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
Don’t toss out that full carton of orange juice sitting in your refrigerator just yet.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is testing all orange juice and orange juice concentrate shipments as well as products at domestic manufacturers, but the regulating agency says "consumers can be confident that the orange juice in their refrigerators is safe."
Here’s what you need to know.
Why is the FDA testing OJ? Last month, Coca-Cola alerted the FDA that it detected low levels of a fungicide in its own and in competitors’ orange juice and in juice concentrates from Brazil following routine tests.
As a precautionary measure, the FDA has halted imports of orange juice and orange juice concentrates from all over the world, and is testing each shipment for the fungicide carbendazim. The FDA said it will deny entry of any imported orange juice products that test at 10 parts per billion or higher for carbendazim, which is still a very low level.
As of Friday, the FDA said it has collected samples from 31 shipments. Twenty-eight are still pending analysis, but three shipments of orange juice and orange juice concentrates were negative for carbendazim, and will be released by the FDA.
What is carbendazim? Carbendazim is a chemical fungicide that is legal in most parts of the world, including Canada, Japan, Europe and Brazil.
The FDA said that industry reports indicated the carbendazim was in orange juice products from the 2011 crop in Brazil, where the fungicide is used to combat a type of mold that grows on orange trees known as black spot.
In the United States, however, the Environmental Protection Agency has not approved the use of carbendazim as a fungicide, and under U.S. law, it’s considered an unlawful pesticide chemical residue.
Is carbendazim dangerous? The EPA has conducted a preliminary risk assessment on carbendazim and determined that levels under 80 parts per billion (ppb) in orange juice do not raise safety concerns.
In the original tests, Coca-Cola (, Fortune 500) detected between 10 ppb and 35 ppb in orange juice products of its own and those of its competitors. Coca-Cola makes Minute Maid, Simply Orange and Odwalla.
However, the EPA is continuing to conduct risk assessments, and said it will have more results next week.
How much orange juice comes from Brazil? About 75% of all orange juice consumed locally is supplied domestically, and the rest is imported, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
However, of the remaining juice that is imported, Brazil is the largest contributor. In 2010, the South American country shipped over 171 million gallons of orange juice to the United States, accounting for more than 56% of all orange juice imports that year.
But overall, only 11% of all orange juice consumed in the U bad credit personal loan lenders.S. comes from Brazil, according to the USDA.
U.S. companies import orange juice from Brazil because of unpredictable weather conditions in Florida — hurricanes and freezing temperatures — which can negatively impact that state’s orange crops.
Is is possible that the orange juice in my fridge has carbendazim? Yes. But because the levels of carbendazim that have been detected are not harmful, the FDA said it has "determined that requiring a recall or the destruction of orange juice products" is not necessary.
In fact, the competitor products that Coca-Cola tested were "currently marketed finished products," meaning they were purchased off grocery store shelves.
Tropicana orange juice, which is owned by PepsiCo (, Fortune 500), contains orange juice from the U.S. and Brazil, according to package labels. But the company said it made an "unrelated decision some months ago" to transition to 100% Florida orange juice for its Pure Premium juices, which do not include orange juice concentrate.
Tropicana said it is already the largest buyer of Florida oranges, so the transition only requires a "minor supply chain adjustment" that will be completed by the end of the month.
Meanwhile, PepsiCo’s Naked Juice products are made only from oranges grown in the United States, the company said.
Similarly, Florida’s Natural, which competes with Coca-Cola and PepsiCo’s orange juice products, prides itself on only using oranges that are grown by U.S. farmers in Florida.
Trader Joe’s said that although its orange juices are only made with oranges sourced from Florida, California and Mexico, its orange juice suppliers are conducting additional testing in light of recent concerns.
The FDA has confirmed that it is also testing samples of finished orange juice products and orange juice concentrates at domestic manufacturers, and said the sampling and analysis will be completed in the next few weeks. The agency said if it identifies a brand of orange juice that presents a public health risk due to levels of carbendazim, it will issue a recall.
