Finance news. My opinion.

Retailers are reporting strong sales gains in November, boosted by a discount-fueled spending binge for the start of the holiday shopping season last weekend. Now, the challenge is to keep shoppers spending throughout the most important selling period of the year.

Macy’s Inc., Costco Wholesale Corp., Limited Brands Inc. and teen retailer Buckle Inc. all reported sales gains Thursday that beat Wall Street estimates. Target Corp., however, was a straggler, reporting a slim sales gain that was below what analysts had expected.

The figures are based on revenue at stores opened at least a year and are considered a key indicator of a retailers health.

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An “overhaul” of European treaties is needed to help restore market confidence in the eurozone’s ability to reduce high state debt and deficits, the French budget minister said Sunday.

Valerie Pecresse said a new governance pact among eurozone members could include “real regulators, real sanctions” to help restore confidence in the currency union.

Speaking on Canal Plus TV, she said the eurozone’s biggest economies _ France, Germany and Italy _ want to be the “motor” of a more integrated Europe.

“We won’t restore confidence unless we show proof _ very quickly _ about the unflailing solidity and solidarity of the eurozone,” Pecresse said.

Pecresse said each country must rid itself of the debt and deficit problems that are behind the continent’s deepening debt crisis.

German media reported this weekend that German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are pushing for swift legal changes that would force eurozone members to comply with strict rules for budget discipline, like tough and easily enforceable sanctions for violators.

Sarkozy and Merkel have argued that the European Union’s treaties must be amended to guarantee a strict enforcement of the currency zone’s growth and stability pact payday loans.

Treaty changes, however, are complicated to engineer and take a lot of time _ probably more than the troubled eurozone currently has with markets doubting the solidity of several member states such as Italy.

One alternative could be a treaty between the governments involved, which would later be merged into EU law _ as has happened before with Europe’s Schengen visa-free travel agreement, German newspapers Welt am Sonntag and Bild reported.

The new initiative could be announced as early as this week and concluded early next year, Welt am Sonntag reported.

Germany’s government, in a statement Sunday, did not comment on the question of an intergovernmental treaty but said it’s continuing to push for changes to the EU treaty to be discussed at a summit next month in a bid to strengthen the currency union.

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President Barack Obama is using a new report on the income gap between the richest Americans and everyone else to continue pushing for passage of his stalled $447 billion jobs bill.

A report this week by the Congressional Budget Office found that average after-tax income for the top 1 percent of U.S. households had increased by 275 percent over the past three decades while middle-income households saw just a 40 percent increase in their post-tax income. Those at the bottom of the economic scale saw their income grow by a mere 18 percent.

Obama said Saturday in his weekly radio and Internet address that he would pay for his jobs plan with an added tax on people who make at least $1 million a year. But Senate Republicans blocked action on the bill, a blend of tax breaks for businesses and public works spending, because they oppose much of the increased spending and the surtax on millionaires.

“These are the same folks who have seen their incomes go up so much, and I believe this is a contribution they’re willing to make,” he said. “Unfortunately, Republicans in Congress aren’t paying attention. They’re not getting the message.”

Obama is now trying to get Congress to pass the individual components of the bill. But Senate Republicans also blocked action on the first of those measures, $35 billion to help local governments keep teachers on the job and pay the salaries of police officers, firefighters and other emergency services workers.

Saying the country can’t wait for Congress, Obama has begun taking unilateral steps that he says will encourage economic growth. The actions do not require congressional approval.

On Friday, Obama directed government agencies to shorten the time it takes for federal research to turn into commercial products in the marketplace, to help startup companies and small businesses create jobs and expand their operations more quickly. He also called for creation of a centralized online site for companies to easily find information about federal services. He previously had announced help for people who owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth and for the repayment of student loans. The White House also challenged community health centers to hire veterans.

“We can no longer wait for Congress to do its job,” Obama said. “So where Congress won’t act, I will.”

The CBO report, based on IRS and Census Bureau data, was released as the Occupy Wall Street movement spreading across the country protests bailouts for corporations and the income gap highlighted by the report. The Occupy Wall Street protesters call themselves “the 99 percent.”

In the weekly GOP message, Illinois Rep. Bobby Schilling urged Obama to support the “forgotten 15″ _ measures that Schilling’s party says would help create jobs by blocking various energy and environmental regulations and streamlining administrative procedures. The bills, passed by the Republican-controlled House, await action in the Democratic-run Senate.

Shilling said the bills give the White House and Congress an opportunity to build on the common ground created by the passage of free-trade agreements, and a measure to void a law requiring federal, state and many local governments to withhold 3 percent of their payments to contractors until their taxes are paid. Obama included repealing that tax in his jobs plan.

