Actual finance blog

Canadian cultural policy has long relied on two levers to promote Canadian content. First, regulators require broadcasters and cable companies to allocate a portion of their revenues to help support the creation of new Canadian content. Second, that content is granted preferential treatment through minimum "CanCon" requirements for both television and radio broadcasting.

While these approaches may have worked for conventional broadcasting, the big question in the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s forthcoming hearings on new media is whether they can be applied to the Internet.

Canadian cultural groups, the biggest proponents (and beneficiaries) of this policy approach argue that similar mechanisms can be adapted to the Internet by requiring Internet service providers to hand over a portion of their subscriber revenues for the creation of new media content. ISPs unsurprisingly opposed, arguing an Internet tax is unfair since it forces all subscribers to fund content in which they may have little interest. Moreover, they note such a scheme may also be illegal since it applies the Broadcasting Act to telecommunications activities.

The CRTC adopted a new CanCon approach for the introduction of satellite radio in Canada and similar creative thinking is needed for the online environment.

One possibility would be to provide new media creators – whether independent filmmakers, digital photographers, musicians, podcasters, or bloggers – with the assurance of equal access to online audiences by mandating that Canadian ISPs treat all similar content in an equivalent or neutral fashion.

In recent months, many Canadian ISPs have engaged in "network management practices" that degrades the bandwidth allocated to certain applications and content. While the ISPs argue such practices are essential to ensure quality of service for the majority of their users, similar activities in the United States have drawn a rebuke from the Federal Communications Commission and a promise from President-elect Barack Obama to address the issue.

This issue has been typically treated as telecom matter, yet there would be considerable benefits in assessing it through the lens of Canadian cultural policy Faxless pay advances. Granting preferential treatment for Canadian content may have made sense in a world of scarcity when there were limited channels and bandwidth, however, it no longer applies in a world of abundance in which the Internet offers virtually unlimited choice.

Canadian creators, therefore, do not need guaranteed space since there is room on the Internet for everyone. Rather, they need guaranteed access – the assurance that their content can find an audience by being treated like any other video or cultural programming. As ISPs move toward tiered access that grants preferential treatment (such as faster speeds) to their own content or to premium content promoted by deep-pocketed interests, an equal approach to new media content would bring CanCon into the Internet era by asking for nothing more than a fair shake.

This approach would also address the funding side of cultural policy. Many ISPs object to the equal treatment principle by maintaining that new media creators should pay for equal access and avoid using technologies such as BitTorrent that are viewed as transferring the cost of distribution from the creator to the network provider. From their perspective, if a new media creator (or a public broadcaster like the CBC) wishes to use an application to distribute content subject to reduced speeds, a requirement to grant unimpeded access should be regarded as a subsidy from the network provider to the content creator.

If so, such a subsidy could be seen as the Internet equivalent of cultural funding. Rather than adopting an ill-suited ISP tax, the costs associated with providing Canadian content with equal treatment could be treated as the financial contribution, thereby eliminating the legal concerns associated with an ISP tax and allowing the CRTC to extract support from network providers for the benefit of Canadian cultural production.

Michael Geist holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law. He can reached at mgeist@uottawa.ca or online at www.michaelgeist.ca.

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NEW YORK–Wall Street greeted the U.S. government’s seizure of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with a sigh of relief yesterday, hoping it would provide some relief to ongoing crises in housing and credit markets.

However, many analysts said the bailout of the United States’ two biggest mortgage finance companies, which could be the government’s costliest ever, was a symptom of the still-dismal state of credit markets after a year of crisis.

The immediate reaction on the mortgage front was favourable. Mortgage rates fell in the hope that now the government was standing behind Fannie and Freddie, they’d be able to continue providing ample funds for home loans and bolster the ailing housing market. Thirty-year home mortgage loan rates fell about a half percentage point from Friday to 6 per cent, according to Bankrate.com.

In financial markets, stock prices around the world surged on hopes the U.S. Treasury’s plan to take control of the companies – which together back about half the $12 trillion in U.S quick payday loan. home mortgages – might put at least a temporary floor under troubled financial markets.

While the Dow Jones industrial average rose, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac stocks got hammered, losing more than 80 per cent of their value and trading below $1 a share.

The takeover came as worries heightened over shrinking capital at the congressionally chartered companies, which had combined losses of nearly $14 billion the last four quarters.

It was welcome news to China and Japan, the biggest buyers of the two companies’ bonds, who praised Washington for its rescue of the mortgage giants.