How will this affect orange juice prices? On Tuesday, March orange juice futures spiked almost 10%, or 20 cents, to $2.07 a pound on the ICE Futures Exchange, which traders said was the highest level since 1977.
Futures reversed course on Wednesday, 9%, to $1.881 per pound. And on Thursday, orange juice futures retreated another 5.6%. On Friday, futures popped 8%.
Traders say huge spikes in orange juice futures could result in price bumps at the grocery store.
Coca-Cola said it could not comment on whether the discoveries would affect pricing of its orange juice products.
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.
Debt-crippled Greece’s budget deficit is expected to hit 9.6 percent of economic output in 2011, about half a percentage point above target, the development minister said Wednesday.
Michalis Chryssochoidis said that an increase in the use of European Union structural development funds had contributed to lowering government overspending from 10.6 percent of gross domestic product in 2010.
“The good news is that absorption of European Union funds has exceeded all expectations,” Chryssochoidis said at an economic forum where the government hopes to attract investment from the United Arab Emirates.
But Greece, which is relying on billions in rescue loans from its European partners and the International Monetary Fund to keep afloat, had pledged to cut the 2011 deficit to 9 percent of GDP.
Greece ran up high budget deficits for years, building a suffocating debt load set to exceed 160 percent of GDP in 2011. In exchange for a vital euro110 billion ($140 billion) international bailout in May 2010, the country implemented a harsh austerity program, slashing pensions and salaries while repeatedly hiking taxes and raising retirement ages.
The country’s interim coalition government is rushing to pass a new batch of reforms and cutbacks, to secure a second, euro130 billion bailout package approved in October but not yet finalized instant personal loans guaranteed.
Fitch Ratings warned on Wednesday that Greece’s financial troubles could still worsen the eurozone crisis if it can’t work out a debt reduction deal with creditors, part of the second bailout package.
Fitch’s head of sovereign ratings David Riley said Greece “still has lots of potential to plunge Europe into crisis” and that “time is running out.”
Greece is in talks with private investors about a voluntary 50 percent reduction in their Greek bond holdings.
It needs to agree the deal before it can get another installment in its rescue loans, which it will need to repay euro14 billion in bonds that come due in March.
Riley said one complicating factor in the private creditors’ deal was the European Central Bank’s refusal to write down its estimated euro45 billion in Greek bonds. That means private bondholders have to be asked to take on more losses to reach a given reduction in Greece’s debt load.
Hildebrand will submit e-mails to parliament today that show his wife acted alone in making foreign currency trades that led to calls for him to resign, Der Sonntag reported yesterday, without saying where it got the information. SNB spokeswoman Silvia Oppliger declined to comment.
Everybody knows that January predicts the stock market’s direction for the year and that the best time to sell stocks is at their spring peak. And among stock market experts, it’s a sure bet that the market will soar in the year before an election.
But what passes for stock market wisdom is suspect when given a closer look. The most common error comes when people spot two events and assume that one causes the other.
And it drives economists, math geeks and plenty of money managers nuts.
“If you look at enough data in enough different ways, you’re going to find something that isn’t really true,” says Edward Keon, who leads a mathematics team at Prudential Financial.
The same seasonal patterns seem to pop up year after year. Some are valuable and some meaningless, Keon says _ like saying stocks tend to rise or fall depending on the month, the temperature in New York City or who wins the Super Bowl.
People “are simply being fooled by randomness,” says Burton Malkiel, professor of economics at Princeton University and author of the finance classic “A Random Walk Down Wall Street.”
Spend enough time digging through numbers and you’re bound to find some that always take the same path, he says. “But none can reliably predict the future.”
Here’s an examination of some of the oldest Wall Street aphorisms.
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The claim: As goes January, so goes the year.