“Republicans have a jobs plan, one with some bipartisan support, but it’s stuck in the Senate,” said Schilling, owner of a pizza parlor in Moline, Ill. “We’re asking President Obama to work with us and call on the Senate to pass the `forgotten 15′ to help the private sector create jobs, American jobs desperately needed.”

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TORONTO

The International Criminal Court will investigate three to six people in Ivory Coast for their actions during the West African nation’s violent six-month-long political crisis, the court’s top prosecutor said.

“We will focus on the most egregious and the most responsible,” Luis Moreno-Ocampo said late Saturday during his visit to Ivory Coast as part of the court’s recently opened investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity. Officials said Sunday that he had left the country.

Moreno-Ocampo said national authorities should investigate other suspects.

He said the public will not know the names of the international court’s suspects until he collects evidence and the judges review it.

“I don’t know (who they are) yet,” he said.

Earlier this month the court’s judges authorized the prosecutor to investigate violence committed after November 2010.

On Saturday, Moreno-Ocampo said the probe may look at violence committed as early as 2002.

“Today people volunteered to provide us with more information,” he said. “The judges are requesting more information and we will provide it.”

Human rights groups have called on the court to probe violence committed before the elections, when the nation was plunged into civil war, then underwent a de facto split along north-south lines.

Former president Laurent Gbagbo failed to hold elections when his first term ended in 2005. After a poll last November, he refused to accept his electoral defeat. Thousands died during the political standoff that followed.

Moreno-Ocampo did not meet Gbagbo during his visit, but said: “We will probably request through his lawyers to interview him.”

On Sunday, a spokeswoman for Ivory Coast’s prosecutor’s office said authorities arrested a fugitive military commander accused of serious crimes while working as a top aide to the former first lady. Habiba Coulibaly said Commander Anselme Seka Yapo was arrested Saturday.

In 2005 the U.N. accused Simone Gbagbo of leading death squads to kill opposition members.

French and U.N. forces assisted the forces loyal to President Alassane Ouattara who removed Gbagbo from power in April. Ouattara took office in May.

Ouattara asked the international court to investigate crimes committed by both sides during the postelection crisis payday loan no faxing.

During his visit Moreno-Ocampo met with Ouattara, with Prime Minister Guillaume Soro, with victims, members of the opposition and with the president of the newly formed reconciliation commission.

The commission, the prosecutor said, can address victims’ needs immediately, unlike the court.

“For those who were raped, who lost their homes, they need assistance now,” he said. “They don’t need to wait for a judge’s decision.”

Human Rights Watch says over a dozen people on both sides, including Gbagbo, led fighters to commit war crimes and likely crimes against humanity during the postelection violence.

Gbagbo’s spokesman Kone Katinan has said if he is to be judged, it should be by his own people rather than by an international tribunal.

Pro-Gbagbo newspapers have accused the international court of being one-sided. But residents have expressed optimism about the court’s involvement.

“It’s good to have someone from the outside of the country investigating … they can be more impartial, and more credible,” said beauty product distributor Kone Tresor Korona, 33, a resident of Abidjan who hails from the north, like Ouattara.

“Since the government is also doing an investigation, we can compare the (results of the) two, and hopefully when we put them together we can be closer to the truth,” Korona said.

The Ivory Coast investigation is the court’s seventh, all of them in Africa. So far, none of the cases has reached a verdict.

Ivory Coast is not a member of the court, but has accepted its jurisdiction in the case. It is the first time the court has opened an investigation in a nonmember nation following such a recognition of jurisdiction by a nonmember state.

Despite their lack of member status, the prosecutor said authorities have welcomed him.

“This is the first time in which we have a good relationship with national authorities. They are allowing us to (speak with) victims,” Moreno-Ocampo said. “It’s an interesting, new experience.”

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Back when the recession first took hold, we never expected to count this high: 61,000 net jobs lost in Metro St. Louis since employment peaked in February 2008.

The stories of the displaced come in an infinite variety, though increasingly with one disturbing commonality: the unprecedented length of their joblessness. The average jobless stint now lasts 10 months, long enough to cripple not only short-term finances but long-term career prospects. 

In the Sunday Business section of the Post-Dispatch, and here on stltoday.com, we’ll explore these trends, and the impact on our neighbors, in a special report: Jobless in St. Louis. 

George Batten, 50, has been out of work for three years - after spending three decades climbing to an executive post. Construction worker Scott Regna, 31, has seen his income drop from $50,000 in 2006 to a mere $3,000 last year. J.L. Hickman, 62, had worked literally hundreds of full-time and contract jobs before hitting a wall 15 months ago; he’s put in 552 unsuccessful applications since then. The career of 24-year-old Isabel Yerkes has yet to start, as she labors in a part-time retail purgatory after graduating college. Alfreda Lewis, 55, prays each day as she nears the two-year mark without a job and nears the end of her unemployment insurance.

