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Spain’s funding for the rest of the year remains “comfortable,” helped by better-than-forecast revenue and a shrinking budget deficit, and the government doesn’t expect problems tapping financial markets going forward, said Deputy Finance Minister Jose Manuel Campa.

Spain, which saw its borrowing costs surge to an eight-year high yesterday, has two more bond auctions scheduled this year. The Treasury will sell three-year debt on Dec. 2 and 10- and 15- year securities on Dec. 16, and has about 8 billion euros ($11 billion) still to raise this year, according to the state borrowing plan.

Campa said that since the funding plan was announced at the beginning of the year, the government has implemented public- wage cuts and other austerity steps to try to shrink its budget gap after Greece’s near-default shook investor confidence in the euro-region’s high-deficit nations.

“We have increased and front-loaded our fiscal consolidation,” he said in an interview at the finance ministry in Madrid late yesterday. “The revenues are actually above budget, so our financial conditions are better than we anticipated, so our financial position in terms of funding for the remaining month and a half is quite comfortable.”

Spain is trying to distance itself from other so-called peripheral nations after Ireland’s request for a European bailout fueled contagion through the southern euro region, pushing the extra yield on Spanish debt to a euro-era high. Spain’s economy is almost twice the size of Portugal, Greece and Ireland combined, making investor concerns about its ability to control its finances a greater risk to the euro region overall.

‘Confident’ on Deficit

Campa, a 46 year-old Harvard-educated economist, said he is “concerned” about market tensions, even as Spain’s interest costs remain low in historic terms. The former professor at New York’s Stern School of Business said he’s “confident” Spain will reach its budget-deficit target of 9.3 percent of gross domestic product this year and next year’s goal of 6 percent is unmovable.

“This is an unconditional target, this 6 percent, it’s not conditional on macroeconomic behavior,” he said. “That means being ready.”

Spain’s regional governments, whose widening deficits contributed to the surge in the national shortfall, will meet their combined budget targets this year and will start giving comparable budget data on a quarterly basis, Finance Minister Elena Salgado said yesterday, in a move she called “great progress for transparency.” Two of the 17 regions, Murcia and Castilla-La Mancha, are at risk of not achieving their individual targets and must take “significant” measures to stop the slippage, she said.

Irish Bailout

The central government is encouraging the regions to rein in their shortfalls as Ireland this week became the first nation to seek to tap the euro region’s 750 billion-euro bailout fund, a decision that led the government to call for early elections. Ireland yesterday announced spending cuts of 20 percent over the next four years as it seeks to rein in a deficit that will reach 32 percent of GDP in 2010.

Ireland’s call for aid sparked an increase in borrowing costs for Portugal and Spain, with the extra yield on Spanish debt compared with German equivalents surging to 235 basis points yesterday, the highest close since the euro was created in 1999 and was little changed today. The yield on Spain’s 10- year benchmark bond rose 2 basis points to 5.11 percent, the highest since 2002.

Deficit Shrinking

The Spanish government says it needs to execute the measures it has pledged rather than take new steps to win credibility. The central government budget deficit narrowed by almost half to 2.96 percent of GDP in the first 10 months from 5.63 percent a year earlier, Finance Ministry data shows.

That compares with a 30 percent decline in Greece’s state budget deficit, while Portugal’s central administration’s shortfall continued to widen through October and Ireland’s overall deficit including the cost of bank bailouts will be more than double last year’s level.

Spain is reducing infrastructure spending, cutting public wages, freezing pensions and raising levies including a 2 percentage-point increase in value-added tax to cut the deficit from 11 percent last year. It plans to overhaul the pension system and push through additional changes to wage-bargaining and employment rules to complement a new labor law.

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Philippine economic growth probably held near a three-year high last quarter as remittances, slowing inflation and record-low interest rates boosted consumer spending and investment.

Gross domestic product increased 7.3 percent in the three months through September from a year earlier, according to the median forecast of 16 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News ahead of a report at 10 a.m. tomorrow. The economy expanded 7.9 percent in the second quarter, the fastest pace in three years.

