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JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is facing shareholders five days after disclosing a $2 billion trading loss.

Dimon will speak Tuesday morning at the bank’s annual meeting in Tampa, Fla.

Shareholders will vote on whether to separate the bank’s chairman and CEO positions, both held by Dimon. They will also vote their approval or disapproval of Dimon’s $23 million pay package from last year.

Analysts say Dimon is unlikely to lose those votes.

Investors have pummeled JPMorgan’s stock price since Dimon disclosed the trading loss on Thursday. The stock has dropped 12 percent and lost almost $20 billion in market value.

Dimon got something of a vote of confidence from President Barack Obama, who appeared on ABC’s “The View” for an episode to be aired Tuesday. Obama used the appearance to press for tighter regulation of Wall Street.

“JPMorgan is one of the best-managed banks there is,” the president said. “Jamie Dimon, the head of it, is one of the smartest bankers we got, and they still lost $2 billion and counting.”

Obama said the bank was “making bets” in the market for the complex financial instruments known as derivatives. Dimon has said the bank was hedging against financial risk.

A part of the 2010 financial overhaul known as the Volcker rule would restrict banks from some trading for their own profit. Dimon and critics of the financial industry have disagreed over whether the trading in question would violate that rule.

Dimon is likely to repeat his acceptance of responsibility for the bad trade. He said in a TV interview Sunday that he was “dead wrong” when he dismissed concerns about the bank’s trading last month.

“We made a terrible, egregious mistake,” Dimon told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “There’s almost no excuse for it.”

On Monday, Ina Drew, the bank’s chief investment officer and one of the highest-ranking women on Wall Street, left the bank. Drew oversaw the trading group responsible for the $2 billion loss.

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A moderate Islamist campaigning to be Egypt’s next president has won the support of some unlikely allies _ the country’s most conservative religious groups, including former militant jihadists.

Their backing reflects the growing mistrust by many Islamists of the powerful Muslim Brotherhood, the would-be flagbearer for the religious vote. And it has made Abdel-Moneim Abolfotoh a front-runner with an unusual coalition that includes secular liberals and even some Christians along with hard-line Islamists.

“He (Abolfotoh) will be a president for all Egyptians,” Wael Ghonim, an icon of the youthful revolutionaries behind the uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak last year, wrote on his Twitter account Monday.

“He will bring us together, not divide us.”

Before he was thrown out last year, Abolfotoh was a senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood _ now Egypt’s most powerful political force. He earned the reputation as a moderate reformer within the Islamic fundamentalist group.

But the bearded, 60-year-old former dissident eventually fell out with the group after publicly slamming it for not being transparent about its financing and irking his fellow Brothers by saying he would rather have a good Christian than a bad Muslim as president _ contradicting the movement’s line that majority Muslim Egypt should not be ruled by a Christian.

Now he is one of the few candidates with crossover appeal for both religious conservatives and liberals.

The endorsements and other key developments over recent days dramatically shifted the fortunes of Abolfotoh from a promising underdog to a real contender. The biggest change came when the election commission disqualified three strong candidates _ Hosni Mubarak’s former spy chief and vice president, Omar Suleiman, the Brotherhood’s first choice candidate Khairat el-Shater and ultraconservative lawyer-turned-preacher Hazem Salah Abu Ismail.

Abolfotoh’s newfound support comes from the ultraconservative Islamists known as Salafis. They adhere to an interpretation of Islam partly inspired by Saudi Arabia’s puritanical Wahhabi doctrine and want to see Islamic law strictly applied in Egypt.

Their backing eats into the chances of Mohammed Morsi, the second choice candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, which won just under half of all seats in parliamentary elections around the start of this year. Abolfotoh’s growing strength also provides Amr Moussa, Mubarak’s longtime foreign minister and a front-runner himself, with a formidable competitor for the land’s highest office.

“Our top priority was: Who has the biggest chance to win? And we found that Abolfotoh has that chance,” said Sheik Abdel-Akhar Hamad, a top leader of the Gamaa Islamiya, the jihadist group that endorsed Abolfotoh on Monday.

The group was partially motivated by its fear of the Brotherhood’s “desire to monopolize power,” Hamad said.

In many ways, the May 23-24 presidential election will answer the persistent question of whether the popular uprising that toppled Mubarak has actually transformed Egypt from autocratic rule to a functioning democracy or whether it just removed the head, Mubarak, but left the regime intact, as many of the liberal youth groups claim.

