Finance news. My opinion.

U.S. stocks ended mixed Thursday afternoon as investors welcomed a slight dip in jobless claims but remained cautious amid ongoing uncertainty in Greece and the rest of Europe.

"The situation in Europe remains fluid, and we’re not likely to get much clarity for awhile, so today is one of those days when a lack of really bad news is good news," said Michael Sheldon, chief market strategist at RDM Financial Group.

The Dow Jones industrial average () rose 20 points, or 0.2%, snapping a six-day losing streak, and the S&P 500 () added 3 points, or 0.3%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq () lost 1 point.

Cisco (, Fortune 500) was the biggest laggard on all three indexes, with shares tumbling more than 10%. Late Wednesday, the networking giant released a disappointing sales outlook for the current quarter.

Europe remains in the spotlight Thursday as Greek politicians continue to struggle to form a coalition government and Spanish bond yields keep rising.

After the Greek radical left party failed to gain consensus, Socialist leader Evangelos Venizelos was given the mandate to form a coalition government by the Greek president on Thursday.

Greece will muddle through

Meanwhile, the Bank of Spain moved to take over Bankia — one of Spain’s largest and most troubled banks — late Wednesday.

U.S. stocks bounced back somewhat from a sharp sell-off Wednesday, but all three major indexes closed in the red as investors continued to fret about Greece and Spain.

World markets: European stocks closed with slim gains. Britain’s FTSE 100 () ticked up 0.3%, DAX () in Germany gained 0.7%, while France’s CAC 40 () rose 0.4%.

The Bank of England held its key interest rate steady and did not increase its asset-buying program at the conclusion of its two-day meeting Thursday, despite a recent report that showed the U.K. has fallen into a new recession.

Asian markets ended mixed. The Shanghai Composite () closed 0.1% higher, while the Hang Seng () in Hong Kong slid 0.5% and Japan’s Nikkei () edged lower 0.4%.

China reported import and export growth that was slower than expected, according to forecasts from economists at HSBC. The report could stir new concerns from investors around the globe about a so-called hard landing for China’s economy, but HSBC said it is also likely to prompt further monetary policy easing by the People’s Bank of China.

Economy: The number of people filing for first-time unemployment benefits in the U.S. fell 1,000 to 367,000 in the latest week. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had expected the report to show 365,000 claims.

The U.S. trade deficit widened to $51.8 billion in March from $45.5 billion in February, according to the Commerce Department. The deficit was narrower than the $53 billion economists had expected.

The Treasury Department on Thursday recorded a $59 billion surplus for the month of May, marking the first time in more than three years that Washington took in more money than it paid out. Tax receipts were higher and spending lower than they were last April.

Companies: Beauty products company Avon (, Fortune 500) said that perfume-maker Coty raised its unsolicited bid for the company to $24.75 a share from its earlier offer of $23.25. Avon’s board said it will consider the offer. Shares of Avon declined.

Avon: Coty’s back with a higher bid

Department store chain Kohl’s (, Fortune 500) reported earnings per share of 63 cents, down from 69 cents a year earlier but still better than the forecast of 61 cents from analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters. But the company gave earnings guidance for the current quarter that was below current forecasts, sending shares lower.

Currencies and commodities: The dollar fell against the euro and the British pound, but gained against the Japanese yen.

Oil for June delivery gained 27 cents to settle at $97.08 a barrel.

Gold futures for June delivery rose $1.30 to settle at $1,595.50 an ounce.

Bonds: The price on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury fell, pushing the yield up to 1.88% from 1.84% late Wednesday. 

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Kellwood Co. has appointed Jill Granoff, former head of Kenneth Cole Productions, Inc., to be its new chief executive officer.

The Town and Country-based apparel company has diverse portfolio of brands including Vince, Rebecca Taylor, David Meister, Lamb & Flag, Baby Phat, and Sag Harbor.

Granoff replaces Michael Kramer, who left to become chief operating officer of J.C. Penney.

She was also formerly an executive vice president of Liz Claiborne Inc. where she was in charge of the worldwide business of Juicy Couture, Lucky Brand Jeans, and Kate Spade payday loans. She has also held executive positions with Victoria’s Secret Beauty and Estee Lauder Inc.

