected to exceed $800 million by the end of the second quarter. And losses could increase depending on market conditions and the bank’s actions moving forward.

Obama said that the loss is an example of why financial reform is needed.

"JPMorgan is one of the best managed banks there is," Obama said during a taped interview that will air on ABC’s The View. "Jamie Dimon, the head of it, is one of the smartest bankers we got, and they still lost $2 billion and counting."

Dimon to face JPMorgan shareholders

Advocates for more government regulation of banks have cited the trades as evidence that JPMorgan (, Fortune 500) was making an end-around the Volcker Rule payday loan no faxing.

That rule, a part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law passed in response to the financial crisis, aims to ban risky trading by banks for their own profit, sometimes referred to as proprietary trading.

The rule has not yet been implemented, and banks have spent millions of dollars lobbying against it, which they view as cumbersome and excessive.

Dimon, JPMorgan’s CEO and chairman, said on a conference call last Thursday that the trades "didn’t violate the Volcker rule."

But he added that "it’s very unfortunate … it plays right into the hands of pundits out there, but that’s life."

JPMorgan’s big loss: FAQ

The Senate Banking Committee on Monday announced future oversight hearings, including one that will look into the trading losses at JPMorgan from a regulatory angle.

And on Friday, lawmakers who helped craft the Volcker Rule denounced JPMorgan’s trades.

"The law very clearly already excludes this activity," Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan said in a call with the media.

"It specifically says that every single position that you take as a hedge has got to be tied to a specific risk arising from another specific position. Now, that’s about as clear as you can write. So the regulators are now hopefully going to implement the law as written." 

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Yahoo still has credibility issues, even after casting aside CEO Scott Thompson because his official biography included a college degree that he never received.

The troubled Internet company’s next challenge will be convincing its restless shareholders and demoralized employees that the turnaround work started during Thompson’s tumultuous four-month stint as CEO won’t be wasted.

It won’t be an easy task, given that Yahoo Inc. has now gone through four full-time CEOs in a five-year stretch marked by broken promises of better times ahead. Instead, Yahoo’s revenue and stock price have sagged during a time when rivals such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. as advertisers spend more money online.

“Yahoo has been floundering for years and it looks like there is going to at least several more months of indirection now that another CEO is coming in,” said Adam Hanft, who runs a consulting firm that specializes in brand reputation and crisis management.

Yahoo’s hopes are now resting on Ross Levinsohn as its interim CEO. Levinsohn had a successful stint running Internet services within Rupert Murdoch’s media empire at News Corp. before one of Yahoo’s former CEOs, Carol Bartz, hired him in November 2010 to help her in her mostly fruitless attempt to fix the company.

Thompson, who was hired as Yahoo’s CEO in January to fill a void created by Bartz’s firing, had promoted Levinsohn last month to oversee the company’s media and advertising services throughout the world.

“This may seem like a great deal of news to digest, but as you are all keenly aware, Yahoo is a dynamic, global company in a dynamic, global industry, so change _ sometimes unexpected and sometimes at lightning speed _ is something we will continue to live with and something we should embrace,” Levinsohn wrote in a Sunday memo to employees that was provided to The Associated Press.

Levinsohn, 48, plans to address workers at a companywide meeting Monday afternoon.

Yahoo tried to make Levinsohn’s job slightly easier by reaching a truce with dissident shareholder Daniel Loeb, a hedge fund manager who exposed the inaccurate information on Thompson’s bio and had made it clear he would continue to publicly skewer the company unless he was given a chance to help develop a turnaround strategy.

To placate Loeb, Yahoo is shaking up its board of directors, which has been in a state of flux for several months.

Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock and four other directors who had already announced plans to step down at the company’s annual meeting later this year are leaving the board immediately. All five of those directors signed off on the hiring of Thompson, a move that made them all look bad by the recent revelation that they didn’t catch an inaccuracy circulating for years about his education.

Three of Yahoo’s vacated board seats will be filled by Loeb, and two of his allies, former MTV Networks executive Michael Wolf and turnaround specialist Harry Wilson.

Alfred Amoroso, a veteran technology executive who joined Yahoo’s board just three months ago, replaces Bostock as chairman.