But analysts noted this was only the latest in a string of bailouts. None has achieved lasting success.

Yesterday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said he couldn’t estimate how big the taxpayers’ burden would be until the extent of mortgage market declines were fully known.

Reuters News Agency

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Switzerland's leading economic indicators fell more than expected to the lowest level in five years this month, evidence that growth may grind to a halt.

The monthly aggregate of indicators that aims to predict the economy's direction about six months ahead slid to 0.68 from a revised 0.85 in July, the KOF research institute in Zurich said today in an e-mailed release. That's the lowest since August 2003. Economists expected a drop to 0.83 from a previously reported 0.90, the median of 13 estimates in a Bloomberg survey showed.

Switzerland's expansion is losing momentum as stalling growth elsewhere in Europe threatens exports of machines and chemicals, and finance market turmoil sparked by the U.S. housing crisis erodes profit at banks including UBS AG and Credit Suisse Group. With inflation at the fastest pace in 15 years, the central bank has limited room to ease lending rates.

“This is quite a sharp slowdown,'' said Jan Amrit Poser, chief economist at Bank Sarasin in Zurich. “The risk of a recession is there, but it's still unlikely. Growth may even have been negative in the second quarter, and we see it averaging only 0.1 percent through the end of the year.''

The Swiss National Bank left its benchmark rate on hold at a six-year high on June 19 as central banks from Asia to North America shifted their focus from the global credit squeeze to stamping out inflation. The SNB holds its next monetary policy meeting on Sept. 18.

Franc Drops

The Swiss franc fell to as low as 1.6165 against the euro after the release from 1.6129 earlier. Against the dollar, the franc fell to $1.0978 from $1.0924.

SNB President Jean-Pierre Roth said on Aug. 19 the economy is slowing even more than policy makers had expected and added this week that growth will slow more markedly in the second half of the year than it did in the first http://payday-nofax.com.

The economy of Germany, Switzerland's biggest trading partner, contracted 0.5 percent in the second quarter and the economy of the euro area shrank for the first time since monetary union a decade ago.

Like other European countries, Switzerland is struggling to stave off the impact of waning growth. German business confidence plunged to a three-year low this month and European services and manufacturing contracted for a third straight month, increasing the risk of a recession.

Export Question

“Net trade continues to be surprisingly resilient, but given that two thirds of exports go to Europe, it's questionable whether they can continue to surprise to the upside,'' said Eoin O'Callaghan, an economist at BNP Paribas in London.

Export growth will probably slow to 3 percent this year after reaching 10 percent in the past two years, according to the government.

With sales weakening and the market turmoil hurting banks' profits, two engines of Swiss growth are stalling. At the same time, inflation is outpacing wage gains and may hurt household spending. Swiss consumer confidence fell to the lowest in four years this month.

Inflation may have reached its peak this summer, Roth said in an interview with the newspaper Finanz und Wirtschaft on Aug. 26. The risk of second-round effects from inflation are limited and it would be “absurd'' to use monetary policy to counter rising prices for oil and food, he said.

Full-year growth will probably slow to between 1.5 percent and 2 percent in 2008 after reaching 3.3 percent in 2007, the central bank estimates.

The price of oil has dropped 18 percent after climbing to a record $147.27 a barrel on July 11.

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U.S. regulators’ emergency rule to restrict “naked” short selling in 19 major financial stocks had little impact and may have even backfired, two studies of the rule’s effects showed on Wednesday.

While overall short selling declined in nearly every firm affected by the rule, many of the 19 stocks still suffered declines in their share prices, the studies showed.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission issued an emergency order last month requiring short sellers to pre-borrow stock in mortgage finance giants Freddie Mac (FRE.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Fannie Mae (FNM.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and 17 other Wall Street firms, such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Citigroup Inc (C.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz). While the rule expired at 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday, the SEC had billed it as an attempt to crack down on illegal “naked” short selling, that could allow reckless short selling of the stocks.

“While the SEC’s intentions may have been good, their attempt to protect price with rule-making was quite flawed and without intended effect,” said John Standerfer, Vice President of Financial Services for market data firm S3 Matching Technologies. “The market has its own mind.”

An S3 study of market data showed short sells for the 19 stocks dropped by about 63 percent while the rule was in effect, but the firm concluded the rule was “ineffective,” saying short selling “did not seem to be a significant factor” in the market’s determination of price for the stocks.

Shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are off more than 20 percent since the protective rule was first announced, despite an almost 5 percent rise in the benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 index .SPX in the same period.

