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The credit rating on Greece’s government debt was downgraded deeper into junk bond territory on Thursday.

Fitch Ratings cited the increased risk that Greece, operating now with a caretaker government, could be forced to leave the eurozone following more elections next month.

An exit from the eurozone would be "probable" if the elections fail to produce a government willing to stand by earlier austerity agreements reached with eurozone leaders, Fitch said.

In turn, the country’s departure from the eurozone would "result in widespread default on private sector as well as sovereign euro-denominated obligations," the ratings agency said. (Moody’s downgrades Spanish regions)

And all 16 other countries in the eurozone could be dinged.

"Fitch would place all eurozone sovereign ratings on Rating Watch Negative following the Greek elections if Fitch assesses that the risk of a Greek exit from [the eurozone] is probable in the near term," the agency said.

Fitch said the other nations’ economies would be hurt if Greece dropped the common currency, and that a continuation of the euro is a basic tenet of its debt ratings on of all the countries using the euro.

The bailout and debt restructuring for Greece approved by the so-called troika — the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund — required the Greek parliament to approve an austerity program of cuts in government spending and benefits.

But the austerity plan sparked backlash, and on May 6 Greek voters denied a majority in Parliament to the two-party ruling coalition that had agreed to the bailout deal.

Polls show that an anti-austerity party is poised to be the top vote getter in the next round of voting, although it is not as clear it will be able to form a ruling coalition of its own. A deadlock could leave Greece without a working parliament able to pass the additional cuts required by the troika.

European leaders said Wednesday they want Greece to remain in the eurozone, but that it must move ahead with its agreed upon austerity plan.

The increased risk that Greece might leave the euro has driven many Greeks to withdraw money from the banks this week. The weakened state of the nation’s banks prompted the ECB to halt some loans to some of the Greek banks, forcing the banks to turn to more expensive assistance from the National Bank of Greece. 

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ST. LOUIS • Six, seven and, finally, eight times, Geoffrey Baer walked across the lobby of the Wainwright Building until the director got the camera shot he wanted for a future public broadcasting program.

“10 Buildings that Changed America,” scheduled to air early next year, will include the Wainwright, in downtown St. Louis, and nine other buildings. The buildings span 215 years of American architecture, from the Virginia State Capitol, designed by Thomas Jefferson, to Frank Gehry’s steel-clad Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

Baer, an affable longtime public broadcasting presence in Chicago, will host the program. WTTW, the public broadcasting station in Chicago, is producing it. Recording began in April. Baer, director Dan Protess and camerman Tim Boyd were in St. Louis last week to examine the Wainwright, the granddaddy of all skyscrapers.

Though not the first tall building with a structural steel frame, the Wainwright showed in 1891 that steel could allow even brick to appear to soar. Famed Chicago architect Louis Sullivan designed for St. Louis financier Ellis Wainwright the nine-story office building of narrow red brick piers that wrap the vertical portions of the steel framework.

Baer said that Sullivan, through his design of “soaring verticality,” demonstrated with the Wainwright how a building could resemble a column with a base, a shaft and a capital.

“The Wainwright is the one that defined what skyscrapers should look like,” he said.

Inclusion of the Wainwright, a National Historic Landmark, was a no-brainer for the 19 architects and architectural historians who helped determine what buildings to squeeze into the one-hour PBS program, Baer said.

“I think Wainwright was never in doubt,” he said. “I think it was always on the list.”

Other buildings featured will include a 19th-century church, an early Ford assembly plant, the first enclosed shopping mall and a post-modernist house.

There were some eligibility rules: All the buildings had to be in different cities and no architect could have more than one building presented. For example, Eero Saarinen’s most famous work is the Arch but the program features his Dulles International Airport terminal near Washington.

Each of the 10 buildings will only get five minutes of air time. Baer and Protess, who double as the program’s writers (and whose wives are from St. Louis), will present the structures in the order built and describe their innovations in style and construction. Baer said the program is not meant as a “10-best” list but as an effort to show buildings that had a lasting influence on American architecture.

“It’s not a competition — it’s not a horse race,” he said.

Among Sullivan’s contributions to the Wainwright was a demonstration of how a steel frame freed architects to design office buildings to be more pleasant for their occupants business cards. He included large windows that improved ventilation and provided more natural light in a time of primitive electric lighting. (Advances by Elisha Otis and others produced safer and faster elevators, making the modern skyscraper a practical reality.)

Only one true skyscraper, the 38-story Seagram Building in New York, made the program’s cut. Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe’s design, completed in 1958, epitomizes the sleek international style that stripped away exterior ornamentation and emphasized the building’s structural elements.