That someone like Abolfotoh has a realistic shot at being president also speaks to the stunningly swift empowerment of Islamists in post-Mubarak Egypt and their emergence as a the nation’s most powerful group after years of persecution. The candidate was imprisoned multiple times under the Mubarak regime, once for five years Payday Loan for Bad Credit.

Abolfotoh, according to an opinion poll conducted by the state-funded Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, has the support of 27 percent of voters, well behind Moussa who has 41 percent. The poll surveyed 1,200 participants in most of Egypt’s 28 provinces and has a 3 percent margin of error. It was conducted in mid-April.

The poll indicates Abolfotoh is likely to face Moussa in a June 16-17 runoff. The winner will be announced June 21, the last stop in a bumpy transitional process led by the generals who took over from Mubarak last year and promised to step down by July 1.

Official campaigning kicked off Monday.

Abolfotoh has been cagey about the state of his relations with the Brotherhood, leaving the exact nature of current ties to the group ambiguous.

That may be motivated in part by his hopes of wooing the votes of young Brotherhood members who are at odds with the group’s leaders over policy, particularly the reversal of initial insistence that they would not field a presidential candidate.

However, his views on core Islamic issues set him apart from the fundamentalist Brotherhood on questions such as the role of women and Christians in mainly Muslim Egypt and whether there is a need to implement Islamic Shariah laws, such as forcing women to respect a strict Islamic dress code in public.

“The greatest thing in Shariah is freedom and justice,” Abolfotoh told a television interviewer recently. “Some people think that you can force people to pray or punish them for not praying. Forcing people against their individual rights create a hypocrite person. When women wear hijab (Islamic headscarf) because they fear punishment, this is religious hypocrisy.”

Such moderate views raise the question of what Abolfotoh offered in return for the endorsements he received.

For example, the Gamaa Islamiya took part in the planning and execution of President Anwar Sadat’s 1981 assassination and fought a low intensity insurgency against Mubarak’s regime for the rest of the 1980s and most of the 1990s to create a purist Islamic state.

The Gamaa’s nod to Abolfotoh followed a more important endorsement over the weekend from a group that is just as radical _ the ultraconservative Dawa Salafiya and its political arm Al-Nour party, which leads a bloc that controls nearly 20 percent of parliament’s seats. Al-Nour, like the Gamaa, advocates the implementation of a strict interpretation of Shariah laws that many view as unfair to women, minority Christians and secularists.

“We felt that it is too much for the Muslim Brotherhood to have it all: parliament with its two chambers, the presidency and the Cabinet,” senior Gamaa official Assem Abdel-Maged said. “This is harmful to the whole Islamist movement.”

Yasser Bourhami, an influential ultraconservative cleric from the Dawa Salafia, said Abolfotoh pledged to the group that, if elected, he would allow the Islamist bloc in parliament, the chamber’s largest, form the government and allow the Salafis a free rein to preach in mosques and religious schools.

“He (Abolfotoh) is the most accepted by the people. He is the most balanced,” he said in videotaped comments posted on social networks. “This is what we think is the best for this phase.”

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The hole in Spain’s economy is getting deeper.

The government reported Friday that unemployment rose to 24.4 percent in the first quarter _ compared with 22.9 percent in the fourth quarter _ and that more than half of Spaniards under 25 are now without jobs. The bleak employment report came one day after ratings agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded the country’s debt.

The Spanish economy is in recession for the second time in three years as the damage from a housing bust persists. Foreclosures are rising, Spain’s banks are in worse financial shape and the government’s deficit is hitting worrisome levels.

The first-quarter employment data showed that 365,900 people lost their jobs, bringing the number of unemployed Spaniards to 5.6 million. The unemployment rate for people under 25 climbed to 52 percent, up from 48.5 percent in the previous quarter.

“The figures are terrible for everyone and terrible for the government,” Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo told Spanish National Radio. “Spain is in a crisis of enormous magnitude.”

The total number of unemployed increased by 729,400 compared with the first quarter of 2011. The National Statistics Institute said Friday that Spain now has 1.7 million households in which no one has work.

The figures were another blow to the conservative government of Mariano Rajoy after Standard & Poor’s late Thursday became the first of the three leading credit rating agencies to strip Spain of an A rating. It cited a worsening budget deficit, worries over the banking system and poor economic prospects for its decision to reduce the rating by two notches from A to BBB+.

