My finance view

Wells Fargo & Co., the largest U.S. home lender, led decliners among bank stocks after reporting that third-quarter revenue declined and margins narrowed.

Investors focused on a 6 percent decline in revenue from a year earlier to $19.6 billion. That missed the $20.2 billion estimate of analysts as low interest rates cut into profit on loans, according to a statement by the San Francisco-based bank.

“Given this low-rate environment, I think investors are very focused on direction of bank margins, and Wells was a little bit weaker than expected on the net interest margin,” David George, a bank analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co. in St. Louis, said in an interview on Bloomberg Televisions In the Loop.

Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf, 58, is focusing on costs as the 9.1 percent U.S. jobless rate and slow economy keep borrowers on the sidelines. Stumpf wants to reduce expenses about $1.5 billion a quarter by the end of next year. Rivals including Bank of America Corp. are cutting employees, and Wells Fargo said it planned to streamline some staff functions.

The bank fell 8.4 percent to $24.42 at 4:15 p.m. in New York trading. It was the biggest drop since August, and Wells Fargo led decliners in the Standard & Poors 500 Financials index and the KBW Bank Index.

Profit for the three months ended Sept. 30 rose 22 percent to a record $4.06 billion, or 72 cents a diluted share, from $3.34 billion, or 60 cents, in the same period a year earlier. Pretax, pre-provision income, used by analysts to filter out the impact of some one-time gains and losses, was little changed at $7.95 billion from $7.91 billion in the preceding three-month period.

“The economic recovery has been more sluggish and uneven than anyone anticipated,” Stumpf said in the statement. “We can’t change the economic environment, yet we have worked hard to control the variables we can.”

The company set aside $1.8 billion to cover loan losses, with net loan write-offs of $2.6 billion, for a pretax reserve release of $800 million.

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To find symbolism in the Greek financial crisis, just go to the source. The national image on the two-euro coin in Greece depicts an ancient myth about the abduction of Europa, a Phoenician princess, by Zeus, the king of the gods in the form of a bull.

The saga known as the “Rape of Europa,” whose protagonist rides the bull’s back in an image reproduced by artists over the centuries, mirrors the turbulent journey of Greece and the rest of Europe, hitched together in an agonizing spiral that seems to go on and on and on.

The crude parallel ends there, however _ Zeus turned into a human, had his way with Europa, and she bore him children. The last chapter in modern Greece, meanwhile, is still blank. Will there be a debt default, with its ominous implications for the global economy? How long will Greeks endure the erosion of what was a good life?

The future is a void, and anger and helplessness dig deep in the Greek psyche. Joblessness is climbing and essential services such as health care and policing are losing resources.

The crisis may pale beside the bloody conflict or poverty in Libya or Afghanistan, but the hardship is as much psychological as economic. It is the shock of undercut expectations, the loss of benefits and prospects once taken for granted as part of the European contract.

The mood now resembles the plot of “Groundhog Day,” a 1993 movie about a man who wakes up to the same day over and over again.

“We don’t see how we can escape from this problem,” said Kostas Theofanides, engineering manager for British Petroleum in Greece. He spoke Thursday evening at a resort hotel on the Athenian coast, where Greek and German business executives, nametags on their suits, mingled during a forum that hummed with talk of investing in a country on the edge.

Greeks, whose previous governments were accused of hiding the extent of the country’s ballooning budget deficit, now talk with withering honesty about their problems. Even at investment forums. Theofanides said his compatriots are angry, unsafe and depressed, and wonder how long they have to put up their daily stew of taxes, austerity, unemployment and general uncertainty.

He ticked off the possibilities: Two years? Three years? Ten years, 25 years? Who knows.

But there is plenty of blame to go around, and nobody is exempt _ from free-spending Greeks, to the politicians they elected, to Germany and the international lenders with their dire prescriptions of cuts and then more cuts.

With a sly smile, Dimitrios Gardikiotis, director at an information technology company, suggested Germany had been plotting Greece’s downfall for the past 20 years, luring its junior economic partner into dissolute ways so that it could barge in and buy assets on the cheap.