The reshuffled board will now try to complete a long-delayed deal to sell part of Yahoo’s roughly 40 percent stake in China’s Alibaba Group, an investment that investors view as the company’s most valuable asset. If a deal can be completed, it could generate billions of dollars that could be returned to Yahoo shareholders and ease some of the pressure on Levinsohn.

Loeb, who controls a 5.8 percent stake in Yahoo though his Third Point hedge fund, had been waging a campaign to gain four seats on the company’s board. Loeb settled for a compromise and Thompson’s departure. The two had a falling out in late March when Thompson told Loeb he wasn’t qualified to be on Yahoo’s board.

Although Yahoo gave no official explanation for Thompson’s abrupt exit, it was clearly tied to inaccuracies that appeared on Thompson’s biography on the company’s website and in a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The bio listed two degrees _ in accounting and computer science _ from Stonehill College, a small school near Boston. After discovering Thompson never received a computer science degree, Loeb exposed the fabrication in a May 3 letter to Yahoo’s board. The revelation raised questions about why the accomplishment had periodically appeared on his bio in the years while he was running PayPal, an online payment service owned by eBay Inc.

Yahoo initially stood behind Thompson, brushing off the inclusion of the bogus degree as an “inadvertent error,” but harsh criticism from employees, shareholders and corporate governance experts prompted the board to appoint a special committee to investigate how the fabrication occurred.

Thompson, 54, spent much of the past week scrambling to save his job. He sent a memo to employees, apologizing for distractions caused by news of the illusory degree and then sought to assure other Yahoo executives that he wasn’t the source of the inaccuracy. He blamed a Chicago headhunting firm, Heidrick & Struggles.

In an internal memo last week, Heidrick & Struggles denied Thompson’s accusation. “This allegation is verifiably not true and we have notified Yahoo! to that effect,” CEO Kevin Kelly wrote to employees. On Sunday, a spokesman for the firm declined to comment.

The flap over the misleading bio elevated the angst in Yahoo just a month after Thompson laid off 2,000 employees, or 14 percent of the workforce, in the biggest payroll purge in the company’s history. In recent weeks, Thompson had been drawing up plans to close or sell about 50 of Yahoo’s services while also antagonizing much of Silicon Valley with a lawsuit alleging the rapidly growing social network Facebook stole some of its technology from Yahoo.

“In spite of the very bumpy road we’ve traveled, we are achieving genuine and meaningful successes in the marketplace every day and heading in the right direction,” Levinsohn wrote in his Sunday memo.

Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan thinks Levinsohn’s media background may make him better qualified to be Yahoo’s CEO than Thompson, whose experience is rooted in electronic commerce.

“Ross Levinsohn is common-sense executive, a pragmatic operator who people love to work for,” Rohan said. “He is the right guy for this job.”

Yahoo’s stock has been sagging since it squandered an opportunity to sell itself to Microsoft Corp. in May 2008 for $33 per share, or $47.5 billion. Yahoo’s stock hasn’t traded above $20 since September 2008.

The shares ended last week at $15.19, leaving it with a market value of $18.6 billion. That’s slightly less than the individual fortunes of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, whose company was still smaller than Yahoo when it went public in 2004.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerbeg’s wealth also could surpass Yahoo’s market value depending on the price set in an initial public offering of stock that is expected to be set Thursday.

Yahoo’s struggles center on the company’s inability to keep up with Google and Facebook in the race for online advertising. Yahoo’s annual revenue has fallen from a peak of $7.2 billion in 2008 to $5 billion last year. Over the same period, Google’s annual revenue has climbed from $22 billion in 2008 to $38 billion last year. Facebook’s annual revenue has increased from $272 million in 2008 to $3.7 billion last year.

“Yahoo has been embattled for such a long time that there are a lot of people prepared to believe the worst about that company,” said Post, who specializes in corporate governance and professional ethics. “When you’re angry at the management and the board, when nothing’s going right and you’re losing money, it’s understandable that shareholders would adopt an `off with their head’ attitude.”

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Search teams found at least 12 bodies Friday on the steep slope of an Indonesian volcano where a Russian-made jetliner crashed while demonstrating the plane for potential buyers from airlines, an official said.