The Philippines, which avoided a recession last year as more export-dependent neighbors including Thailand and Malaysia contracted, may also be less affected by faltering recoveries in the U.S. and Europe now threatening demand for the region’s goods. President Benigno Aquino, who took office in June, is seeking investments for more than 700 billion pesos ($16 billion) of infrastructure projects to boost the economy.

“The Philippines does seem to be in a good position for 2011” relative to its peers, said Matt Hildebrandt, an economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in Singapore. “The economy is far less vulnerable to a global economic slowdown or reversal in risk-taking sentiment 500 payday loan.”

The Philippine peso rose to the strongest level in more than two years this month, reaching 42.47 a dollar on Nov. 4. The central bank has eased rules on foreign-exchange outflows and capped dollar supply in the market by allowing currency swaps to mature as it joined regional counterparts in seeking to slow excessive currency gains.

Record Exports

A stronger peso may crimp the record gains in Philippine exports that have supported Aquino’s efforts to expand the economy by as much as 8 percent annually from 2011. Sales abroad increased 46.1 percent in September from a year earlier to an unprecedented $5.31 billion, the biggest jump on record based on Bloomberg data going back to January 1981.

Thailand and Malaysia’s economic expansion slowed last quarter as exports eased, adding to signs of a moderating Asian rebound. While the region’s growth is still outpacing the rest of the world, sovereign credit woes in Europe have reemerged with Ireland becoming the second euro country to seek a rescue and the U.S. Federal Reserve renewing a plan to buy Treasuries.

Thai gross domestic product rose 6.7 percent in the third quarter, after climbing 9.2 percent in the previous three months. Malaysia expanded 5.3 percent, slowing from an 8.9 percent growth rate in April to June.

Government Forecast

The Philippines relies less on exports to drive growth compared with its neighbors. Overseas sales account for about 30 percent of the $160 billion Philippine economy. The value of Thai shipments is equivalent to almost 60 percent of GDP, and Malaysia’s exports of goods and services are about the same size as its economy.

Philippine growth was probably 6.7 percent to 7.7 percent last quarter, Economic Planning Deputy Director General Margarita Songco said yesterday, citing a government forecast. The National Statistical Coordination Board will release the GDP data in Manila tomorrow.

Remittances from the more than 8 million Filipinos living in countries including the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are supporting domestic consumption, said Sherman Chan, a Hong Kong-based economist at HSBC Holdings Plc. The funds account for about a 10th of the economy and help boost demand for Ayala Land Inc. homes and Bank of the Philippine Islands loans no credit check payday loans.

Solid Consumption

“Consumption and investment growth should remain solid on the back of still-healthy remittances,” Chan said. “Policy makers do seem to be heading in the right direction in terms of building investor confidence and providing an accommodative business environment.”

Remittances climbed at the fastest pace in nine months in September, rising 10.6 percent from a year earlier to $1.6 billion. Aquino is wooing investors to help build roads, schools and bridges as he seeks to boost incomes in a nation where the World Bank estimates one out of four people live on less than $1.25 a day.

Easing inflation has allowed Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas to refrain from raising borrowing costs for more than a year to support the economy. Philippine inflation slowed to an 11-month low in October, with consumer prices rising 2.8 percent from a year earlier. The central bank last week cut its inflation forecasts for 2010, 2011 and 2012.

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A council of U.S. regulators charged with preventing another financial crisis is starting to consider which clearinghouses and exchanges are systemically important and require additional oversight.

The Financial Stability Oversight Council voted at a meeting in Washington today to request public comment on how it should designate such firms for Federal Reserve supervision. The council, which is led by Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and includes Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, is also analyzing which non-bank financial companies could pose a potential risk to economic stability. It will propose a rule in January guiding that process, Geithner said.

“Imposing higher, more consistent standards” on clearing and settlement activities is “a key piece of building a more resilient, more robust financial system,” Geithner said during the meeting at the Treasury Department.

The Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law, which created the council, aims to stem systemic risk by requiring that most interest-rate, credit-default and other swaps be processed by clearinghouses after being traded on exchanges or swap-execution facilities. Clearinghouses are privately owned third parties that guarantee transactions and keep track of collateral and margin.