Even with the protection, S3 found the number of short sells in shares of Bank of America Corp (BAC.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) were often higher while the rule was in effect than they were the day before the rule was announced fast cash payday loan. But despite the higher levels of short selling, Bank of America’s stock price is up more than 40 percent in the past month.

A separate study from Arturo Bris, a finance professor at IMD business school in Lausanne, Switzerland, found that, even controlling for short selling, market efficiency had deteriorated more for the 19 stocks affected by the rule than for other comparable U.S. financial stocks. 

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In the Mexican town of Tarimbaro, construction has stopped on new homes, so sales at a hardware store are half last year's total. A butcher who slaughtered a head of cattle a day now slays two a week. And Rocio Rangel feeds her son and daughter bread and coffee for dinner.

Rural Mexican towns are suffering as money transfers from relatives working north of the border dry up, the result of a weak U.S. economy. Remittances equaled 2.7 percent of gross domestic product last year and are Mexico's second-biggest source of dollar flows after oil exports.

“My children need more than this, but we don't have anything,'' said Rangel, 36, whose husband hasn't sent funds home from Florida in nine months.

Shrinking transfers, inflation at a three-year high and a peso that has appreciated 10 percent this year are eroding the purchasing power of Mexico's poor, the 35 percent of the population that can't afford basics such as clothing, housing and health care. Residents who depend on funds from abroad are cutting back on spending because of weakness in U.S. industries such as construction, the biggest employer of Mexico's migrants.

In the first half of this year, remittances fell 2.2 percent to $11.6 billion, the first decline for the period since Mexico's central bank began tracking the data in 1995. For the entire year, the bank forecasts they will drop as much as 3 percent.

Remittances grew only 1 percent in 2007 to $24 billion after a record 39 percent expansion in 2003.

Danger for Calderon

The dwindling flow of cash this year may shift support from President Felipe Calderon to the opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution, which attracts lower-income voters.

“The worse the economy is, the better'' the PRD will do, said Daniel Lund, president of consulting group Mund Americas in Mexico City. The party's former presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador refused to recognize a razor-thin defeat to Calderon in the 2006 election and set up his own quasi- government that opposes the president's initiatives.

Lopez Obrador, whose campaign pledge was “the poor come first,'' promised to reduce privileges for the business elite. Calderon is backed by the business community, who endorse his efforts to promote free trade and boost private investment.

An increase in popularity for Lopez Obrador “is the great danger'' for Calderon, said Gabriel Casillas, an economist at Banco UBS Pactual in Mexico City. “It's a priority for the presidency to try to prevent him from gaining more support.''

Diversified Exports

So far, the economy is benefiting from diversified exports and Calderon's plan to spend 2.5 trillion pesos ($250.7 billion) in public and private funds on infrastructure projects during his six-year term, creating construction jobs, building ports and expanding roads payday loans. The government estimates GDP expanded 3 percent in the second quarter.

In May, Calderon announced a program to boost aid to more than 5 million of Mexico's poorest families by 22 percent to 655 pesos a month. His goal is to shrink extreme poverty, defined as families unable to pay for a basket of basic foodstuffs, by 30 percent in the next five years. In 2006, 10.6 percent of the population was in the lowest income group.

Tarimbaro Mayor Baltazar Gaona Sanchez said Calderon's anti-poverty program benefits only about 6 percent of the townspeople and isn't having a significant effect. Residents work mainly in agriculture, growing corn, tomatoes and onions.

“There's still a lot lacking,'' he said. The economy of the municipality, which is 200 kilometers (124 miles) west of Mexico City, “has sunk,'' he said. “There are a lot of people who come to ask for help to eat.''

`No Work'

Maria Sebastiana, 50, who lives about an hour away in the town of Zinapecuaro, said her husband was fired from his construction job in Oregon and hasn't sent money to her since November. Still, her pregnant daughter's boyfriend has left for the U.S. in search of employment to support the couple and their child. “Here, there's no work,'' Sebastiana said.

In the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, Mexicans who once had full-time construction jobs are now looking for day employment on street corners, said Antonio Bernabe, day-laborer organizer at the city's Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights.

“They are living in very poor conditions, eating noodle soups at 25 cents each,'' Bernabe said.

Only half of Latin American immigrants in the U.S. said they sent money home in February, down from 73 percent two years ago, according to a survey released in April by the Inter- American Development Bank.