All 45 aboard the Sukhoi Superjet-100 that crashed Wednesday are feared dead.

“Today we have discovered 12 victims, all dead,” Rear Marshal Daryatmo, head of the national search and rescue agency, told reporters Friday.

The search team used ropes to climb up to the wreckage through jungle on the near-vertical slopes of Mount Salak, search and rescue agency spokesman Gagah Prakoso said by telephone.

Thick fog and the jagged mountain’s slopes are still keeping helicopters from landing, so the bodies remain at the crash site, said Daryatmo. He added that the soldiers, police and volunteers on the rescue team were cutting down trees to fashion a landing area for helicopters.

Local television showed what appeared to be the plane’s tail with the blue-and-white Sukhoi logo, part of a wing and bits of twisted metal scattered along the slope like confetti.

The jetliner slammed into the dormant volcano at nearly 800 kph (480 mph) during drizzle no fax needed payday loans. Russian and French investigators have joined the investigation into the cause.

The Superjet-100 is Russia’s first new model of passenger jet since the fall of the Soviet Union two decades ago and was intended to help resurrect its aerospace industry.

The ill-fated Superjet was carrying representatives from local airlines and journalists on what was supposed to be a 50-minute demonstration flight. Just 21 minutes after takeoff from a Jakarta airfield, the Russian pilot and co-pilot asked for permission to drop from 10,000 feet to 6,000 feet (3,000 meters to 1,800 meters). They gave no explanation, disappearing from the radar immediately afterward.

It was not clear why the crew asked to shift course, especially since they were so close to the 7,000-foot (2,200-meter) volcano, or whether they got an OK, officials have said.

Communication tapes will be reviewed as part of the investigation, but it’s unlikely they will be released to the public any time soon.

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Apple is the world’s most valuable company. The Dow Jones industrial average is probably the world’s best-known stock index. So don’t they deserve each other?

Consider this: If Apple had been added to the Dow in June 2009, the last time there were serious rumors that it would happen, the average would be about 2,500 points higher than it is today and well above its all-time high.

Paul Hickey of Bespoke Investment Group, which crunches numbers about the markets, says the Dow would be at 15,360, about 1,200 points above its record of 14,164, set in October 2007. The Dow closed Wednesday at 12,835.

Not only would investors be perkier, but everyday Americans watching the Dow set one record after another would probably feel wealthier. That might inspire them to spend more money and help the economy grow faster.

But if you think the time is right for an Apple-Dow marriage, don’t check your mailbox for a wedding invitation. Apple, which redefined how people listen to music and reinvented the cellphone, is simply too hot for the Dow.

In 2009, when a bankrupt General Motors and a hobbled Citigroup were booted from the Dow and Apple was talked about as one replacement, Apple stock traded at about $144.

On Wednesday, it closed at $569. Because of how the Dow is calculated, Apple would dwarf the other stocks in the average and distort the Dow from its purpose _ which is to reflect the broad economy, not represent the hottest stocks.

A big one-day gain by Apple, like a $50 jump after it reported blockbuster earnings last month, would send the Dow higher by hundreds of points. Similarly, a big drop would suggest the market was in more trouble than it really was.

The Dow comprises 30 stocks. It is weighted so that a $1 move by any stock, no matter how cheap or expensive, moves the average the same _ about seven and a half points as the Dow is calculated today.

Because it’s much easier for a $100 stock to move $1 than it is for a $20 stock, higher-priced stocks carry more importance. IBM, at about $200, is the most expensive stock and carries nearly 12 percent of the Dow’s weight.

Apple would carry a quarter or more, depending on which stock it replaced. That is why the Dow would be thousands of points higher if it had welcomed Apple in 2009: Each share of Apple has grown by hundreds of dollars since then.

“It wouldn’t be the Dow Jones industrial average,” says Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at ConvergEx Group. “It would be the Apple Plus Some Other Stuff Index Internet Payday loans.”

Apple is already the biggest component of the other two major U.S. stock indexes: It makes up nearly 12 percent of the Nasdaq composite and more than 4 percent of the Standard & Poor’s 500.