Revamping Oversight

Regulators are revamping oversight of the $583 trillion over-the-counter derivatives market after largely unregulated trading emerged as a central reason for the 2008 financial crisis.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission may identify “systemically important clearinghouses” by the middle of 2011, CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler, a member of the oversight council, said in a statement today.

Gensler told Congress in September that “some small handful” of clearinghouses would likely be considered systemically important by the council.

The group won’t begin designating specific companies until after the first quarter of 2011, according to the council’s web page.

Atlanta-based Intercontinental Exchange Inc.’s ICE Trust is the world’s largest credit-default swap clearinghouse. LCH.Clearnet Group Ltd., based in London, is the biggest interest-rate swap clearinghouse. Chicago-based CME Group Inc., the world’s largest futures exchange, guarantees credit default and interest-rate swaps with its clearinghouse.

“Certainly clearinghouses are systemically important,” Craig Pirrong, a University of Houston finance professor who studies derivatives-trading, said in an interview yesterday. “If a swaps or futures clearinghouse failed, it would be in many respects equivalent to a large bank failing. It can be a channel of contagion.”

Automatically Designated

U.S. bank holding companies with more than $50 billion in assets each — about 35 in all, including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs — will automatically be designated systemically important.

Michael Barr, the Treasury’s assistant secretary for financial institutions, briefed the regulators on delays in home foreclosures and said “inexcusable breakdowns in basic controls” must be resolved.

A foreclosure “task force” with representatives from 11 federal agencies is working with state regulators and attorneys general and conducting examinations of the largest mortgage servicers, Barr said. Barr, 45, is leaving Treasury on Dec. 3 to resume his academic career at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

State attorneys general are investigating mortgage lenders and servicers after revelations that banks may have acted illegally in using so-called robo-signers to validate documents without reviewing the underlying facts.

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Asian stock markets were mostly higher Monday after debt-hobbled Ireland applied for a massive EU emergency loan to bailout its banking sector, easing fears Europe’s debt woes will escalate.

Japan’s Nikkei stock index was up 1 percent, or 101.65 points, to 10,124.04 and South Korea’s Kospi rose 0.1 percent to 1,942.66. China’s Shanghai Composite Index advanced 0.4 percent to 2,901.07 and Australia’s S&P/ASX200 added 0.4 percent to 4,648.20.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index fell 0.3 percent to 23,536.86. Benchmarks in Singapore and Indonesia were also down.

Asia’s gains came after weekend talks to bail out Ireland’s financial sector, which was decimated after the country nationalized three of its six banks following the collapse of a real estate boom.

European Union finance ministers quickly agreed in principle to the bailout, saying it “is warranted to safeguard financial stability in the EU and euro area.” All sides said Sunday that further negotiations loomed.

Irish Finance Minister Brian Lenihan said Ireland needed less than $140 billion to use as a credit line for its state-backed banks, which are losing deposits and struggling to borrow funds on open markets. He said the loan facility could last anywhere from three to nine years. The International Monetary Fund also said it was prepared to offer loan assistance.

Ireland has been brought to the brink of bankruptcy by its fateful 2008 decision to insure its banks against all losses _ a bill that is swelling beyond $69 billion and driving Ireland’s deficit into uncharted territory.

On Friday in New York, stocks posted slight gains after China took more steps to curb inflation, which traders fear could slow the country’s growth.

China ordered its banks to hold more reserves, the second time it has done so in the past two weeks. The goal is to curb lending and avoid speculative bubbles. Inflation in China shot to a more than two-year high last month. Investors also expect China to raise key interest rates as part of its effort to control inflation.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 22.32, or 0.2 percent, to 11,203.55 on Friday. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose 3.04, or 0.3 percent, to 1,199.73.

In currencies, the euro rose to $1.3761 from $.1.3673 late Friday in New York. The dollar fell to 83.41 yen from 83.56 yen.

Benchmark crude for January delivery was up 61 cents at $82.59 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

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Irish and European Union officials are haggling over the terms of a bailout loan to rescue the country’s shattered banking system.