The Seagram will appear in the second half of “10 Buildings.” Immediately after the Wainwright, viewers will see the Robie House, the Chicago residence designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, who briefly worked for Sullivan.

That the Wainwright survives is a tribute to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which took an option on the building, and the state of Missouri, which bought it for renovation in 1981 as offices. The neighboring Title Guaranty building, designed by architecture firm Eames and Young and built in 1898, was demolished in 1983. Gateway One, the building that includes Peabody Energy’s headquarters, occupies the site now.

During a downpour last Monday, Protess directed Baer to walk repeatedly across the Wainwright’s lobby while Boyd changed camera angles. Protess eventually got his desired shot of Baer striding across the tile floor as Boyd tilted the camera to capture the host gazing up toward the skylight added in the 1980s renovation.

PBS viewers will not see that Baer had to avoid a large rainwater puddle that spread across the floor below — a skylight leak. Protess fretted that rain would disrupt the next day’s shooting schedule.

“Tomorrow morning, I want it to be beautiful,” he muttered.

It was.

THE BIG 10

Here is a list of the program’s buildings with location, designer and year completed.

1. Virginia State Capitol, Richmond, Thomas Jefferson, 1788

2. Trinity Church, Boston, H.H. Richardson, 1877

3. Wainwright Building, St. Louis, Louis Sullivan, 1891

4. Robie House, Chicago, Frank Lloyd Wright, 1910

5. Highland Park Ford Plant, Highland Park, Mich.; Albert Kahn, 1910

6. Southdale Center, Edina, Minn.; Victor Gruen, 1956

7. Seagram Building, New York, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, 1958

8. Dulles International Airport, Chantilly, Va.; Eero Saarinen, 1963

9. Vanna Venturi House, Chestnut Hill, Penn., Robert Venturi, 1964

10. Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, Frank Gehry, 2003

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Wholesale prices in the U.S. fell in April for the first time in four months, led by a decline in fuel costs that signals inflation may cool.

The producer price index dropped 0.2 percent after no change in March, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. Economists projected the gauge would be unchanged in April, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey. The 1.9 percent increase over the past 12 months was the smallest since October 2009.

Falling raw-material costs mean companies will have less incentive to charge customers more. Slowing inflation would underscore views of some Federal Reserve policy makers who have said higher fuel prices will have only a temporary effect, allowing the central bank to stick to its plan to keep interest rates low at least until late 2014.

Slightly fewer Americans filed for new unemployment benefits last week, a reassuring sign about the labor market in the closely watched economic reading.

The Labor Department reported Thursday that 367,000 filed new jobless claims in the week ended May 5, down from 368,000 the week before. The previous week reading was revised up by 3,000.

Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had forecast 365,000 would file for help.

There have been growing worries about a weakening of the recovery in the jobs market, especially after a disappointing April jobs report that showed employers adding far fewer jobs than expected.

Jobless claims, which had been falling steadily earlier this spring, also had climbed again in recent weeks before a drop two weeks ago.

The 86 million invisible unemployed

"The fact that claims continue to drift back toward pre-Easter levels provides important evidence that the level of activity in the labor market did not stall in recent weeks," said Joseph LaVorgna, chief economist at Deutsche Bank, in a note Thursday.

Hiring in a hurry picks up

Economist Michael Gapen of Barclays Capital said the latest reading shows that the improvement in the labor market seen earlier this year has not vanished, despite the temporary jump in new claims filings in April.

"The fact that initial claims held their decline last week is supportive of the idea that the recent softness in initial claims has reversed," Gapen said.

Initial claims can be a volatile reading, which is why economists prefer to look at the four-week average for claims. And that reading also improved slightly to 379,000 from 384,250.

Behind the jobs recovery

There were also 61,000 fewer people receiving continuing unemployment benefits, as that reading for the week ended April 28 — the most recent week available — fell to 3.23 million from 3.29 million.

"Continuing claims never altered their downward trend, even while initial claims were moving higher in previous weeks," Gapen said. "Normally, initial and continuing claims will exhibit similar movements when underlying trends in the labor market are shifting." 

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A U.K. factory index fell more than economists forecast in April and U.S. manufacturing probably slowed as the world economy stayed reliant on China to drive economic growth.

The gauge of British factory output dropped to 50.5 from 51.9 in March, London-based Markit Economics said today. The median forecast of 27 economists in a Bloomberg News survey was for a decline to 51.5. The Institute for Supply Management

European Central Bank officials led by President Mario Draghi resisted calls from the International Monetary Fund and U.S. Treasury to do more to stem the debt crisis roiling the euro-area economy.

As talks of global finance chiefs ended yesterday in Washington, euro-area central bankers from Draghi to Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann argued they have done enough by cutting interest rates and issuing more long-term bank loans.