“I am excited about the opportunity to partner with Kellwood and Sun Capital to optimize the brand portfolio and enhance overall business performance,” she said in a statement. “We have a great platform to accelerate growth and profitability.”

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Employers in the U.S. announced more job cuts in April than a year earlier, led by education and government agencies.

Planned firings rose 11 percent to 40,559 from April 2011, according to figures released today by Chicago-based Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. The monthly average of 45,913 cuts through the first four months of this year is lower than the full-year average of 50,507 for 2011.

Employers in education, government, and the consumer goods and transportation industries are easing the pace of dismissals even as they continue to trim headcount, the report said. Job creation in the world

No central banker in the world

For Express Scripts, Medco Health Solutions will be a very big pill to swallow. Could it bring on a little indigestion?

With $70 billion in revenue last year,  Medco far outsells Express Scripts Inc.’s $46 billion. Medco employs 23,200 people versus 13,100 at Express Scripts.

Yet the smaller pharmacy benefit management company is buying the big one, in a deal that closed on Monday.

Observers are betting that Express Scripts will be able to successfully digest Medco, although they expect burps and hiccups.

“These are two top companies doing the same thing,” says Judson Clark, an analyst at Edward Jones investments in Des Peres. Both handle pharmacy benefits for employer health plans.

“There will be a couple of headaches, sure. But it’s not like the airlines coming together and merging reservation systems and everyone ending up stranded in Tallahassee,” Clark said.

Express Scripts has a track record. This is the third time it has doubled its size or more through acquisitions since 1998.

“If anybody can pull this off, it’s Express Scripts,” said Ed Lawrence, a finance professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, who co-authored a company-financed study of Express Scripts’ economic impact on St. Louis.

Still, mergers produce anxiety — among employees worried about at least $1 billion in cost-cutting, among senior executives who must figure out how to integrate the separate businesses, and among customers who worry whether merger glitches could affect their prescriptions.

The company says it’s working to avoid the latter.

“Service and stability are our job one,” said Express Scripts spokesman Brian Henry.

Although both dispense drugs, the firms have different strengths.

Medco has a reputation as the better company at the nitty-gritty of getting drugs to patients. Express Scripts is best at “understanding what motivates patient behavior,” says Clark.

For instance, Express Scripts is good at getting patients to actually take their drugs, and converting patients to cheaper generic drugs.

Express Scripts will try to take the best of both, which raises the question of which executives will end up running what.

Big mergers set off a game of musical chairs in management, as the company tries to cut costs.

Fear about that “permeates the entire organization,” says Stuart Greenbaum, former dean and professor emeritus at the Washington University business school.

Some firms settle those turf disputes quickly. Others drag them out, cutting executive staff by attrition and internal competition.

All that can have an effect on efficiency.

“You want to get a full day’s work out of people, not have them spending half the day polishing their résumés,” Greenbaum said.

When big companies merge, customers sometimes feel the effect as new leaders change rules and customer-relations staff is shaken up. Competitors often use that opportunity to swipe customers away.

There may be some of that in the Express Scripts deal but probably not much, says analyst Clark. The company’s customers are mainly big employers.

“The process of rebidding is not easy,” says Clark. “It’s not easy for HR to undertake, and they are not eager at the prospect of doing it again just for kicks.”

Putting systems together and closing duplicate operations also can cause headaches.

“The IT side is often a very difficult challenge,” says Greenbaum. “Talk to the airlines, and they’ll tell you that sometimes it blows up in your face and sometimes it goes smoothly.”

Firms often take that slowly, integrating systems over a year or two.

For customers, the question is how much they’ll benefit from the deal.

The merged company may have more clout to demand better prices from drugmakers and the drugstores.

How much patients and employers will share in the savings remains to be seen. Critics say the company’s dominance will allow it to keep much of the savings. The smart management move would be to pass along much of the savings “and be very visible about it,” said Greenbaum. That would head off cries for more regulation later.

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Six centuries after the first one was minted and a decade after they went out of circulation, the last French francs are being exchanged for euros, severing France’s final link to its former national currency.

However, the franc’s end also comes as its replacement, the euro, suffers its worst crisis since its creation.

The Banque de France set a deadline of the close of business Friday for French savers to exchange whatever leftover franc notes they’ve kept socked away in drawers or under mattresses, whether held onto intentionally as souvenirs or simply forgotten about.