S&P even warned that a further downgrade is possible as it left its outlook assessment on Spain at “negative.”

Spain, the eurozone’s fourth-largest economy, is just now just three notches above so-called junk status. Earlier this week, the Bank of Spain confirmed that the country had entered a technical recession _ two consecutive quarters of negative growth.

The country’s economic problems have become the epicenter Europe’s debt crisis in recent weeks as investors worry over Spain’s ability to push through austerity measures and reforms at a time of recession and mass unemployment.

The cuts are aimed principally at slashing the government’s deficit from 8.5 percent of economic output to the maximum level set by the European Union of 3 percent by 2013. For this year the goal is 5.3 percent.

With the economy shrinking and the population restless, there are concerns that the government will not meet its targets and will be forced into seeking a financial rescue as Greece, Ireland and Portugal have done before.

The difference is that Spain’s economy is double the size of the combined economies of the three countries that have already been bailed out. The other eurozone countries would struggle to muster enough money to rescue it.

The government later Friday released a flurry of upbeat data on how it plans to turn the economy round between 2012-2015. Despite the dismal job numbers, it predicted a roughly balanced budget in 2016.

But there was more pain, too. Economy Minister Luis de Guindos announced an increase next year in indirect taxes. He said this measure will raise (EURO)8 billion ($11 billion) in new revenue to help chip away at a bloated deficit.

The conservative government has already raised income and property taxes, and announced cuts in spending on health care and education. The forecast is for the economy to shrink 1.7 percent this year.

Foreseeing the economic downturn, businesses have been laying people off at a faster rate than expected, said IESE Business School economics professor Antonio Argandona. New laws also make it easier for companies to shed workers at low cost.

Argandona said Spain is not now at risk of needing a bailout because its government is still solvent. But even if the economy returns to growth next year as forecast, the jobless rate will lag behind and unemployment could hit 26 percent, he added.

The mood among Spanish people out on the streets Friday was downcast.

“The situation is very bad. There’s no work,” said Enrique Sebastian,a 48-year-old unemployed surgery room assistant as he left one of Madrid’s unemployment offices.

“The only future I see is one with wages of (EURO)400 ($530) a month for eight-hour days. And that’s if you can find it,” said Sebastian.

Markets in Spain initially reacted negatively to the twin news but soon recovered their poise alongside the rest of Europe as the downgrade was largely viewed as a belated acknowledgment of the market realities.

The main IBEX index, having fallen more than 1 percent earlier, recovered and was up 1.2 percent in early afternoon trading. Meanwhile investors sold off Spanish bonds in a show of jitters. The interest rate, or yield, on the country’s ten-year bond was up 0.07 of a percentage point to 5.87 percent, having touched 6 percent earlier.

Though the yield is below the 7 percent rate widely considered unsustainable in the long-run, it has edged up over the past month from below 5 percent in a clear sign investors are fidgety over its economic prospects.

Gayle Allard, a labor market expert at IE Business School, said that while a jobless rate of 24.4 percent is terrible, Spain is traditionally a high unemployment country. Three times in the past 30 years it has exceeded 20 percent, Allard said.

“It is something that, somehow, they live with. Things go underground. I don’t know what they do. They hide money in good years and they pull it out in bad years,” Allard said.

____

Pylas contributed from London. Ciaran Giles and Jorge Sainz contributed from Madrid.

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Investors are steering away from French bonds as they cast a wary eye on election frontrunner Francois Hollande

The outlook among U.S. homebuilders dimmed in April after six months of rising or steady confidence. The decline suggests the housing market remains weak despite modest gains.

The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo said Monday that its builder sentiment index fell this month to 25 from 28. Last month’s reading was the highest since June 2007. The index rose for five straight months between September and February.

Builders expressed weaker confidence in sales over the next six months. A separate gauge measuring that outlook rose for six straight months before falling this month, from 35 to 32.

The housing industry has a long way to go in its slow recovery. Any reading below 50 indicates negative sentiment about the housing market. The index hasn’t reached hit that level since April 2006, the peak of the housing boom.

“What we’re seeing is essentially a pause in what had been a fairly rapid build-up in builder confidence that started last September,” said David Crowe, chief economist with the homebuilders’ group. “This is partly because interest expressed by buyers in the past few months has yet to translate into expected sales activity.”

The spring buying season got an early start thanks to a mild January and February, which made up the best winter for sales of previously occupied homes in five years. Permits to build houses and apartments rose in February to their highest level since 2008.