Agustin Garduno, wearing a paint-stained sweatshirt, said he sleeps in cars and on floors at friends' houses because he can't afford rent. As noon approaches and no contractors have pulled up to the corner of Van Nuys Boulevard and Oxnard Street looking to hire, it will be the fifteenth day he has gone without work.

“If you gave me a ticket, I'll go back to Mexico because here, there's nothing,'' said Garduno, 48, who used to make $1,300 a month and now makes about $500.

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The Federal Reserve unanimously approved new mortgage lending rules Monday in a crackdown on shady practices - particularly those involving subprime loans made to borrowers with weak credit.

The agency made several substantial revisions to the proposed regulations it unveiled in December. Many of the changes acknowledged consumer advocates’ concerns that the rules still contained too many loopholes that would allow shady lending practices to continue.

But the Fed also made some concessions to industry executives, who feared increasing oversight would lead to less lending.

The new rules will apply to all mortgage lenders, not just those supervised and examined by the Fed. All but one requirement will take effect Oct. 1, 2009. However, board members said they will continue to work on further oversight of the mortgage industry.

"The proposed final rules are intended to protect consumers from unfair or deceptive acts and practices in mortgage lending, while keeping credit available to qualified borrowers and supporting sustainable homeownership," said Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. "Besides offering broader protection for consumers, a uniform set of rules will level the playing field for lenders and increase competition in the mortgage market, to the ultimate benefit of borrowers."

The proposals won’t help the millions of homeowners who’ve already fallen behind in their mortgages, but the Fed is aiming to prevent another such crisis by tightening lending standards, particularly for subprime mortgages.

Many critics have charged that under former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, there were few restraints during the real estate boom. They say the agency should have flexed its muscles several years ago, clamping down on unscrupulous lenders and protecting borrowers.

Consumer advocates said they were pleased with the changes, but stressed that the Fed’s action is just one in a series of steps needed to better protect borrowers from shady lenders. Industry executives, meanwhile, applauded the Fed for attempting to protect consumers while keeping in mind the need for low-cost mortgage loans.

The rules

The new rules governing "higher-priced," or subprime, loans will:

• Prohibit creditors from extending credit without regard to a consumer’s ability to repay the loan from income and assets other than the home’s value. The lender complies, in part, by assessing repayment ability based on the highest scheduled payment in the first seven years of the loan.
• Require creditors to verify income and assets they rely upon to determine repayment ability
• Ban any prepayment penalty if the payment can change in the initial four years. For other higher-priced loans, a prepayment penalty period cannot last for more than two years.
• Require creditors to establish escrow account for property taxes and homeowner’s insurance. This rule will be phased in during 2010.

The Fed changed the definition of higher-priced loans to first mortgages with rates at least 1.5 percentage points above the average mortgage rate published by Freddie Mac. Also, second mortgages with rates at least 3.5 percentage points above the Freddie Mac rate will fall into this category.

With this change, the Fed is hoping to address industry complaints that the previous definition would capture non-subprime loans as well.

Additional rules will apply to all mortgages, regardless of rate.

• Creditors and mortgage brokers cannot coerce a real estate appraiser to misstate a home’s value.
• Companies that service mortgage loans are prohibited from engaging in certain practices, such as pyramiding late fees no fax payday loans. Also, they must credit consumers’ loan payments as of the date of receipt and provide a payoff statement within a reasonable time of request.
• Creditors must provide a good faith estimate of the loan costs, including a schedule of payments, within three days after a consumer applies for any mortgage loan, including home improvement loans or refinancings. Currently, these estimates are only required for home-purchase loans. Consumers cannot be charged any fee until after they receive the early disclosures, except a reasonable fee for obtaining the consumer’s credit history.
• In advertisements, companies must include additional information about rates, monthly payments and loan features. The rule also bans seven deceptive practices, such as saying a rate is fixed when it can change.

In a nod to the brokerage industry, the Fed withdrew a proposal requiring additional disclosure of the "yield-spread premium," which allows banks to pay brokers for steering homeowners into higher-priced loans. After testing consumers, the agency found that the rule would likely not be effective. But the Fed said it would continue reviewing the issue.

Advocates for consumers and industry generally pleased

Both consumer advocates and industry executives put a full-court press on the Fed in recent months, trying to get the agency to revise its proposed rules. More than 4,500 comments were filed since the agency announced its plan in late December.

After reviewing the final rules, advocates said they felt the changes did provide additional protections for the consumers. In particular, it’s important that the Fed eliminated the requirement that borrowers prove lenders engaged in a "pattern or practice" of originating unaffordable loans since that’s very hard to do, said Brenda Muniz, legislative director of Acorn, a housing advocacy group.

