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GENEVA Average salaries in developed countries are expected to have risen by no more than inflation this year, the International Labour Organization said on Friday. Developed country wages failed to keep up with inflation in both 2008 and 2011, but remained about 5 percent above the 2000 level in real terms, the ILO said in its Global Wage Report, published every two years. “So far as we can tell for 2012 at this stage the trend seems to be for zero percent growth — flatlining,” ILO Director General Guy Ryder told a news conference in Geneva. The report said governments [...]

SEOUL South Korean exports last month marked their first back-to-back growth of the year, but demand from the advanced economies was weak, data showed on Saturday, indicating any global recovery would be fragile at best. November exports grew by 3.9 percent over a year earlier to $ 47.8 billion on top of a revised 1.1 percent rise in October, while imports last month rose by 0.7 percent to $ 43.3 billion, the Ministry of Knowledge Economy data showed. The November data, released for the first time by a major exporting economy, and the robust survey findings in China disclosed earlier [...]

BEIJING China’s economy is finally regaining traction, official and private sector factory surveys showed on Thursday, although the recovery remains sluggish with the latter recording its 12th straight month of slowing growth. Evidence is mounting that the economy revived in October after domestic credit curbs and poor demand from overseas markets pushed economic growth in the third quarter to its weakest rate since the depths of the global financial crisis. The final reading for the HSBC Purchasing Managers’ Index rose to 49.5 in October – just shy of the 50-point line that divides accelerating from slowing growth – from 47.9 [...]

HONG KONG (MakretWatch) – China’s foreign direct investment dropped in September, rounding out a down-trending pattern for the first nine months of the year. Inflows of FDI totaled $ 8.43 billion for the month, down 6.8% from a year earlier, while January through September inflows totaled $ 83.4 billion, down 3.8% from the same period a year earlier, according to Ministry of Commerce data released Friday.

ATHENS The Greek economy shrank even more over the last five years than previously estimated, according to revised economic growth figures released by the debt-ridden country’s statistics agency. In a statement published late on Friday, the ELSTAT agency said gross domestic product (GDP) contracted by 4.9 percent in 2010 and 7.1 percent in 2011, exceeding previous estimates of 3.5 percent and 6.9 percent respectively. The revision took account of “significant reductions … in the consumption expenditure of households,” ELSTAT said. GDP estimates are a key parameter in assessing the sustainability of Greece’s debt under two multi-billion-euro bailouts from the European [...]

Like a lot of American communities that were rapidly expanding after the turn of the millennium, Bakersfield, California, took it on the chin when the housing bubble burst. Foreclosures surged, home construction halted and unemployment reached nearly 18 percent in March 2010. But a look at the credit files of more than 682,000 Americans in 143 markets shows some reason for optimism in Bakersfield and other severely busted housing markets like Las Vegas and Phoenix. Credit reporting agency Experian, in its annual State of Credit report, saw the biggest improvements in struggling communities. For example, Bakersfield’s average credit score rose [...]

HONG KONG New smartphone and tablets models unveiled by Samsung Electronics Co. at the IFA consumer-electronics and home-appliances trade show in Berlin over the past day illustrates the company’s prowess in developing technologies and hardware “ahead of peers,” Nomura said Thursday. Nomura also reaffirmed their buy recommendation on the company’s stock after seeing the new gadgets. “The unpacking in Berlin affirms our confidence that it will be challenging for Apple to keep Samsung from churning out new models,” Nomura analysts said. The Japanese brokerage said the recent drop in Samsung Electronics shares following Friday’s U.S court victory involving a patent [...]

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke should show a greater sense of humility about the limits of monetary policy, said Sen. Bon Corker, a Republican senator from Tennessee, in an op-ed in the Financial Times on Tuesday. Corker wrote that the central-bank’s asset purchase programs have empowered runaway spending by the federal government, hurt savers and forced investors to “hunt for yield in asset classes to which they are not suited.” Corker said he would seek to narrow the Fed’s “dual mandate” of full employment and inflation to a single-minded focus on inflation. He added that the next Fed chairman should [...]

I had a reminder today, how easy it can be to take leave of your senses and want to use your credit card for something you can’t afford.My eight-year-old daughter, Lorelei, lost her pet rat today. Looking concerned, she came into my home office where I was sitting at my computer and trying to think of a credit card topic to write about, and said something might be wrong with Racer, Racer the Rat, as he is known around here, and could I check him out?I gamely followed her into her bedroom, and there was Racer, lying very still in [...]

Members of the Federal Reserve got closer to pushing the button on a new round of bond purchases even as a less aggressive step of altering language on a low-rate pledge seems to be in the works, according to minutes from the July 31-Aug. 1 meeting released Wednesday. “Many members judged that additional monetary accommodation would likely be warranted fairly soon unless incoming information pointed to a substantial and sustainable strengthening in the pace of the economic recovery,” the minutes said. The first alternative for action listed is essentially what the markets anticipated for the Aug. 1 meeting – a [...]