‘”I’m preparing your economic death. Then I will buy you and your wife and your children,’” said Gardikiotis, imagining what he thought might be a German viewpoint. He said it in such a disarming manner that it was hard to tell what he really thought.

“Greeks actually point their fingers at others, not at themselves,” Gardikiotis said. “Of course, there are certain mistakes, and everybody has to recognize their responsibility.”

History is to blame as well, in some Greek quarters.

Its students point to centuries of Ottoman rule that ended in independence in 1829, giving other European nations a headstart in building democracy. Then bouts of civil strife stunted progress. The king and the prime minister sparred during the National Schism in the early 20th century, the Western-backed government fought the communists in the late 1940s, and a military junta ruled between 1967 and 1974.

For a few resentful Greeks, there are always the Nazis, who occupied Greece during World War II payday loans for bad credit. On Thursday, several people in uniforms, including a man doing his best to impersonate Adolf Hitler, turned up with a Nazi flag and other insignia outside the German Embassy.

“The Germans owe us millions in war reparations, let them pay what they owe us,” said 75-year-old Demetris Kollatos, a fixture on the protest circuit who vaguely recalled the German occupation of Athens during his childhood. “In their greed to get everything, they’ll lose everything.”

Mostly, there is grim confusion and numbing fatigue. Greece is struggling to meet the terms of a euro110 billion ($146 billion) international bailout from other eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund, but there is growing doubt about whether it can dodge a default. The country is in a third year of recession, with another on the way.

The government is tightening up on tax evaders, but some edicts, including those about what receipts taxpayers need to save in order to avoid penalties, have changed several times. A columnist in the English-language Athens News, who draws on historical figures for his alias, Alcibiades Ouranos, predicted a looming deluge of bureaucracy:

“Thing A should be dealt like that, but we acknowledge that B, C and D are unfairly hurt by that legislation, so we declare that B should do that, C should do something else and D should do that, but only if they do not fall into category E, have F blahblahblah. So bring us statements from agency G, H and I who monitor such things, to establish that you are indeed a B and not an A.”

Some Greeks think they are venturing onto new psychological terrain after nearly two years in which the concept of crisis, which should be exceptional by definition, is as banal as the protests and strikes that convulse Athens from time to time.

Despoina Ergenidou is director of the Numismatic Museum, a monument to the coins and currency of ancient Greece that is housed in the mansion where Heinrich Schliemann, the German archaeologist who excavated Troy, lived in the late 19th century.

“It’s not just the economy. It’s ethical values,” she said in an interview in her office, flanked by a garden in downtown Athens. “They are losing what they believe. I don’t mean religion. We were working for something better, we believed in things, people, good ideas. We were working for those ideas. It’s not like that anymore.”

In ancient times, Ergenidou said, there were no banks, so people hoarded coins in hiding places, in pots or pouches, behind walls and under floors. Many families survived war and other hardships through their domestic economies, a garden to grow vegetables or some farm animals.

Those were truly hard times. They were also glorious times, when hundreds of cities and kings minted coins in different denominations and metals. There were tetradrachms and staters and obols, gold and silver and brass, and coins with images of turtles, foals and owls.

It is tempting to find relevance in the words of ancient Greek philosophers to Greece’s modern predicament, in which avarice played a star role. Aristotle recognized the value of money as a tool for the interchange of goods, beyond barter, but warned of its artifice and the imbalances generated by seeking cash without restraint.

“It appears necessary that there should be a limit to all riches, yet in actual fact we observe that the opposite takes place; for all men engaged in wealth-getting try to increase their money to an unlimited amount,” he wrote.

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The departing chief economist of the European Central Bank is saying that heavy levels of government debt are threatening the existence of the euro currency.

Juergen Stark’s statements in a paper with three other economists on the ECB’s website are unusual because they come from a high-ranking central banker.

The paper also dismisses new measures to strengthen EU controls over national government spending as insufficient.