Still, the Fed could have done better by completely banning prepayment penalties, as several states have done, said Deborah Goldstein, executive vice president of the Center for Responsible Lending, a consumer rights organization. She noted that people in subprime fixed-rate loans are still subject to hefty fees if they try to refinance their loans within two years.

Also, some advocates wondered why the rules won’t take effect for 15 months, and why subprime borrowers can opt out of escrowing their property taxes and homeowner’s insurance after the first year.

"It’s the first step toward better protecting consumers in the mortgage market, but not the last step," said Jim Carr, chief operating officer of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, an advocacy group.

Industry executives, meanwhile, endorsed the changes overall, but said there still may be some areas of concern in the 419-page document. For instance, the Mortgage Bankers Association said it plans to ask its members about the elimination of the "pattern or practice" rule.

Still, the new rules will help consumers, without placing such a burden on lenders that they will have to curtail credit, industry insiders said.

"This is just the right amount of regulation," said Marc Savitt, president of the National Association of Mortgage Brokers. 

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Shares of mortgage financing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both plummeted Monday after an analyst with Lehman Brothers wrote in a report that the two companies may need to raise billions of dollars if accounting rules are changed.

Shares of Fannie Mae (FNM, Fortune 500) fell more than 16% to $15.74. The stock set a new 52-week low of $14.65 earlier during the day. Freddie Mac (FRE, Fortune 500) plunged nearly 18% to $11.91. It also hit a new 52-week low of $10.28 a share before recovering slightly at the end of the trading session.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government sponsored enterprises that help the mortgage market function by purchasing pools of loans and packaging them into securities.

According to a report from Lehman Brothers analyst Bruce Harting, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) is considering a rule change that would force Fannie and Freddie to move so-called off balance sheet securities onto their balance sheets.

The potential accounting change would require Fannie Mae to add $46 billion of capital and Freddie Mac to add $29 billion of capital, Harting noted.

Fannie Mae was not immediately available for comment about the Lehman report. Sharon McHale, spokesperson for Freddie Mac, said that Freddie Mac will "not comment on changes in the stock price."

But an accounting rule change would be the latest blow to Fannie and Freddie. With more than a million Americans facing foreclosure and home prices sinking, the two companies have already been hit hard.

The two companies, which bought securities backed by risky subprime mortgages when the housing market was booming, have watched those bets unravel in the past few months as the housing market buckled under credit crisis pressures.

Fannie Mae has reported a loss for the past two quarters while Freddie Mac has posted three consecutive quarterly losses. Both companies are expected to report a loss in the second quarter as well.

As such, concerns have grown about their need for more capital. Some analysts have even suggested that a government bailout of the two may be necessary.

But one analyst said the accounting changes discussed in the Lehman report were so drastic, that it’s hard to imagine Fannie and Freddie being forced to adopt them payday loan.

"The notion that FASB would be so reckless to precipitate a major financial crisis just seems too absurd to believe," said Jaret Seiberg, a financial services policy analyst at Stanford Group, a research firm.

In fact, even Lehman’s Harting downplayed the notion that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would soon need to raise more capital.

Harting wrote that it would be "extremely challenging" for either company to come up with so much cash to meet new minimum capital requirements, causing already timid investors to be concerned. He added that a "severely undercapitalized" Fannie and Freddie "could possibly topple the already fragile markets."

For this reason, Harting went on to write that he thought it was "highly unlikely" that the FASB would impose such new regulations on Fannie and Freddie.

Nonetheless, the thought that Fannie and Freddie may need to raise more capital further spooked Wall Street, which prior to the Lehman report already had plenty of reasons to be worried about Fannie and Freddie as well as other financial stocks.

"The stocks continue to drift down on any news, whether it is reality or not," said Frederick Cannon, managing director at KBW, an investment bank that specializes in financial firms. Cannon says that any change in the capital requirements for GSE’s would not come from a change in accounting rules, but from careful consideration and gradual change in Congressional regulation.

There is so much anxiety surrounding the housing market, said Seiberg, that "everyone is on edge." To that end, shares of other top bank and brokerage companies fell in afternoon trading Monday.

Dow components Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500) fell nearly 4% while Citigroup (C, Fortune 500) was down 2.5%. Wachovia’s (WB, Fortune 500) stock fell 7%. And shares of the investment bank Lehman Brothers (LEH, Fortune 500), which is facing its own concerns about the need for more capital, plunged 9%. 