Officials from the EU, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund are in Dublin to look over Ireland’s books and see how bad the situation really is.

Ireland is resisting any suggestion it will have to give up its low corporate tax in return for billions in international bailout loans. The rate is 12.5 percent, far lower than in other European countries and key attraction for business.

Ireland’s banks are hurting because they made reckless loans to real estate developers. The government has taken responsibility for bank’s debts, and that is threatening to sink its own finances.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

BRUSSELS (AP) _ Irish and European Union officials are haggling over the terms of a bailout loan to rescue the country’s shattered banking system payday lenders.

Officials from the EU, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund are in Dublin to look over Ireland’s books and see how bad the situation really is.

Ireland is resisting any suggestion it will have to give up its low corporate tax in return for billions in international bailout loans. The rate is 12.5 percent, far lower than in other European countries and key attraction for business.

Ireland’s banks are hurting because they made reckless loans to real estate developers. The government has taken responsibility for bank’s debts, and that is threatening to sink its own finances.

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Anguished relatives voiced frustration as poisonous gases prevented rescuers from entering a New Zealand coal mine Saturday, a day after a powerful blast left 29 workers missing underground.

“If I had my way I’d be down there, I’d go into the mine myself,” said Laurie Drew, whose 21-year-old son, Zen, is one of the missing men.

Rescue organizers said the level of methane and carbon monoxide was still too high to send a crew into the Pike River Mine. Two miners reached the surface after Friday’s gas explosion, but there has been no word from 29 others. Police said the miners, aged 17 to 62, are believed to be about 1.2 miles (two kilometers) down the main tunnel.

“Unfortunately it’s just not as simple as putting on a mask and gown and rushing in there,” the police search controller, superintendent Gary Knowles, told TV One. “It does pose a danger to those guys underground and … a danger to the staff going in.”

After a day of monitoring, air quality tests showed that gas levels had not dropped sufficiently and Knowles said the rescuers would remain on standby until the gases were next checked early Sunday.

He remained confident that the 16 mine employees and 13 contract miners had survived.

“This is a search and rescue operation, and we are going to bring these guys home,” Knowles said.

The blast was most likely caused by coal gas igniting, Pike River Mine Ltd. chief executive Peter Whittall said.

Electricity in the mine went out shortly before the explosion and that failure may have caused ventilation problems and contributed to a buildup of gas. The power outage continued to frustrate efforts Saturday to pump in fresh air and make it safe for rescuers, though Whittall said air was flowing freely through a compressed air line damaged in the explosion.

“We have kept those compressors going and we are pumping fresh air into the mine somewhere. It is quite conceivable there is a large number of men sitting around the end of that open pipe waiting and wondering why we are taking our time getting to them,” Whittall said.

A working phone line to the bottom of the mine, however, had rung unanswered.

The two dazed and slightly injured miners stumbled to the surface hours after the blast shot up the mine’s 354-foot (108-meter) -long ventilation shaft. The men were taken to a hospital for treatment of minor injuries and were being interviewed to determine what happened. Whittall said one of two men had used the phone to contact the surface before walking out.

The explosion occurred about 3:45 p.m. Friday. Video from the scene showed blackened trees and light smoke billowing from the top of the rugged mountain where the mine is located, near Atarau on South Island. It is New Zealand’s largest underground coal mine.

Families of the missing men gathered at a Red Cross hall in nearby Greymouth on Saturday, and were being briefed hourly on rescue efforts. Most have declined to talk to reporters, as have the two men who made it out of the mine.

“There is a great sense of anxiety and genuine fear, and I think that’s only natural given the … difficulty of the situation,” Prime Minister John Key told reporters after visiting the families. “We reflected to them that they have to hang on to hope. As we saw in the case of Chilean mine, 33 miners did get out alive.”

But unlike the accident in Chile, where 33 men were rescued from a gold and copper mine after being trapped a half mile (one kilometer) underground for 69 days, Pike River officials have to worry about the presence of methane, mine safety expert David Feickert said.

He added, however, that the Pike River mine has two exits, while the mine in Chile had only one access shaft that was blocked.