The euro replaced the franc in wallets and purses in January 2002, but the central bank has continued to accept francs in exchange for euros _ until late Friday.

A decade might seem to have been enough time to get to the bank, even for the worst procrastinators. But lines of last-minute holdouts still formed all week long outside Banque de France branches, the last place where francs can be swapped for the new currency at the rate of 6.55957 francs for 1 euro _ the exchange rate that was locked in when France joined the euro in 1999.

The French press has been filled with reminders about the looming deadline, after which all those blue 50-franc bills with the cartoon drawing of The Little Prince standing alone on his planet will lose all but their sentimental value.

Some people heard about the deadline just in time.

“They were in a drawer and I found them a few days ago, and when I heard this morning that today was the last day to turn them in, I came this morning to do it,” said Rene Huot, as he waited in line at a Banque de France branch on Paris’ Left Bank.

The central bank estimates that even after Friday’s deadline, around half a billion euros worth of old franc notes will remain in the wild, unexchanged and henceforth worthless.

The existence of the euro, used by more than 330 million people in 17 countries, has come into doubt recently as European governments failed to prevent the financial crisis from widening from Greece to Italy and even France. The French and German leaders’ shock admission in November that Greece might leave the euro only added to those concerns.

France is the second eurozone country to definitively phase out its old currency, after Italy stopped exchanging the lire in December. Finns have until the end of this month to turn in their last markkaa, while the Dutch get to hang onto their old guilders until 2032.

About half the eurozone countries have set no time limit at all.

Greeks have until March 1 to exchange their drachmas _ if the country hasn’t switched back to its historic currency by then.

Eurozone ministers are due to meet Monday to decide on a new euro130 billion bailout Greece needs if it hopes to avoid becoming the first eurozone member to default on its debts and be ejected from Europe’s common currency.

While few Europeans are prepared to scrap the euro _ in part because they fear a chaotic collapse more than the current muddle _ some are nostalgic for the money they counted on before it arrived.

“We are living a lot less well with the euro, especially when we have a modest salary and a small pension and by God we are really obliged to maintan a tight budget,” said Micheline Leblanc, a retiree who was also changing her last francs at the Banque de France.

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Developer Paul McKee is poised to more than double his real estate holdings in north St. Louis, a move that could represent a big step forward for his controversial plan to remake several battered neighborhoods there.

On Monday, McKee’s NorthSide Regeneration will ask three city development boards for the right to buy 1,233 parcels of city-owned land — roughly 162 acres in all — across the near north side. The price? About $3.2 million.

The move would be the biggest buy yet for McKee, whose vision of thousands of new homes, office buildings and more has been stalled for nearly two years since a judge tossed out a $390 million city subsidy, but who has continued to push his project forward in small steps while he appeals that ruling.

The purchase needs the approval of an alphabet soup of city agencies that own the land, but the request has the blessing of top development officials and St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay.

“It’s a good thing,” said Slay chief of staff Jeff Rainford. “He’s willing to move forward even without the (tax increment financing) issues being settled.”

The purchase has been discussed at City Hall since at least 2009, when McKee first unveiled his NorthSide plans. But it’s not clear why it’s happening now. McKee answered several questions by email Friday but did not directly address his timing. He has, however, been showing the NorthSide to prospective tenants in recent months and says he has ’some deals that are pretty far along.”

“He wants to move forward on some projects,” said Rodney Crim, executive director of the St. Louis Development Corp.

McKee already owns about 800 parcels — totaling perhaps 130 acres — scattered across the 1,500-acre project area. Most of that he bought in secret over five years, using shell buyers to keep the price down. Since stepping out from behind the curtain, he has made a few purchases — like the 17-acre Bottle District site north of downtown, which he closed on in December — but nothing on a large scale.

Now, McKee wrote Friday that he can combine the city land with his current holdings to offer a wide range of sites to businesses or housing developers.

“Opportunities to create large-scale development in the most blighted areas of our cities are rare,” he wrote, saying that the combination can “create a unified development footprint worthy of the City’s hopes for the future.”

McKee has acknowledged that the project’s slow progress has stretched him financially but said Friday he has lined up funds to buy the land. He received $2.1 million in Missouri state tax credits in December, with an application for more still pending, and, according to city records, has continued to borrow in relatively small doses from the Bank of Washington, the only bank that has publicly committed to NorthSide.