It says Europe needs far tougher measures, such as appointing administrators to oversee finances in countries that need bailouts, as Greece, Ireland and Portugal have.

Stark is resigning almost three years before the end of his term amid talk that he is unhappy with the bank’s crisis measure of propping up weak governments by buying their bonds.

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St. Louis-based Ralcorp Holdings has rejected ConAgra Foods’ offer to buy the company.

Ralcorp issued a statement Monday morning saying the company intends to move forward with its plans to spin off its branded food business, Post Foods, as a separate public company rather than sell the entire company to Omaha, Neb.-based ConAgra. ConAgra’s earlier offers to buy Ralcorp this year so far have been rejected.

Last week, ConAgra issued a statement saying it would retract its offer to buy Ralcorp for $94 a share, or nearly $5.2 billion, by today unless Ralcorp entered into negotiations for a sale. So far, Ralcorp’s board of directors has refused to meet with ConAgra executives about a sale fast payday loans.

“Post Foods is on track to be spun off to Ralcorp shareholders, at which time I will become chairman of the board of the new Post Foods,” Ralcorp Chairman Bill Stiritz said in a statement today. “Post Foods’ main asset is its great brand name — it has untapped potential. Looking forward, the management of this valuable asset will not be a combination of the past, but rather it will be creative, imaginative and adaptive in pursuit of shareholder value creation — nothing is off the table.”

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The Dow Jones industrial average plunged more than 300 points and erased its gains for the year as investors grew more concerned about economic weakness in the U.S. and Europe.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell more than 3 percent, bringing it 10 percent below its recent high of 1,363 reached on April 29. A decline of 10 percent is considered to be a market correction. The Dow Jones industrial average is now down more than 1,100 points from July 21.

Oil fell 4 percent to $88 a barrel on worries demand will fall because of the slowing economy. Oil had traded over $100 as recently as June 9.

“We are continuing to be bombarded by worries about the global economy,” said Bill Stone, chief investment strategist at PNC Financial.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 325 points, or 2.7 percent, to 11,571 in midday trading. The S&P 500 lost 39, or 3.3 percent, to 1,221. The Nasdaq composite shed 89, or 3.3 percent, to 2,603. The losses in the Dow were the largest since June 2010, when it fell 323 points.

Money poured into investments that are seen as relatively safe when markets are turbulent. Gold rose 1 percent to $1,680 an ounce. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note fell to 2.51 percent, its lowest level of the year. The yield on the 2-year Treasury note hit a record low of 0.265 percent. Bond yields fall when demand for them increases.

Large investors have moved so much money into cash accounts at Bank of New York that on Thursday the bank said it would begin charging some clients a 0.13 percent fee to hold their cash.

“In the past month, we have seen a growing level of deposits on our balance sheet from clients seeking a safe-haven in light of the global interest rate and credit environment,” the bank said in a statement to The Associated Press. Bank of New York clients include pension funds and large investment houses.

“Investors are deciding that now is the time to take risk off the table,” said Brian Gendreau, market strategist for Cetera Financial Group. Gendreau said that some investors are now wondering whether stocks will have a prolonged slump similar to the aftermath of the Great Depression.

European stocks fell broadly because of concerns that Italy or Spain may need help from the European Union. The benchmark stock indexes in Italy, Germany and England each fell 3 percent.

Companies that make most of their profits when the global economy expands fell the most. Caterpillar, Alcoa and Chevron led the Dow lower with losses of nearly 4 percent each.

Some traders are selling ahead of Friday’s employment report, which is expected to show that unemployment remained at 9.2 percent last month. A rise in the unemployment number would likely push stocks lower again.

The U.S. government said before the market opened that the number of people who applied for unemployment benefits for the first time was only slightly lower last week to 400,000. That’s still above the 375,000 level that economist say indicates a healthy job market. It was the latest indication of weakness in the U.S. economy.

Kraft Foods was the only company among the 30 stocks in the Dow to rise. Kraft rose 2 percent after the company said Thursday that it plans to split into two. One company will focus on snacks such as Oreo cookies and the other will target the North American grocery business.