The Dow was born in 1896 and has changed over the years to reflect the changing economy. Agricultural and coal companies have been replaced by banks and drug companies. Car makers have knocked off railroads.

Of the Dow’s 12 original stocks, only General Electric is still part of the index. So why not add Apple, which has enormous cultural pull and admiration throughout corporate America _ plus a market value of half a trillion dollars?

“We don’t run the Dow as we would an investment portfolio,” says John Prestbo, the executive editor of Dow Jones Indexes, which maintains the Dow and other indexes.

Prestbo, along with the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal and the research head of the CME Group, which owns a majority stake of Dow Jones Indexes, decide which companies make up the Dow.

They meet occasionally to discuss whether they need to change the index. The CME Group provides benchmark indexes on investments like agricultural products, energy and metals.

The Dow committee might boot a company if it’s no longer an industry leader, or if its industry is too heavily represented. Sometimes companies will ask to be included, which doesn’t necessarily hurt or help their case, Prestbo says.

Three years ago, when GM and Citigroup got the ax, the group snubbed Apple and chose Cisco Systems, which makes computer networking equipment, and Travelers Companies, the insurance provider.

Travelers is up almost 50 percent since it was added to the Dow, but Cisco has moved slightly lower. In the hypothetical example provided by Bespoke, Apple would have replaced Cisco in 2009.

There’s some history behind the idea of having the most valuable company be part of the Dow. Exxon Mobil, which held the title until Apple wrested it in January, is a Dow member. Ten years ago, two Dow components, Microsoft and GE, jockeyed for the honor.

But Prestbo brushes off the what-if questions about Apple. Would the Dow be higher? Sure, he says. “But it also wouldn’t be tracking the market.”

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U.K. retail sales fell the most in more than a year last month as the wettest April on record kept Britons from shopping and hurt demand for clothing, footwear, and gardening gear, the British Retail Consortium said.

Sales at stores open at least 12 months, measured by value, declined 3.3 percent from a year earlier, the biggest monthly drop since March 2011, the London-based trade group said in an e-mailed report today. Including stores open less than 12 months, sales decreased 1 percent.

With Britain suffering its first double-dip recession since 1975, Bank of England policy makers must decide this week whether to add stimulus to their existing 325 billion pounds ($525 billion) of bond purchases. Officials will have to balance the need to bolster the recovery with the threat of inflation, which is above their 2 percent target.

?The weakening economy is likely to mean people are even more cautious about their finance,? BRC Director General Stephen Robertson said. ?Any significant improvement in the difficult underlying conditions? is ?a long way off.?

April registered the largest amount of rainfall for the month since records began in 1910, according to the U.K. Met Office. That caused a ?substantial? year-on-year decline in clothing demand, while footwear posted the largest annual drop since January 2008, the BRC said. The wet weather also hurt demand for outdoor home-improvement equipment, gardening tools, lawnmowers and plants.

In the three months through April, food sales increased 0.6 percent from a year earlier on a like-for-like basis, while non- food sales fell 1.6 percent.

The Bank of England forecast in February that inflation will slow to its 2 percent target this year. It will have new projections at its policy meeting this week that it will publish on May 16.

Separately, KPMG LLP and the Recruitment and Employment Confederation said their index of hiring of full-time staff dropped to a three-month low of 51.9 in April from 52.4 in March. An index of hiring of temporary workers slipped to 48.2 from 48.5. Readings below 50 indicate contraction.

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Elections in Greece renewed uncertainty over Europe’s debt crisis, causing a massive drop on the Athens exchange, though losses elsewhere were trimmed as investors regained their poise and Spain announced it will help its banks.

Greece’s election resulted in a massive loss of support for the two parties of the previous coalition government that had backed the austerity demanded by creditors in return for crucial bailout funds. Votes transferred mostly to extremist parties, making it difficult to form a new government that would support the rescue package _ meaning another election may be held in two months.

Antonis Samaras, leader of conservative New Democracy, which won the most votes, is currently trying to form a government, but amid the uncertainty, investors took fright.

Greek shares took a pounding, underperforming all others with a near 7 percent retreat on the main Athens exchange.