He will not be able to claim the state tax credits for this land — purchases of city-owned property are not eligible — and city leaders say he’s paying full price, minus a small break for buying so much.

“We’re not giving him these properties. We’re not selling them at a discount,” Rainford said. “He is buying them for what we think these properties are worth.”

The land — much of which the city acquired after previous owners stopped paying taxes — includes hundreds of small lots and individual buildings scattered all over McKee’s 1,500-acre NorthSide footprint. In some cases, it amounts to nearly whole blocks of vacant urban prairie, with just one or two privately owned homes still occupied and standing.

The deal also comes with a two-year option to buy the site of the old Pruitt-Igoe housing complex for $100,000. The 33-acre site at Jefferson and Cass avenues, which has sat empty since the mid-’70s, is today basically a forest surrounded by chain-link fence, and may have pollutants in the ground. But it’s a key site for McKee, and he has suggested he’ll turn it into a retail complex.

The deal also highlights the city’s long history of “land banking” — assembling unwanted land for future development.

The practice has become more popular in recent years as cities like Detroit and Cleveland wrestle with widespread abandonment, and Missouri lawmakers are considering a bill to create a land bank in Kansas City. But St. Louis has been doing it since 1971, when the Land Reutilization Authority became the nation’s first city-run land bank.

Today, the LRA owns about 10,000 parcels, with other city land banks owning about 1,000 more.

It pays to mow grass and picks up trash and, if there’s a building on the site, is responsible for keeping it safe. It collects no taxes on these properties, and many it has owned for decades. Selling more than one-tenth of that property will generate at least $100,000 in new taxes, even without any development, said Crim.

And selling it to a developer increases the odds that something will get built there, said Rainford.

“Whenever possible, we want land in the hands of the private sector,” he said. “As long as the city’s holding the ground, nothing’s going to happen on it. Our bias is trying to get this land out the door.”

The city’s land-banking program has come under some fire in recent years.

Free market think tank the Show-Me Institute found that the LRA rejected nearly half of all offers to buy its property from 2003 through 2010, often citing possible “future development” as a reason why. Some of those rejections were in the NorthSide footprint, said Audrey Spalding, a Show-Me policy analyst who conducted the study. That McKee is buying them now comes as no surprise, she said, but it also provides no guarantees.

“I’m thrilled that 1,200 parcels are being bought. In terms of tax revenue, it’s a positive. And if Paul McKee’s dreams come to fruition, it’s going to be great for the city,” she said. “But I don’t see it as a validation of holding land vacant in hopes of a big development.”

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Costs related to Ralcorp Holdings’ spin-off of its branded cereal business and an October acquisition drove down first quarter profit by 8 percent.

St. Louis-based Ralcorp posted a net income of $65.3 million, or $1.16 a share, in the quarter ended Dec. 31,  down from $71.3 million, or $1.28 a share, a year ago. Net sales rose 18 percent to $1.38 billion.

Ralcorp, which makes private label cereals, pastas and bakery goods, spun-off its branded cereal business, Post Holdings, as a separate company on Feb. 3.  In its first fiscal quarter of 2012, Ralcorp spent $2.7 million primarily in professional service fees related to the Post spin-off.

Ralcorp also spent $5.6 million in the quarter on acquisition costs, primarily related to its $545 million acquisition  of the North American refrigerated dough business from Sara Lee in October.

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The spending cuts that helped the U.K. preserve its AAA credit rating last year and bolstered the pound are now weighing on the currency as investors lose confidence that Prime Minister David Cameron will revive economic growth.

Sterling had its worst January since 2008, falling 0.6 percent, after a 3.1 percent advance in the second half of 2011, according to Bloomberg Correlation-Weighted Indexes that track 10 developed-market currencies against each other. Gilts are lagging behind lower-rated Treasuries, after world-beating gains of almost 17 percent last year.

Investors are beginning to favor policies promoting growth over austerity just as the biggest government-spending squeeze since World War II risks sending the U.K. into its second recession since 2009. U.S. President Barack Obama has used outlays to drive America

The cost of living in the U.S. was probably little changed in December as stores discounted merchandise during the holidays, supporting the Federal Reserve