All 10 industry groups in the S&P index fell. Energy, financial and industrial companies each lost 2 percent or more.

Stock trading has been volatile this week because of concerns that the U.S. economy is weakening. Manufacturing, consumer spending and hiring by private companies are below levels that are consistent with a healthy economy. Those reports have called into question estimates from economists, including Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, that the economy will grow more quickly in the second half of the year.

The sell-off comes at a time when corporate profits are growing. The forward price to earnings ratio of the S&P 500 has fallen to about 12, well below its long-term average of 16. That means that investors who buy now are paying less for each dollar in profits.

General Motors Co. fell 2 percent despite beating analyst estimates. CVS Caremark fell nearly 4 percent after its revenue slipped last quarter.

Several national retailers are announcing July sales results throughout the day. Target, Gap Inc. and Macy’s each fell by more than 1 percent, in part because of concerns that consumers would spend less if the economy continues to slow down.

The Dow rose 30 points Wednesday _ after being down 166 _ to break an eight-day losing streak. Nine days would have been the longest since February 1978. The S&P 500 index rose 6 points and broke a seven-day streak.

—

AP business writers Dave Carpenter and Pallavi Gogoi contributed to this story.

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Market analysts and investors around the world remained on edge Sunday as Congress continued to work out a deal to avoid a U.S. debt default.

If there is no agreement to raise the nation’s borrowing limit and defuse the building financial crisis, analysts say they expect Monday to bring a steep slide in stocks across the globe.

In the U.S. that would add to six straight days of stock losses. The Dow fell 581, or 4 percent, in that time.

John Brady, a senior vice president for futures and options at MF Global predicts the Standard & Poor’s 500 index could fall another 7 percent on Monday if a deal falls apart. The S&P closed at 1,292 on Friday and was down 3.9 percent last week. A loss of the size Brady suggests could send the S&P down to 1,200, a level it hasn’t seen since last November.

The Treasury Department has said that after Tuesday the U.S. government won’t have enough money to meet all of its financial obligations if Congress does not raise the nation’s debt ceiling. If a deal is not reached, the Treasury Department will have to decide which bills to pay and which to delay. Among them: interest payments on bonds, salaries of federal employees, and Social Security payments to retirees. The Treasury Department has not indicated which payments will take priority if the debt ceiling is not raised.

Treasury bonds have long been considered the world’s safest investment and are a top holding of the largest pension funds in the U.S., the Chinese government and millions of Americans who own mutual funds.

Thomas Tzitzouris, head of fixed income research at Strategas Research Partners says to avoid a steep decline, the market needs to at least see some progress.

If not, he says: “That would be a double whammy. When (Congress says) there is progress and then there isn’t, that really spooks the market.”

That’s exactly what happened last week when a series of proposals gave investors fleeting hope for a deal. That is, until one party or the other shot them down. Nearly every measure of market confidence fell last week as Congress edged closer to Aug. 2 without a deal. The price of gold rose 2 percent for the week. The price of gold tends to rise when investors aren’t confident about other investments. A measure of stock market volatility, the VIX, jumped 6 percent.

On the other hand, if a deal is reached to raise the borrowing limit, MF Global’s Brady says the S&P 500 could add 6 percent.

“Stocks will rally, and stocks will rally big,” Brady said.

A deal would remove a major source of something investors hate most: Uncertainty. But there’s another reason the so-called deal rally might be a big one no credit check payday loans. Companies have reported strong earnings in recent days, but traders have been reluctant to buy stocks because they were afraid the debt wrangling in Washington might set off a financial crisis. In turn, the yield on the 10-year Treasury sank to its lowest level of the year on Friday, 2.80 percent. Treasury yields fall when demand for them goes up. Demand tends to rise when investors are reluctant to put money in stocks.

“If this issue can be taken out of the headlines and the focus on Washington can be redirected toward corporate earnings and economic fundamentals, the market will have removed a significant obstacle,” said Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist at Prudential Financial.