Yet home prices continued to fall this winter. Builders keep slashing their prices to stay competitive. Last year was the worst for new-home sales on records dating back to 1963.

Builders are struggling to compete with foreclosures, which have forced down prices of previously occupied homes. And many people are finding it hard to qualify for loans or meet higher required down payments.

Low appraisals are scuttling some deals after contracts have been signed. As a result, some people who want to buy a new house are holding off because they can’t sell their home.

Those in a position to buy are benefiting from lower prices and the cheapest mortgage rates on record. The average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage is hovering near record lows below 4 percent.

Builders have pointed to some regional pockets of strength. New Orleans, Pittsburgh and other smaller areas of Texas, in particular, have reported increased buying.

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The raspberry-colored walls are up — as is the large “American Girl” sign with stars dotting the “i”s.

When the highly-anticipated store opens later this week in Chesterfield Mall, lines of devoted fans are expected to snake outside the store as they wait to buy $100 dolls. But many parents haven’t waited for the grand opening to book children’s birthday parties there, with reservations already scheduled for several months out.

The store’s arrival — and the diehard following it brings along — is being welcomed with open arms by Chesterfield Mall. The shopping center has struggled in recent years with declining sales and a lower occupancy rate than many other area malls.

Katie Reinsmidt, spokeswoman for CBL & Associates, the mall’s owner, said the mall has already been moving in a positive direction this year with a rise in both traffic and sales.

“I think things are turning the corner,” she said.

And the American Girl store can’t do anything but help bring more visitors and buzz, she added.

“Other retailers at the center are anticipating some additional traffic — it will definitely have some cross benefit,” she said. “There’s nothing like it in the mall today.”

That’s what Angie Sicard hopes. Her specialty toy store, Toy Tyme, caters to both girls and boys.

“Families are going to spend so much on girls (at American Girl), that the boys are going to want something, too,” she said. “So they are going to come to our store” or other retailers in the mall.

Wade Opland, American Girl’s vice president of retail, said retailers near new American Girl stores usually see a double-digit sales lift regardless of whether it’s a cookie store or clothing store.

“We’re like the Apple of girls business for a mall,” he said, referring to the high traffic and sales that Apple brings to mall-based stores. “That’s why we’re so sought after.”

Whereas most mall stores pull from an area of about 20 miles, American Girl stores draw customers from a 150 to 200-mile radius, Opland said.

The Chesterfield store is one of three stores American Girl will open this year; the other two slated to open later this year are in Miami and Houston.

But while the retailer, which began as a direct-to-consumer catalog company, has been growing its bricks-and-mortar footprints in recent years, it doesn’t expect to have more than 20 stores nationwide, Opland said. The Chesterfield store is American Girl’s 12th store nationwide and will be the retailer’s only store in Missouri.

The retailer was drawn to Chesterfield Mall for its “premier” mix of stores and because it is in the midst of a growing community with many young families, Opland said.

“Part of our strategy is we want to put these stores where mom, girls, and families live,” he said guaranteed pay day loans. “At Chesterfield Mall, we’re in a prime location where mom can see us and it has a plethora of parking.”

The 10,850 square-foot store, which has an exterior entrance to the mall, is going into the space formerly occupied by the restaurant Wapango.

CBL’s Reinsmidt said Chesterfield Mall has a great location in an area with attractive demographics.

“But Chesterfield had unfortunate luck going into the recession,” she said. “Pretty much anytime a national bankruptcy announcement was made, there was one of those stores at Chesterfield.”

Borders and The Sharper Image are two examples. And some retailers — such as Abercrombie & Fitch, which shuttered its store in Chesterfield Mall earlier this year — have been paring back their number of mall stores nationwide, she said.

In late 2009, the mall began inviting local artists to fill some empty spaces in the mall as part of Artropolis — similar to ailing Crestwood Court’s now mostly-defunct ArtSpace.

By the end of 2011, Chesterfield Mall’s store space was 93 percent leased, up from 84 percent in 2007, according to CBL’s annual report.

But even though it has fewer vacancies, the mall’s sales per square foot in those mall stores (not including anchors) dropped 17 percent to $270 during that same time period. By comparison, sales per square feet at other CBL malls in the area range from $475 at West County Center to $400 at St. Claire Square to $364 at South County Center.

Reinsmidt said one of the challenges for Chesterfield Mall is that there is a lot of space to fill — nearly 500,000 square feet of store space not including anchors. That is more than any of CBL’s other four malls in the region.