“Financial markets loath uncertainty, and so the reaction seen to the elections makes a great deal of sense,” said David White, a trader at Spreadex.

Elsewhere in Europe, however, the early downbeat mood improved somewhat as investors awaited the arrival of Francois Hollande as French president following his defeat of Nicolas Sarkozy on Sunday.

Hollande campaigned on the need for more growth-generating economic policies and less reliance on austerity. While economists agree more growth would help fight the debt crisis, some fear Hollande could upset the balance in European policies, with uncertain consequences.

“The market will likely cautiously wait to gauge to what extent Hollande will want to renegotiate the French position about fiscal and economic matters in Europe,” said Jan Dubsky, an analyst at Royal Bank of Scotland.

That reflective approach was evident in the performance of the CAC-40 in France, which following early losses, was trading 0 free credit report and score.8 percent higher at 3,188.

Germany’s DAX also trimmed losses to be trading only 0.2 percent lower at 6,548 after new figures showed the country’s factory orders rose 2.2 percent in March, more than expected, despite an economic downturn in Europe.

Also helping markets recover from early losses was Spain’s decision to present measures this week to support the banking sector _ a key source of worry over whether the country might need a financial bailout. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said he would not rule out lending, or injecting public money into the sector if necessary.

Madrid’s main stock index rallied 1.8 percent on the news. Elsewhere, the FTSE 100 of leading British shares was closed for a public holiday.

In the U.S., the Dow Jones industrial average was down 0.3 percent at 13,004 while the broader S&P 500 index was unchanged at 1,369.

In the currency markets, the euro also recovered some of its poise after falling to a three-month low against the dollar during Asian trading hours. It was up 0.6 percent at $1.3047, having earlier fallen to $1.2972.

Earlier in Asia, Japan’s Nikkei 225 index plunged 2.8 percent to close at 9,119.14 _ its lowest finish in three months _ with the market’s export sector also sapped by a rising yen. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng slid 2.6 percent to 20,536.59. In other Asia markets, Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 lost 2.2 percent to 4,301.30 and South Korea’s Kospi shed 1.6 percent to 1,956.44.

Oil prices fell alongside equities, with the benchmark New York rate down 76 cents at $97.73 a barrel.

____

Pamela Sampson in Bangkok contributed to this report.

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Berkshire Hathaway chairman and CEO Warren Buffett and vice chairman Charlie Munger spent more than five hours Saturday answering questions from shareholders, reporters and stock analysts.

Here is a sample of their comments on a variety of topics:

___

BUFFETT’S SUCCESSOR:

Buffett has said one of his most important jobs as the head of Berkshire is to manage risk and make sure the company is not exposed to catastrophic problems. He said his eventual successor will also have that job.

Buffett said Berkshire’s board won’t ever choose a CEO who doesn’t have the skills needed to evaluate the complicated insurance and derivative transactions Berkshire sometimes enters into.

“We’re not going to have an arts major in charge of Berkshire,” Buffett said.

Buffett said his eventual successor at Berkshire will maintain the company’s culture and keep key managers of its subsidiaries happy.

“You do not need to worry about my successor,” he said.

Many of the managers of Berkshire companies are independently wealthy themselves. They work only because they enjoy it, and Buffett largely lets them operate their companies independently.

“The successor we have in mind will not be one who will turn off the managers,” Buffett said.

___

RENEWABLE ENERGY:

Buffett said the subsidies Berkshire Hathaway’s utility companies get for their wind and solar power projects are important because the projects might not get built without them.

“I don’t think any of our projects would make sense without subsidies,” Buffett said.

___

LARGE ACQUISITIONS:

Buffett said Berkshire can consider acquisitions up to about $20 billion. Larger deals are tougher to complete, he said, because Berkshire doesn’t want to issue new stock and doesn’t want its cash to drop below $20 billion No teletrak payday loan.

Recently, Berkshire was negotiating a $22 billion acquisition, but Buffett said the numbers didn’t work out.

To complete a deal bigger than $20 billion, Buffett said he would sell off some of Berkshire’s stock investments to raise cash.