Even so, there are other problems suppressing investor enthusiasm. A report Friday said that the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of only 1.3 percent between April and June. This year, the economy has grown as its slowest pace since the recession ended in June 2009 _ just 1.7 percent. A debt deal that significantly cuts short-term government spending could further weaken the economy, experts say.

Even with a deal to raise the borrowing limit and cut spending, analysts say companies won’t be ready to hire workers and invest in new projects until some other Washington issues are resolved, like the cost of health care legislation passed last year and financial reform legislation.

Analysts say that if a deal is ultimately reached before Aug. 2, investors will chalk up the market-rattling debt drama as another example of ultimately harmless Washington theatrics.

If the current deal falls apart, however, they say politicians will have done lasting damage to the nation’s credibility. Over time, this could make U.S. government debt less desirable to the worldwide market. That, in turn, could raise the cost of borrowing for the U.S. government.

Lawmakers expressed optimism that a deal could yet be reached Sunday. A number of other promising deals have fallen through in recent days. This has left some investors frustrated at Washington for adding to the economic uncertainty by failing to reach a deal before the deadline became so close at hand.

“This is the worst crisis I can remember and I’ve been in the markets for many of them,” said Uri Landesman, the president of Platinum Partners, a New York hedge fund. “There has been incredibly weak leadership all the way around.”

–Associated Press writer David Carpenter contributed to this report.

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The economy slowed in the first six months of 2011 to its weakest pace since the recession ended. High gas prices and scant income gains forced Americans to sharply pull back on spending.

The Commerce Department says the economy expanded only 1.3 percent in the April-June period. And it downwardly revised the January-March figures to show growth of just 0.4 percent, the weakest since the recession ended two years ago.

Consumer spending was almost flat this spring. It increased only 0.1 percent, after 2.1 percent growth in the winter. Spending on long-lasting manufactured goods, such as autos and appliances, fell 4.4 percent.

Government spending fell for the third straight quarter. And state and local governments cut spending for the seventh quarter in eight since the recession ended.

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The European Union is introducing new rules that would make it cheaper to use mobile and smartphones abroad.

The proposals from the EU’s executive Commission Wednesday seek to spur competition among providers and put new caps on roaming charges.

For the first time, the EU is slapping caps on the price individuals have to pay for going online from a smartphone or tablet computer when moving from one country to another. The EU is made up of 27 countries.

The European Commission also said that from July 2014 operators will have to open their networks to providers from another EU state, which would give consumers more providers to choose from. At the same time, consumers will be able to sign a separate roaming contract, allowing them to take advantage of cheaper offers when moving about.

The new rules will kick in when the bloc’s existing regulation on mobile roaming expires at the end of June next year.

While the current rules have forced the price of making calls down to 35 euro cents (about 50 U.S. cents) a minute when traveling in another EU country and kept a lid on the cost of receiving calls and sending text messages, the Commission believes that charges remain way too high.

The Commission’s goal is to bring roaming prices in line with national ones by 2015, an important step in getting the 27-country bloc closer together and spurring business and freedom of movement in the EU’s internal market. The new rules would also apply in non-EU states Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.

“This proposal tackles the root cause of the problem _ the lack of competition on roaming markets _ by giving customers more choice and by giving alternative operators easier access to the roaming market,” Neelie Kroes, who is in charge of the EU’s digital agenda, said in a statement.

For the first time, the rules would also cap the price of going online from a smartphone or tablet computer. Using mobile Internet in another EU country can quickly drive up phone bills, with prices for downloading one megabyte of data averaging euro2.23 ($3.22) but sometimes going up to euro12 ($17.35), according to the Commission.

One megabyte is equivalent to about 100 e-mails without attachments or a few seconds of streaming video online. Under the new proposal, charges for data roaming would have to come down to 90 cents a megabyte by July next year and sink to 50 cents by 2014.

By that date, the price of making calls would be capped at 24 cents a minute, while incoming calls and text messages would cost 10 cents.