The coal seam at the mine is reached through a 1.4-mile (2.3-kilometer) horizontal tunnel into the mountain. The seam lies about 650 feet (200 meters) beneath the surface. According to the company’s website, the vertical ventilation shaft rises 354 feet (108 meters) from the tunnel to the surface.

Whittall said the horizontal tunnel would make any rescue easier than a steep-angled shaft.

“We’re not a deep-shafted mine so men and rescue teams can get in and out quite effectively, and they’ll be able to explore the mine quite quickly,” he said.

Each miner carried 30 minutes of oxygen, enough to reach oxygen stores in the mine that would allow them to survive for “several days,” said Pike River chairman John Dow.

Australian and British citizens were among the missing men, and Australia sent a team of mine rescue experts to assist the operation.

While Pike River Coal is a New Zealand-registered company, its majority owners are Australian. There are also Indian shareholders.

Pike River has operated since 2008, mining a seam with 58.5 million tons of coal, the largest-known deposit of hard coking coal in New Zealand, according to its website.

The mine is not far from the site of one of New Zealand’s worst mining disasters _ an underground explosion in the state-owned Strongman Mine on Jan. 19, 1967, that killed 19 workers.

New Zealand has a generally safe mining sector, with 181 people killed in 114 years. The worst disaster was in March 1896, when 65 died in a gas explosion. Friday’s explosion occurred in the same coal seam.

“The longer it drags on it doesn’t look good, does it?” said local resident Shayne Gregg, who worked at the mine last year. “It’s a feeling of hopelessness not … being able to get there, but people are aware the mining industry is hazardous and has highs and lows.”

But father Laurie Drew said he was frustrated by the lack of action from rescuers, who he said were giving excuses instead of finding solutions.

As he spoke to TV One, Drew wore his son’s jacket. “I wore it so I can give it back to him when he comes out,” he said, choking back tears. “I just want my boy home.”

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The Federal Reserve would be required to have a “systematic” rule for adjusting interest rates under a proposal raised today by Stanford University Professor John Taylor, a critic of the Fed’s monetary stimulus.

The Federal Reserve Act should be amended so the central bank has to tell Congress twice a year about its strategy for the “systematic adjustment of the federal funds rate in response to changes in inflation and in the real economy during the current year and future years,” Taylor, author of a formula used by the Fed for setting central bank interest rates, said in a speech in Washington.

Taylor, 63, is among the most prominent of Republican- leaning economists gaining influence in discussions of Fed policy after the party won control of the House and slimmed down the Democrats’ Senate majority in this month’s midterm elections. The former Treasury undersecretary was among 23 people who signed a letter this week calling for the Fed to halt its $600 billion of Treasury purchases aimed at lowering unemployment.

“Recently, policy has become more short-term focused, more discretionary and less rule-like,” Taylor said at the Cato Institute’s annual monetary conference. “The idea here is maybe with some legislation we could get policy to be more rule-like and less interventionist, if you like, and that that would improve performance. And that may get us back to the kind of good performance we had for a couple of decades.”

Taylor said he previously hadn’t advocated putting monetary-policy rules into law. His proposal would allow some discretion: If the Fed deviates from the rule, the chairman would have to tell Congress why, Taylor said.

‘Not a Radical Proposal’

“This is not a radical proposal,” Taylor said.

Taylor published his interest-rate formula in a 1992 paper while at Stanford. It suggests how a central bank should set interest rates if inflation or growth veers from goals. The Taylor rule is used more as a reference than a policy trigger. Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said in 2007 that Taylor’s research provides “essential guidance” to central bankers on setting interest rates.

Since the financial crisis that began in 2007, Taylor has become one of the Fed’s chief academic critics. In January, Bernanke said the Fed’s monetary policy wasn’t responsible for causing the housing bubble, a claim disputed by Taylor.

Taylor’s proposal joins other potential changes to Fed law being pushed by Republican lawmakers. Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee and Representative Michael Pence of Indiana are proposing legislation that would remove the Fed’s full- employment mandate and have the central bank focus on inflation alone.

