Financial thoughts

The Swiss Competition Commission said Friday it has launched an investigation into possible cartel behavior by a dozen banks including the country’s two biggest institutions UBS and Credit Suisse.

The banks are suspected of colluding to influence key interest rates and the trading conditions for derivatives, the commission said in a statement Friday.

“Specifically, collusion between derivative traders might have influenced the reference rates LIBOR and TIBOR,” it said.

The London Interbank Offered Rate, LIBOR, and the Tokyo Interbank Offered Rate, TIBOR, underlay many commercial interest rates.

The commission said the banks are also suspected of illegally influencing market conditions for derivatives based on these reference rates.

The foreign institutions named in the Swiss probe are Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Citigroup Inc., Deutsche Bank AG, HSBC Holdings PLC, JP Morgan Chase & Co., Mizuho Financial Group Inc., Rabobank Groep N.V., Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC, Societe Generale SA, and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation.

Competition authorities in the United States and Britain have launched similar investigations.

Source

For online payday loans no faxing or no fax quick instant cash loans turn to us.

At long last, the Holy Grail of Internet IPOs is here. Facebook filed Wednesday to raise $5 billion in an initial public offering.

In 2011, Facebook earned $1 billion on sales of $3.7 billion. As of December 31, Facebook had 845 million monthly active users.

The company crossed the line into profitability in 2009, five years after it launched in founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room. Facebook earned $229 million that year on sales of $777 million, and has remained profitable ever since.

It’s not yet known on which stock exchange Facebook will trade, though it said it plans to use the ticker symbol "FB."

Facebook will likely re-file its paperwork several times over the coming months. Those updates will add more details and could even restate some of the financial information detailed in Wednesday’s filing.

In this initial paperwork, companies don’t declare how many shares they’re going to sell, or how much those shares will cost. Those details will be added in an updated filing shortly before trading begins.

Without that share price information, Facebook’s valuation is still speculative.

Facebook has its own guesses, though. The company said it conducted its own valuation of its stock at the end of each quarter, and as of December 31 determined it to be worth $29.73 a share.

Zuckerberg’s letter to investors: ‘Hacker Way’

Revenue breakdown: Advertising accounted for 85% of Facebook’s 2011 revenue, or almost $3.2 billion.

Facebook’s other revenue stream is its payment system for purchases within apps and games: Facebook Credits. Facebook keeps 30% of the revenue from those payments, and passes the remaining 70% on to the app developer.

Those fees brought in $557 million for Facebook last year.

Revenue from Zynga, which makes FarmVille and other games played on Facebook, represented 12% of Facebook’s total revenue in 2011.

About 44% of Facebook’s revenue came from overseas last year, compared with 38% in 2010 and 33% in 2009.

As of December 31, Facebook had $3.9 billion in cash and liquid assets.

Exec compensation: Another choice tidbit: In 2011, Facebook CEO Zuckerberg raked in a $500,000 base salary. But he requested — and will receive — only $1 per year in salary starting January 1, 2013.

Don’t feel too bad for Zuck, who remains the largest shareholder in the company he created. His total compensation in 2011 came to $1.48 million, according to Facebook’s calculations.

He was one of the lowest-paid among Facebook’s executive ranks. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg topped the list with a total package Facebook estimated at $30.9 million, almost all of it in stock.

Engineering VP Mike Schroepfer made an estimated $24.7 million — again, mostly in stock — while CFO David Ebersman collected an $18.7 million pay package. (For more on Ebersman, see Fortune’s profile: "The man behind the Facebook IPO.")

As far as the regular rank-and-file at Facebook, the company had 3,200 full-time employees as of December 31. That was a 50% increase from the previous year, and Facebook said it "expect[s] this growth to continue for the foreseeable future."

Facebook also noted that it has bought out some small companies mainly to acquire employees, and said that it intends to continue that strategy.

How much Facebook is worth: Trading won’t begin for several months, as Facebook now has to field questions from regulators and court investors for its stock sale.