But Berkshire still doesn’t want to pay a dividend anytime soon because Buffett and Munger believe they can invest the $38 billion cash on hand profitably.

“We’ll think about that when we’re older,” said Buffett, 81.

___

INVESTMENTS TO AVOID:

Buffett said it’s silly to think that initial public offerings of stocks will be attractively priced because so much effort goes into promoting those stocks. Munger said investors should pay attention to the kind of commissions a broker will earn on a specific investment. “If it’s got a really high commission on it, don’t bother looking at it,” Munger said.

___

WAL-MART BRIBERY SCANDAL

Buffett said Wal-Mart Stores Inc. appears to have mishandled the scandal over allegations that it used bribes to speed its expansion in Mexico.

The scandal will certainly occupy a great deal of the time of Wal-Mart’s managers. But the allegations don’t change the way Buffett views Wal-Mart as a business.

“I don’t see that as changing the earning power,” Buffett said.

At the end of last year, Berkshire held 39 million shares of Wal-Mart stock.

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French investigators are studying accusations that Dominique Strauss-Kahn may have been involved in a rape during a sex party in a Washington hotel in 2010, while he was chief of the International Monetary Fund, a judicial official said Friday.

Strauss-Kahn, via his lawyers, denied any violence and said he’s the subject of a public “lynching campaign.” The prominent economist, once a top contender for France’s presidency, has seen his career and reputation crumble since he was accused of sexual assault in a New York hotel a year ago.

Investigating judges in the northern French city of Lille have asked for prosecutors’ permission to broaden a suspected prostitution probe to examine claims of rape during an orgy in Washington in December 2010, said an official at the Lille prosecutor’s office.

The prosecutor’s office will decide next week whether to expand the investigation, the official said. The official was not authorized to be publicly named because of prosecutor’s office policy.

Strauss-Kahn is already a target in the Lille prostitution probe, which has mushroomed over the past year into a nationwide scandal. He is facing preliminary charges of alleged aggravated pimping, based on accusations by other people questioned in the investigation.

He denies those charges, acknowledging he was involved in “libertine” activity while saying that he was unaware of anyone being paid for sex.

The Lille prosecutor’s office gave no details of the U.S. rape accusations.

French daily Liberation reported Friday that two Belgian prostitutes questioned in the Lille probe described Strauss-Kahn as using violence during sex and forcing one of them to have anal sex despite her protests.

Bill Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, declined Friday to comment on the allegations. A spokeswoman for Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department had no immediate comment.

Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers said no legal complaint has been filed about the suspected incident.

“Strauss-Kahn absolutely contests having committed the slightest violence of any nature, and notes that the declarations made by the young women are contradictory,” lawyers Frederique Beaulieu and Richard Malka said in a statement.

They noted that the accusations surfaced two days before France’s presidential elections. Strauss-Kahn has reportedly said the sex-related accusations against him were part of an effort to discredit him and keep him out of France’s presidential race, where he once was considered a leading challenger to President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Strauss-Kahn is facing a trial in New York over a lawsuit by a hotel maid who accused him of sexual assault in May 2011. A judge ruled this week that the trial can go forward despite Strauss-Kahn’s claim that he had diplomatic immunity.

A French writer had accused Strauss-Kahn of sexually assaulting her during an interview in 2003, but prosecutors ruled last year that too much time had passed to pursue her complaint.

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Energizer Holdings Inc., which makes batteries, flashlights, and other consumer products, said this morning that its fiscal second-quarter net income nearly doubled on higher prices in its household products segment and better personal care sales.

The Town and Country-based company cautioned that third-quarter earnings per share will likely be lower than a year ago, mostly because of the timing of promotional spending over the last six months of the fiscal year.

Energizer also said it plans to start paying a dividend in its fourth quarter.

Energizer earned $77.9 million, or $1.17 per share, for the period ended March 31. That’s up from $39.1 million, or 55 cents per share, a year earlier.

Excluding a restructuring charge and other special items, adjusted earnings were $1.22 per share. Revenue increased 6 percent to $1.1 billion from $1.04 billion, The results beat Wall Street’s forecast for earnings of $1.09 per share on revenue of $1.04 billion, according to FactSet.