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World energy use is expected to surge 50% from 2005 to 2030, largely due to an expanding population and rapid economic growth, according to a government report Wednesday.

Without any new laws restricting greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide emissions will see a similar jump, the Energy Information Administration said in its annual report on global energy markets.

Demand for new energy is led by the developing world, EIA said.

While developed countries are expected to see a 19% rise in energy use, demand for energy in the developing world is expected to surge 85%.

Oil prices are expected to range from $113 to $186 a barrel, under different price scenarios the agency modeled.

"Given current market conditions, it appears that world oil prices are on a path that more closely resembles the projection in the high price case than in the reference case," the report said.

Under the high price case, world oil use is expected to grow to 99 million barrels a day in 2030, from about 85 million barrels a day currently, as high prices limit demand.

In the medium price case, worldwide oil use is expected to jump to 113 million barrels a day, EIA said, as oil prices ease to about $70 in the next few years and new supplies come online.

The projections in the report were based on 2007 oil prices. Oil has nearly doubled in price since then.

Although the government and the oil companies say producing 113 million barrels of oil a day is possible, market skepticism has kept oil prices high over the last few years.

The International Energy Agency, a sister organization to EIA established by developed countries to counter the influence of OPEC, recently said it is revising its assumptions about oil supply. That agency said it’s likely the world will not be able to produce more than 100 million barrels of oil a day by 2030.

Others in the industry, like the oilman T. Boone Pickens, feel the world is pretty much maxed out at 85 million barrels a day.

"The key here is going to be supply," said Paul Horsnell, head of commodities research at Barclays Capital in London http://us-no-fax-payday-loans.com. "And we’re thinking closer to 100 [million barrels a day] as opposed to 115."

The report also said that rising prices are expected to decrease the use of oil and biofuels as a fuel, going from 37% of the world’s energy use in 2005 to 33% in 2030, although liquids will remain the largest single source of energy.

Production of so called non-conventional liquid fuels - things like ethanol, coal-to-liquid, heavy oil and oil from tar sands - is expected to see a big increase.

Under the medium price scenario, these unconventional fuels go from 2.5 million barrels a day in 2005 to nearly 10 million barrels a day in 2030. Under the high price scenario, these numbers could be much higher, the report said.

Without any new greenhouse gas restrictions, coal use is expected to soar - increasing 64% by 2030.

China - which the report said has doubled its coal use since 2000 - is leading the way, accounting for over 70% of new coal consumption.

China, along with India and the U.S., has huge amounts of coal, which is a cheap but dirty fuel.

Electricity generation under the medium prices scenario is expected to nearly double by 2030, the report said, fueled mainly by coal and natural gas.

But future legislation could curb those predictions. The agency noted that "the outlook for fossil-fuel-fired generation could be altered substantially by international agreements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

Nuclear power is expected to increase by nearly 50%, the report said, mostly in India and China.

Use of renewable energy is expected to increase nearly 70% by 2030. But much of that is due to large hydropower projects, and under current policies, renewables’ overall contribution to global energy supply remains small.  

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ATA Airlines is suing FedEx Corp. over its decision to drop the airline from its military charter team, a move ATA says forced it into bankruptcy protection and left it financially destroyed.

ATA says in a lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court that FedEx (FDX, Fortune 500) broke contractual promises with the Indianapolis-based airline when it ousted ATA in January bad credit payday loans.

The airline says charter flights of military personnel and their families generated more than $400 million in annual revenue and were ATA’s most important profit base.

ATA abruptly ceased operations April 3. 

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Bank of America Corp. said Tuesday it plans to raise its stake in China Construction Bank Corp. to nearly 11%.

The Charlotte-based banking company said it will exercise part of the option it has to buy more common shares of the Beijing-based China Construction Bank.

The option would be exercised under the terms of agreement when it first invested in the China bank in June 2005, when Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500) bought a 9% stake in the bank in a $3 billion deal.

Bank of America said it intends to purchase 6 billion H-shares on or about June 5 for about 2.42 Hong Kong dollars per share, which would take its total stake to 25.1 billion H-shares, or 10.75% of China Construction (CICHF) bank’s issued shares payday loans. The 6 billion new shares may not be sold until Aug. 29, 2011, the company said.

Bank of America currently holds about 8.2% of the issued shares.

Since 2005, the two banks have launched nearly two dozen partnership projects, including a leasing business in Beijing and no-fee cash withdrawals from Bank of America’s ATM machines in China.

Shares of Bank of America rose 18 cents to $34.11 in morning trading Tuesday. 

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