These are just a handful of stories plucked from the tens of thousands being lived, and endured, every day by our family, neighbors and friends in the St. Louis region. Taken together, they amount to a staggering financial and emotional toll that, however and whenever we recapture solid economic ground, will be with us for years to come.

In Sunday Business: 

A stock trader dubbed the Octopussy because he reached for so much inside information was sentenced Wednesday to 10 years in prison and a California finance researcher convicted in a separate but related insider trading case received a four-year prison term as two judges tried to send a stern warning to Wall Street.

“Insider trading is very, very hard to detect. Because of that, it has to be dealt with harshly,” U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan said as he gave 34-year-old Zvi Goffer one of the longest prison terms ever handed down in an insider trading case. He added: “These crimes are not going to be tolerated, certainly not in my courtroom.”

U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff said it was important that each sentence send a tougher message to deter inside trading than previously thought necessary.

“It’s hard to detect but easy to commit so the temptations are great,” Rakoff said as he sentenced Winifred Jiau, 43, of Fremont, Calif., who has remained imprisoned for nine months because it was determined that the Taiwan-born researcher was a risk to flee. Still, the sentence was only half of what was called for by federal sentencing guidelines.

The Israeli-born Goffer, who lives in Brooklyn, was convicted with two others in June in a conspiracy to pay bribes to coax confidential information out of two shady lawyers at a Manhattan firm. The arrests were part of what prosecutors called the biggest hedge fund insider trading case in history. In all, more than two dozen people have been convicted in the probe.

The sentencings Wednesday came weeks before the scheduled sentencing next month of Raj Rajaratnam, a one-time billionaire hedge fund founder who was convicted on insider trading charges earlier this year. Prosecutors say he made more than $50 million through illegal trades and are seeking a prison term of more than 24 years.

When the charges against Rajaratnam and Goffer were announced in the fall of 2009, prosecutors said they had made unprecedented use of wiretaps, in part because white collar criminals were starting to use techniques to cover up their crimes that made them resemble common criminals.

The wiretaps eventually led to a separate probe of researchers in the securities industry who enable illegal secrets to be passed between hedge fund managers and employees of public companies. Jiau was among 13 people arrested last year in that probe.

At his sentencing, Goffer apologized to investors in the stocks in which he had an unfair advantage, saying: “They didn’t have the information I had.”

He began crying when he apologized to his brother, Emanuel, who was convicted at trial along with him and is awaiting sentencing. A third defendant, Michael Kimelman, also awaits sentencing.

“He knows I love him,” he said of his brother. Zvi Goffer said he didn’t always understand the seriousness of the crime but had awakened to its tragic consequences.

“Now today I have to face it and I am terrified,” he said.

The sentence caused Goffer’s wife to break down in sobs.

“What am I going to do?” she called out in court at one point. “It’s not fair!” A woman beside her then shouted a profanity, causing Sullivan to rise from the bench and threaten to bring in U.S. marshals to make arrests.

“This is a courtroom, not a street corner,” he said. “I am not going to tolerate this.”

Goffer was convicted by a jury that viewed evidence that he had arranged to pay two attorneys nearly $100,000 in 2007 and 2008 for inside tips on mergers and acquisitions.

During the two-week trial, prosecutors introduced evidence that Goffer gave conspirators prepaid cellular telephones in an effort to reduce detection by law enforcement.

The judge said Goffer had repeatedly demonstrated that he knew he was breaking the law and didn’t care.

“It’s a game that you and others seem to find exciting,” he said, adding that Goffer had a gambler’s mentality that led him to “double down and go to trial” when he would have shaved three years off his prison sentence by accepting responsibility before trial and admitting his crimes.

“You went for broke. You gambled and lost on that, too,” Sullivan said.

Before starting his own firm, Goffer worked for nine months for Rajaratnam.

Jiau was convicted of charges that she conspired to accept cash and gifts to feed inside information to hedge funds.

Jiau, a U.S. citizen, worked for two years as a consultant for Primary Global Research, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company.

Prosecutors said she earned more than $200,000 by selling “tomorrow’s news today” about earnings and performance of publicly traded companies. The information, they say, was communicated in code with her co-defendants, sometimes using “cooks” to refer to tipsters, “recipe” for the inside information and “sugar” for what she was paid for

Lawyers for both Jiau and Goffer said their clients were left in financial ruin and their careers were destroyed.

Jiau told Rakoff she was “sorry for being here.”

She also apologized to her dog, a Golden Retriever named Hunter who is being cared for by friends, saying: “I’m sorry I broke my promise to take care of you and be with you.”

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Fiat and Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne on Tuesday said the combined companies still aim to produce 6 million cars a year by 2014 despite the increased uncertainty in global financial markets.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Frankfurt Auto Show, Marchionne expressed frustration at Europe’s spiraling debt crisis, which threatens to engulf Fiat’s key market of Italy. It already is sapping consumer confidence with auto sales in Italy forecast at around 1.8 million this year, the lowest level since 1983.