At the center of the Commission’s proposals are efforts to increase competition between providers. From July 2014, operators will have to open their networks to providers from another EU state, which would give consumers more services to choose from.

At the same time, consumers will be able to sign a separate roaming contract, allowing them to take advantage of cheaper offers from a different provider while keeping their regular number and SIM card.

The Commission believes that more competition is the best way of forcing operators to bring down prices and stop price ceilings from effectively becoming price floors.

The new rules still have to be approved by EU states and the European Parliament.

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The United Nations will open eight new peacekeeping bases in western Ivory Coast in an effort to restore law and order ahead of upcoming legislative elections, local U.N. mission chief Choi Young-jin said.

The bases will be located in areas where fighting was the fiercest in March, and where tens of thousands of people still refuse to return home in fear of reprisal attacks.

“There is a pressing need to restore law and order throughout the country,” Choi told journalists on Thursday.

Former President Laurent Gbagbo was arrested in April after holding onto power for five months after he lost an election. Fighters loyal to the democratically elected leader Alassane Ouattara finally removed Gbagbo from power with the help of U.N. and French military forces.

The fighting during the political crisis left an estimated 3,000 people dead, and sent more than 1 million people fleeing their homes. The U.N. refugee agency says that 300,000 people are still displaced, more than two months after the fighting ended.

Human Rights groups allege that war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed by both sides during the power struggle over the presidency.

While 15 members of Gbagbo’s government have been charged with crimes, not a single member of president Ouattara’s forces has been arrested.

The International Criminal Court sent an investigation team to Ivory Coast last week and pledged to bring all those responsible for crimes to justice.

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Maybe the global economy isn’t in such bad shape after all.

After weeks of worries about the economy pulled stocks down, indexes have risen sharply for two days in a row.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose more than 120 points in midday trading Tuesday, thanks in part to signs that concerns of a global slowdown may be overblown. Quarterly results from Nike Inc. bested analysts’ expectations helped spark a rally in stocks of clothing stores, restaurants and jewelers. Such companies tend to do well when consumers are less worried about things like high gas prices and are willing to spend on themselves.

Other industries that do well during periods of economic expansion led the stock market higher. Caterpillar Inc., one of the 30 stocks that make up the Dow, gained the most, rising 2.3 percent. Industrials gained 1.2 percent overall. Consumer discretionary companies gained 1.6 percent.

Signs that the housing market is improving helped lift Home Depot Inc., a company that benefits when consumers spend money on home improvement. Home Depot gained 2.1 percent following a report that home prices rose in April in 13 of the 20 cities tracked by the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index. The index rose for the first time in eight months thanks to an annual push to buy homes in the spring.

The long slump in the housing market has been a drag on the U.S. economic recovery. Housing usually leads the economy out of recessions. But that hasn’t been the case with the current recovery, which began in June 2009 Low fee payday loans.

A decline in U.S. consumer confidence to a seven-month low, largely because of worries about jobs, did not slow down the gains in stocks.

The Dow gained 121 points, or 1 percent, to 12.164 in afternoon trading. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose 14, or 1.1 percent, to 1,294. The Nasdaq composite index added 34, or 1.3 percent, to 2,722.

Signs that the Greece may be making progress in its debt crisis also boosted markets. Greek lawmakers are debating austerity measures that must be passed to secure the next installment of emergency loans from international lenders. On Monday French banks agreed to accept slower repayment on Greek debts, another key step in avoiding a Greek debt default.

Among U.S. companies, Accenture rose 3.5 percent after S&P announced that the company would be added to its S&P 500 index. And tobacco company Altria Group fell 2 percent after the Food and Drug Administration announced it is reviewing research to determine the public health impact of menthol cigarettes.

Government bond prices fell as investors put a greater value on riskier assets like stocks. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury rose to 3.03 percent from 2.93 percent Monday. Bond yields rise when prices fall. Bond yields fell to their lowest level of the year last week due to concerns that Greece’s debt problems would spread to other European countries.

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