Starbucks Corp., the world

European stocks faltered Wednesday after two days of gains but Asian markets jumped on speculation Japan might take new measures to spur its economy.

Stocks in Europe recovered their poise this week after a run of losses, with sentiment bolstered by solid U.S. corporate earnings, a surprise improvement in German investor sentiment and relatively well-received Spanish bond auctions. An upward revision to the International Monetary Fund’s global growth forecast also underpinned confidence.

How European markets close out the week will depend on Spain’s ten-year bond auction on Thursday. If it goes badly, investors will likely fret once again about the country’s ability to get a handle on its debts.

Spain has become the main source of concern in Europe’s debt crisis as investors worry about the government’s ability to push through a raft of austerity measures at a time when unemployment stands at a startling 23 percent and the economy is in recession.

The yield on the country’s ten-year bond on Monday spiked above 6 percent, not far off the 7 percent rate that eventually forced Greece, Ireland and Portugal into seeking financial help from their partners in the eurozone.

In the past two days, however, it has edged back down to more manageable levels. On Wednesday, it was down a further 0.15 of a percentage point at 5.74 percent.

Despite the drop in the yield, Spanish stocks continued to oscillate wildly. On Wednesday, the main IBEX index down 2.2 percent. Elsewhere in Europe, the FTSE 100 index of leading British shares was 0.1 percent lower at 5,760 while Germany’s DAX fell 0.5 percent to 6,769. The CAC-40 in France was 1.1 percent lower at 3,254 poor credit personal loans.

The euro was also faring poorly in the risk-averse environment, trading 0.4 percent lower at $1.3074.

Wall Street was poised for modest losses at the open after registering one of its strongest gains in a month. How it will actually perform will depend on the next run of U.S. quarterly corporate earnings.

“With the U.S. earnings season in full flow, investors will be looking to see if earnings reports continue to beat expectations,” said Chris Beauchamp, market analyst at IG Index.

Earlier in Asia, sentiment was buoyed by indications that the Bank of Japan may do more to prop up the economy. Kyodo news agency reported that Deputy Governor Kiyohiko Nishimura’s suggested the central bank might take additional stimulus steps to tackle deflation.

That helped the Nikkei 225 index in Tokyo to soar 2.1 percent to 9,667.26 and the dollar to rise 0.5 percent to 81.46 yen.

Other stock markets were up too, including Hong Kong’s Hang Seng, which gained 1.1 percent to 20,780.73.

Mainland Chinese shares rose on hopes for financial reforms aimed at regulating private lending and creating new institutions to serve private borrowers better, analysts said. The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index rose 2 percent to 2,380.85. The Shenzhen Composite Index gained 2.1 percent to 956.49.

Oil markets were subdued, with the benchmark New York rate down 6 cents at $104.14 a barrel.

____

Pamela Sampson in Bangkok contributed to this report.

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A Japanese utility sought government approval Monday to restart two nuclear reactors even though some key upgrades to prevent another nuclear crisis will take three years.

All but one of Japan’s 54 reactors are offline for regular safety checks, and the last will be shut down in May. Residents fear another disaster like the Fukushima crisis, but Japan faces a severe power shortage if reactors are not restarted.

The government issued new safety guidelines to address residents’ worries, but it gave no deadline for when the improvements must be finished. Utility officials say the full upgrades will take three years.

Kansai Electric Power Co. submitted its safety plans for two reactors in Fukui prefecture, and the government’s final decision on whether to restart the reactors is reportedly expected later this week.

“We’ll aim to achieve the world’s top-class safety at our plants,” said Kansai Electric President Makoto Yagi as he handed the safety improvement roadmap to Economy and Industry Minister Yukio Edano.

However, more than one third of the necessary upgrades on the list are still incomplete, utility officials said.

Filtered vents that could substantially reduce radiation leaks in case of an accident threatening an explosion, a radiation-free crisis management building, and fences to block debris washed up by a tsunami won’t be ready until 2015 faxless pay day loans. This means the plant, as well as plant workers and residents won’t be fully protected from radiation leaks if a Fukushima-class accident occurs while the measures are being taken.

Currently, the crisis management headquarters at the Ohi plant is in the basement. The plant is relocating the function to a room next to the control room for the two reactors. None of Japan’s 54 nuclear reactors are equipped with filtered vents, although their operators are moving to install them in coming years.

“The operators are expected to take initiative to improve safety and reliability, and never dwell on the safety myth,” Edano told Yagi, urging the utility to expedite the process.

The startup guidelines are based on recommendations adopted last month by the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. The most crucial measures to secure cooling functions and prevent meltdowns as in Fukushima were incorporated in the government’s guidelines, but the rest were not.

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