“People don’t even know how to buy groceries for the weekend right now, and we are worrying about 2014,” Marchionne said with some irony.

“In the absence of a cataclysmic event the answer is yes, that is what we are trying too build,” he said, referring to the companies’ production goals.

Fiat SpA has a 53.5-percent majority stake in U.S. automaker Chrysler Group LLC and is looking to combine the companies to create a global automaker. Marchionne said Chrysler is in a better position because U.S. policymakers have done more to stimulate the economy.

The Italian-Canadian CEO said there need to be serious discussions in Europe about promoting growth, and that governments across the continent need to reduce their costs to confront the crisis credibly.

“Anybody who runs a business knows, the only way to maintain a structure when you are under pressure is to reduce costs. … I am talking about everyone in general. Tighten belts, remove all unnecessary expenditures and try to gear up these places toward growth,” Marchionne told the Associated Press.

Despite the weakening market, Fiat is premiering the third generation of the Panda city car, the best-selling car in the segment in Europe, at the Frankfurt Auto Show cash advance loan. The car is slightly longer, but retains much of the look of the original, which has sold more than 6 million units since its launch in 1980.

It is being challenged by Volkswagen, which is launching the Up, the latest entry in the market for tiny, fuel-efficient city cars.

Marchionne said there was no choice but to go ahead with the launch.

“It is never the right moment when the market is weak,” he said. But if the company had to follow volatile markets “then we close up shop and go home.”

Production of the Panda will begin in November at the Pomigliano plant near Naples. But Marchionne has put other investments on hold _ including plans to build Alfa Romeo and Jeep SUVs at a plant in Turin _ while the crisis sorts itself out.

“Everything is on the table now because this uncertainty makes everyone concerned about what the future looks like,” he said.

Marchionne has pledged to invest euro20 billion ($27 billion) in Italy to double production by 2014.

The Fiat CEO also confirmed talks with Suzuki on supplying engines, but indicated the deal was not yet finalized.

“I think there is a potential deal with Suzuki on engine supply. We are going to continue working with the company. … anything that works for them and for us, we will do,” Marchionne said.

Suzuki Motor Corp. on Monday said it will end its alliance with Volkswagen AG following a nearly two-year marriage, after Volkswagen accused Suzuki of violating the terms of its partnership by deciding to buy diesel engines from rival Fiat SpA.

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Twenty-five of the 100 largest U.S. corporations paid their chief executives more last year than they paid in federal income taxes, according to a report released Wednesday.

The nonprofit Institute for Policy Studies says the 25 CEOs averaged $16.7 million in salary and other 2010 compensation.

Most of the companies they ran, meanwhile, came out ahead at tax time. They collected tax refunds that averaged $304 million, based on a review of public filings. The think tank says the 25 firms that paid out more in CEO compensation than U.S. taxes reported average global profits of $1.9 billion.

The institute, based in Washington, describes itself as a community of public scholars that works with social movements to promote democracy and challenge corporate influence and military power.

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China plans to inspect all of its showcase bullet train lines following a crash last month that killed 40 people, as authorities work to determine who is ultimately responsible for the disaster.

The State Administration of Work Safety will present a report on the July 23 crash to China’s top leaders in September, the agency’s spokesman Huang Yi said in comments Tuesday on its website.

“Of course, a period of analysis is required to determine both the direct and indirect factors behind the crash and to work out who is responsible,” Huang said.

The monthlong inspections of 49 projects and 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles) of railway lines will run through the middle of next month, and train operations and construction will be suspended if safety problems are found, officials say.

In the crash last month near the city of Wenzhou in eastern China’s Zhejiang province, a lightning strike caused one bullet train to stall and a sensor failure that allowed a second train to keep moving on the same track and slam into it.

Huang said it was clear that there were deficiencies in the safety management of the system.

“This was an accident that was both avoidable and preventable,” he said.

The collision killed 40 people and injured 177, including a toddler orphaned by the crash who was rescued nearly a day later.

The official Xinhua News Agency reported Tuesday that the two-year-old girl, Xiang Weiyi, has been moved to Shanghai to help her recover from severe injuries to one of her legs, after relatives appealed for better help for the girl.

The girl will need a “pretty long time to recover,” it quoted pediatric orthopedist Dr. Zhao Li as saying.

China has 13 high-speed railways in operation, with 26 under construction and 23 more planned, although approvals of new projects were frozen following the Wenzhou crash. Delays on a new Beijing-Shanghai line blamed on equipment and power failures have fanned public anger over the cost and potential risks of the program.

The government has ordered reduced speeds and cut ticket prices for the lines.

Earlier plans called for expanding the network to 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers) of track by 2020.

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