The idea is that January works as a barometer for the stock market’s full-year performance: A strong first month often leads to a year of gains, and a weak one to a year of losses.
It comes from Yale Hirsch, father of the Stock Trader’s Almanac, and looks reliable. Since 1929, the calendar year has followed January’s lead 60 out of 83 times, according to Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at Standard & Poor’s. That’s a .723 batting average.
The suggestion that January somehow directs the course of the next 11 months is what irks economists and investors, including Dan Greenhaus, chief market strategist at the brokerage BTIG.
Expecting to hear praise for January’s forecasting powers, Greenhaus attacked the idea on his blog Jan. 2, the day before U.S. markets opened for 2012. He took the S&P 500 index’s returns since 1950, including dividends, and found that the four months following January also appeared to work magic. When April is down, the next 12 months return a negative 0.2 percent. When April is up, the S&P 500 returns 12.8 percent. It’s a similar story with February, March and April. But why?
“It’s true that if January is up, the year is up most of the time,” he says. “But if you look at any month, you’ll find the market tends to be up over the next 12 months. And the reason is very simple: the market tends to be up.”
The S&P 500 has climbed in three out of every four years since 1950. Pick nearly any month in which stocks rose and most of the time you’ll find that the year was headed in the same direction.
But what if stocks fall in January? It doesn’t mean the next 11 months will follow. Sometimes, the stock market starts the year in a hole and digs its way out. In 1992, the S&P 500 dropped 2 percent in January, then ended the year with a modest gain of 4.5 percent.
“If you’re starting in the hole, then the 12-month period is starting in the hole,” Greenhaus says. “That should be intuitive. Instead it gets treated as some sort of prognostication tool. It’s just what happens.”
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The claim: Sell in May and go away.
Like a flock of migrating birds, the stock market tends to travel south or north depending on the season. It rises through the winter months and falls late in the spring. Investors struggle through the summer until November rolls around and the market picks up again.
“Sell in May and go away” is a well-worn saying, but the numbers seem to back it up. Since 1990, the three months starting in July have been the worst quarter for the S&P 500. Last year, the S&P hit its peak on April 29, then hit bottom Oct. 3, right on cue.
Even many skeptics think “sell in May” probably has something going for it _ but they can only guess why.
“It’s harder to debunk this one,” says Nick Colas, chief market strategist at ConvergEx Group.
The flow of money into retirement plans and mutual funds may have something to do with it. Colas says databases that track cash moving into stock funds show patterns similar to the stock market trend: A strong start that evaporates as the year progresses.
In the first four months of 2011, Americans added $13 billion to U.S. stock funds, according to the Investment Company Institute. But they pulled $6.5 billion in May and then began withdrawing much more. By the end of the year, retail investors had pulled $131.8 billion out of U.S. stock funds.
Some tie the summer sluggishness to vacation season. Trading desks are thinly staffed in the weeks before Labor Day. Fewer traders means a drop in trading volume, which makes it easier for markets to take bigger swings, often down.
Here’s where that explanation falls short. Traders return to their desks after Labor Day in September and trading picks up. But for all major stock indexes, September is historically the worst month of the year. Since 1950, it’s the only month in which the stock market has fallen more than it has risen.
In a story Jan. 4 about The Boeing Co.’s announcement that it is closing its plant in Wichita, Kan., The Associated Press reported erroneously that the closure will cost 2,160 workers their jobs. An unspecified number of those workers will be allowed to transfer to the company’s plants in other states cheap pay day loans.
Consumer confidence in the U.S. rose last week to the highest level in more than five months and the pace of firings declined, showing an improving job market is bolstering the biggest part of the economy.
The Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index (COMFCOMF) climbed to minus 44.8 in the period ended Dec. 31, the best reading since mid-July, from minus 47.5 the prior week. Applications for jobless benefits (INJCJC) decreased by 15,000 during the same time to 372,000, according to Labor Department figures.
A pickup in hiring will further lift Americans
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