Most analysts estimate Facebook’s valuation will fall somewhere between $85 billion to $100 billion. But the value of Web companies can be extremely volatile.

A recent example: Zynga (). The FarmVille maker’s IPO filing reported that it valued its shares in August 2011 at $17.20 each, which gave the company a valuation of $14 billion. But when Zynga went public in December, shares sold for just $10 — valuing the company at $7 billion.

Several other Internet companies made their public debuts in 2011, but the end of the year proved to be a turbulent time for the sector. Shares of Groupon (), Pandora (), Zillow (), LinkedIn () and Angie’s List () all suffered steep double-digit losses for November, though most clawed back at least a bit in December or January. 

Source

Please remember that a payday loan is a rather expensive line of credit. Much like taking something to the pawn shop.

Leaders of the world

Divers have resumed the search for 21 people still missing after a cruise ship capsized off the Tuscan coast.

Divers were scouring the submerged area of the ship Thursday once officials determined it had stablized after shifting on the rocks a day earlier.

Rough seas were forecast for later in the day, adding an element of uncertainty to the search and plans to begin pumping a half-million gallons of fuel from the vessel.

The missing include a 5-year-old Italian girl and her father. The girl’s mother issued a fresh appeal to speed the search and for passengers who saw the pair to come forward to help determine where they were last seen.

Source

Nigerian oil union Pengassan said it will only shut down oil output as

China will take measure to stabilize its exports and imports as slowing global growth creates a

Home prices fell for a fourth straight month in November as distressed sales continued to weigh on prices, data analysis firm CoreLogic said on Monday.

CoreLogic’s (CLGX.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) home price index fell 1.4 percent in November from the previous month. Compared with November of last year, prices were down 4.3 percent, steeper than the 3.7 percent year-over-year decline seen in October.

Excluding distressed sales, prices were off just 0.6 percent in November on a yearly basis. Homeowners in danger of foreclosure, or in “distress,” often sell their homes at a significantly reduced price Payday Loan for Bad Credit.

“Distressed sales continue to put downward pressure on prices and is a factor that must be addressed in 2012 for a housing recovery to become a reality,” Mark Fleming, chief economist at CoreLogic, said in a statement.

Of the top 100 statistical areas measured by population, 77 showed year-over-year declines, down from 80 in October.

Read more

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan said executive-branch politicians will take a 25 percent pay cut amid labor union plans for a nationwide strike to protest scrapping of fuel subsidies that more than doubled gasoline prices.

The government will reduce overseas traveling and all ministries and departments must cut costs in 2012, Jonathan said, adding that he won

India

Valley Beef LLC, a franchisee of five St. Louis area Lion’s Choice restaurants, has filed for bankruptcy.

Clayton-based Valley Beef, led by Thomas Ginos, filed the Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition Thursday in St. Louis federal court and listed between $500,000 and $1 million in liabilities and assets of $50,000 or less. Its largest creditors holding unsecured claims are US Foods, which is owed $117,850, and Pulaski Bank, which has claims totaling $195,205.

Valley Beef’s Lion’s Choice locations in Chesterfield, St. Louis, Fenton, Wentzville and on Mid Rivers Mall Drive in St. Peters have 84 employees. Valley Beef shuttered a Lion’s Choice in downtown St. Louis in 2009.

Ginos became a franchisee of the restaurant chain that specializes in roast beef sandwiches in 2001. He plans to keep the five remaining restaurants open during the bankruptcy reorganization, according to his attorney, Robert Eggmann of Clayton-based law firm Desai Eggmann Mason. Eggmann said his client filed the bankruptcy to restructure debt and expects to emerge from bankruptcy within six months.

Lion’s Choice was founded in Ballwin in 1967 as Brittany Beef and has 15 company-owned restaurants in the St. Louis area that are not included in the bankruptcy. Jim Tobias, president of Lion’s Choice Restaurant Corp., said he did not expect the bankruptcy filing to interrupt operations at the five St. Louis area franchise restaurants. “We don’t expect any change in business,” Tobias said.

Source