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Warren Buffett praised the U.S. government’s efforts to bail out the economy during the financial crisis two years ago, preventing an economic collapse.

In a letter published by the New York Times, Buffett wrote that all corporate America’s dominoes were lined up and were ready to topple at lightning speed in the aftermath of Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in September 2008.

“My own company, Berkshire Hathaway (BRKa.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), might have been the last to fall, but that distinction provided little solace,” Buffett, nicknamed the Oracle of Omaha, said.

He said the U.S. government’s decision to buy up assets that many investors considered to be toxic had helped pull back the economy from the brink of collapse.

Buffett commended the architects of the bailout program including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and praised U.S. President George W. Bush for leading the program even as Congress “postured and squabbled.”

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Google Inc., owner of the world’s most popular Internet search engine, urged the U.S. to combat Internet censorship abroad as an unfair trade barrier.

China, Vietnam, Iran and Turkey are among countries that have shut off of search engines, blogging platforms or social- media websites such as Facebook, Google said in a white paper released today. Those actions are harming the ability of U.S. companies to profit, Google said.

“Governments around the world are restricting, censoring, and disrupting the free flow of online information in record numbers,” according to Google’s paper, which was posted today on its blog. “These actions unnecessarily restrict trade, and left unchecked, they will almost certainly get worse.”

Google disclosed in January that Chinese hackers had targeted its mail servers and announced that the company would no longer censor search results in the country. Google then began redirecting all searches in China to a site in Hong Kong no fax cash loans.

China is the world’s biggest Internet market with 384 million Web users at the end of 2009, according to the China Internet Network Information Center, a government agency that registers online domain names.

The Google paper outlines a series of rules under the World Trade Organization that might apply to Internet censorship. WTO rules call for reasonable, objective and impartial rules, and say that “exceptional measures” must be narrowly applied.

“The WTO negotiators set clear limits on the ability of members to invoke such exceptions,” the Google paper said.

Google also asked U.S. negotiators to strengthen protections for Internet freedom in pending agreements with South Korea, in the Doha Round of global trade talks and in a broader Asian measure known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

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Any possible housing market recovery hit a snag during the three months ended September 30, as a government tax credit for homebuyers wound down.

Home prices fell only slightly during the quarter, according to a report from the National Association of Realtors (NAR), but the number of homes sold plummeted more than 25%, compared with the previous quarter.

The fall-off in sales volume remains a troubling feature of the current housing market scene because there’s rarely been a more attractive time to buy.

"Given the relationship between mortgage interest rates, home prices and median family income, the buying power in today’s market is matching the highest levels we’ve seen dating all the way back to 1970," said NAR President Ron Phipps.

Many sales were undoubtedly happened in early 2010 as homebuyers accelerated their purchases to qualify for the tax credit, which shaved as much as $8,000 off their tax bills.

Contracts had to be signed by the end of April to qualify and the deals had to close by the end of September.

The national median price for a single-family home sold during the quarter was $177,900, down 0.2% from the same period a year ago and up 0 no teletrack payday loan.6% from the second quarter of 2010.

Single-family home prices rose 2.5% to $253,400 in the Northeast, the only region that showed price improvement. Midwest prices fell 3% to $145,600, prices dropped 1.9% in the South and 0.4% in the West region.

The metro area with the biggest gain was Burlington, Vt., where the median price of $286,300 was 17.6% higher than 12 months earlier. The biggest loser was Ocala, Fla., down 20% to $82,200.

San Jose, Calif., recorded the highest median price — $628,700 — during the quarter, just nosing out Honolulu at $628,100.

Youngstown, Ohio, the old steel town, had the lowest median sale price, at $60,400.

Condo prices fared worse than those of single-family houses. The national median fell 3.9% from 12 months earlier to $171,400.

Palm Bay, Fla., had the biggest year-over-year loss: down 32% to $73,000; Jacksonville. Fla., was off 31% to $63,200. Phoenix condo prices also plunged, down 26.6% to $73,300.

Condo prices in the New York metro area soared, up 34.5% to $400,000, the most, by far, of any city. 

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