And when the mall’s previous owner, Westfield, refurbished the mall in a $71 million project in 2006, it added more store space with a wing that includes the movie theater, food court, stores and restaurants like the Cheesecake Factory.

“They expanded the small shop space rather than contracting it,” she said.

With so much space, many of Chesterfield’s stores are a bit larger than in other malls, which lowers the mall’s sales-per-square-foot number, she said.

“The stores are really profitable and have great volumes,” she said.

As some stores leave, new tenants continue to come to the mall. Francesca’s Collections opened in the last week or so. And Monsoon, a London-based children’s retailer, is planning to open a store there this summer.

And, of course, there is American Girl. It plans a “soft” opening on Wednesday followed by a grand opening celebration on Saturday and Sunday.

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Facebook’s long-awaited IPO filing is imminent, according to several news reports.

The Wall Street Journal kicked off the hoopla on Friday, citing anonymous sources who said that Facebook may file for an initial public offering as early as this Wednesday.

The New York Times and CNBC echoed that with their own unnamed sources in articles posted late Tuesday, saying that the filing will land Wednesday. Facebook is seeking to raise up to $5 billion in its offering, they added.

If that number is correct, Facebook would represent by far the largest global IPO ever by an Internet-focused company, according to data from Dealogic. Google’s (, Fortune 500) $1.9 billion debut is currently the largest U.S. Internet IPO.

But Facebook would still lag behind blockbuster U.S. IPOs like those from Visa (, Fortune 500), which raised more than $19 billion in 2008, and General Motors (, Fortune 500), which raised $18 billion last year.

Facebook’s IPO filing won’t answer one burning question: What’s the company worth? For that, Wall Street will have to wait until Facebook starts trading, which typically happens several months after companies file their first round of regulatory paperwork.

Some experts have suggested that the social network could valued between $75 billion and $100 billion once it starts trading. No matter what the market cap, Facebook’s IPO is undeniably hot, says Max Wolff, chief economist at GreenCrest Capital.

But there’s a lot more riding on Facebook’s paperwork than wealth creation. The social network has become an entire ecosystem, supporting independent app makers and gaming platforms like Zynga ().

Facebook’s filing will have implications for companies that depend on it, as well as the social media landscape at large. Until then, analysts are left to speculate about Facebook’s revenue streams and profitability — and whether it really deserves a $100 billion market value.

Michael Pachter, a research analyst at Wedbush Securities, says the rumored valuation range is reasonable — though he won’t cite a specific estimate of his own.

How Facebook makes money — and could make more: The vast majority of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising: a combination of search and display ads. And the sales growth is incredibly robust.

Research firm eMarketer estimated last September that Facebook’s ad revenue would more than double in 2011 to $3.8 billion and increase another 52% to $5.78 billion in 2012.

Facebook has grown by grabbing market share from Google and Yahoo. Last year Facebook comprised 16.3% of the so-called display (i.e. banners and other graphical ads) market, eMarketer estimates — compared with Yahoo’s (, Fortune 500) 13.1% and Google’s (, Fortune 500) 9.3%.

Martin Pyykkonen, analyst at Wedge Partners, says Facebook is highly appealing to advertisers because about two-thirds of its users fall into the coveted age demographic of 18-49. He thinks Facebook’s ad targeting will become even more effective over time.

"The ‘Like’ button option is a basic example of targeting," Pyykkonen wrote in a note to clients Monday. "[It’s] likely that advertisers will be able to even better target their audiences as Facebook goes deeper with integrating apps, games, movies, music."

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.

Facebook Credits now comprises 10% of the company’s total revenue, up from 5% in early 2010, Pyykkonen estimates.

Those estimates will soon be backed up — or refuted — by hard numbers from Facebook. Once its IPO filing does finally land, it will help answer questions about the overall social media market.

"People are extrapolating outcomes into an environment that’s hungry for missing details," said Wolff. "It’s like all the guys in the class spreading rumors about the prettiest girl in the school."

– CNNMoney’s Maureen Farrell contributed reporting. 

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Manufacturing in the New York region expanded in January at the fastest pace in nine months, reflecting improving orders, sales and employment.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York

President Barack Obama will speak today at the White House at 11:20 a.m. Washington time on steps he plans to make the U.S. government leaner, smarter and more consumer-friendly, a White House official said business card templates.

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