Revenue for the company’s personal care unit climbed 6.7 percent to $651.5 million, buoyed by higher sales of Schick Hydro razors, lower promotional spending and more shipments of Edge and Skintimate shaving products payday loans for bad credit.

Household products revenue rose 6 percent to $450.3 million on higher prices in the U.S.

The company stuck with its outlook for fiscal 2012 earnings of $6 to $6.20 per share. Analysts expect full-year earnings of $6.10 per share.

Energizer plans a fourth-quarter dividend of 40 cents per share and expects to pay a dividend in each quarter after that. The company is also looking to buy back up to 10 million of its shares. Energizer said that the repurchase program replaces an existing program that allowed it to buy back up to 10 million shares. The company had repurchased about 8 million shares under the existing program.

Energizer also said that and it appointed Daniel J. Heinrich to its board. He most recently was CFO at Clorox Co. Heinrich became a member on Monday, bringing the board’s total to 10.

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Malaysia will introduce its first minimum wage to benefit an estimated 3.2 million workers, joining neighbors Thailand and Vietnam in strengthening support for low-income households as elections approach in Southeast Asia?s third-largest economy.

?The lowest-paid will now be guaranteed an income than lifts them out of poverty and helps ensure that they can meet the rising cost of living,? Prime Minister Najib Razak said, announcing the plan in a speech in Putrajaya, near Kuala Lumpur, ahead of today?s Labor Day holiday. ?The proposed rates take into account the needs of business, while ensuring that no Malaysian is left behind.?

The government has been preparing for a possible early election in May or June, before the due date in early 2013, according to four officials who spoke in March on condition of anonymity because the talks are private. Najib, 58, has raised civil servant salaries and pensions, waived school fees and boosted handouts for the poor in a bid to extend the ruling party?s 55-year lock on power.

The pay plan comes after police arrested 512 people who took part in a street protest in Kuala Lumpur on April 28 to demand cleaner and fairer elections. Najib?s government enacted legislation in April banning such protests after police detained more than 1,600 people during a similar rally in July.

Workers on Peninsular Malaysia will get a minimum 900 ringgit ($297) per month starting in October, said Najib, who is also finance minister. The rate will be 800 ringgit in some more rural areas, including the eastern Sabah and Sarawak states, he said. The government has already begun distributing one-off 500- ringgit ($165) cash payments to the poor after announcing a record 232.8 billion-ringgit spending plan for 2012 in his October budget.

Wealth Gaps

Asian nations from Thailand to Taiwan are introducing or raising minimum pay to address wealth gaps in a region that is leading global growth.

Thailand increased its minimum wage to 300 baht ($9.75) a day in Bangkok and six provinces in April, and by an average of 40 percent in the rest of the country guaranteed unsecured personal loan. The move partly fulfilled a campaign pledge that helped propel Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra?s party to a majority win in July elections.

Vietnam in May will raise the minimum wage for state employees by about 27 percent to 1.05 million dong ($50) per month, according to a National Assembly decision last year. The government enacted a minimum wage increase of as much as 69 percent in October that applied to workers employed by private and state-owned enterprises.

Taiwan?s move last year to increase minimum pay by 5 percent to NT$18,780 ($644) per month helped President Ma Ying- jeou win a second term in January.

Hong Kong Protest

Hong Kong introduced its first statutory minimum wage of HK$28 ($3.61) an hour last year. Thousands of workers were expected to take to Hong Kong?s streets today, demanding Chief Executive-elect Leung Chun-ying address a widening wealth gap when he takes office in July.

Najib, who took over as prime minister mid-term in 2009, sparked speculation of an early vote when he said in December that preparations had begun for the contest. His National Front coalition, which has governed Malaysia since independence, had its narrowest election victory in half a century in 2008.

Malaysia?s minimum wage policy is part of the government?s long-term economic plan to move the country up the value-added chain into higher-yielding industries from its agricultural base.

The country?s per capita income has risen to $9,700 from $6,700 when the government?s economic transformation program was started two years ago, Najib said on April 3. This means Malaysia is on track to achieve its target of per capita income $15,000 by 2020 when the Southeast Asian nation wants to achieve developed-nation status, he said.

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